Bilagáanaa Diné historian Farina King implements a Four Directions model of the Diné philosophy of Sa’áh Naagháí Bik'eh Hózhó (the path of Beauty to Old Age) to link the history of Navajo education to “Diné culture, epistemology, spirituality, physical landscape, and time” (pp. 1, 2). King argues that in spite of, and against, federally mandated American education for Diné children, a foreign system intended to destroy all sense of being Diné, the Diné people have faithfully valued their own epistemology, which King calls an “earth memory compass.” The earth memory compass is a “form and embodiment of Indigenous (specifically Diné) knowledge” embedded in the sacred mountains that mark the boundaries of the homeland and indicate how to live a life in beauty (Hózhó) (p. 2). Across generations, the Diné people have relayed the meaning of their homeland and how they came to be Diné; this history is often termed “creation narratives” and draws upon sacred knowledge as the compass for returning home—literally and metaphorically.
King's history starts in the 1930s with the boarding schools and day schools that were established within the Navajo tribe's borders, covers the aftermath of World War II and the 1950s, and goes through the 1970s and 1990s, focusing on the Diné struggles to claim sovereignty and self-determination over education. This sovereignty and self-determination over education can be interpreted as the right to provide culturally relevant education for Diné children.
For the Diné, their military defeat by the American Army in 1863 led at least half of their population to endure the “Long Walk,” forced relocation, and incarceration at the Bosque Redondo reservation until the Diné male leaders agreed to the Treaty of 1868. The 1868 Treaty provision that mandated American education for Navajo children set the stage for Navajo struggles to reverse American ethnic cleansing laws, policies, and practices meant to turn the Diné into American citizens and to move toward Diné-based education as a measure of self-determination. In the fight against American determination to make Navajos into American citizens, the Diné have invoked their ancestors’ knowledge to reclaim Sa’áh Naagháí Bik'eh Hózhó as the foundation for education.
The Earth Memory Compass proposes a methodology, a “cultural hybridity” that blends American intellectual work with Diné traditional thought and practice to convey the persistence of Diné memory about their central values and teachings. Following a directional paradigm—east to south and west to north—Earth Memory Compass offers case studies and draws upon the author's interviews with community members, relatives, and her own family to map the historical shifts in Navajo education. Selected historical moments are connected to the four sacred mountains to reflect progress in Navajo education to realize Sa’áh Naagháí Bik'eh Hózhó.
Chapter one begins with Sis Naajiní, White Shell Mountain, in the east and establishes its place and direction as one of “the time for goal setting and intellectual development” (p. 26). King delineates the foundation of Diné values as they are embedded within the creation narratives. This history of Diné emergence into this present world, the interactions with nonhuman beings and the Holy People, and the establishment of four sacred mountains as the boundaries of Diné Bikéyah (Navajo homeland) sets the foundational Diné values that guide Diné education today.
Chapter two designates the teachings of the south sacred mountain, Tsoodził, as an era when youth attended boarding schools to “learn important life skills such as self-sufficiency, responsibility, and leadership” (p. 26). Here, King focuses on Crownpoint Boarding School, where teachers endeavored to teach “Diné to be Diné” (p. 26). Ironically, children are removed from their homes and taken to the schools to be inculcated with American culture, which is mostly irrelevant to being Diné or to teaching what it means to be part of an economically sustainable community.
Chapter three establishes the west sacred mountain, Dook'o'oosłííd, and its correlation of teaching “reflection” and “Life” in understanding a tragic event at Leupp Boarding School in 1957 (p. 27). For King, the incident, in which a Navajo girl was beaten and murdered by her schoolmates, became the impetus for the parents and community to change the direction of Navajo education. Chapter four draws upon the fourth sacred mountain, Dibé Nitsaa, which is associated with new beginnings. In her historical mapping of Diné education, King brings the Four Directions framework full circle by examining how the Navajo challenged racial discrimination against Diné students in southern Utah. Navajo parents, leaders, and community members forced racist white Mormons who dominated and controlled the public schools to implement culturally relevant education for Diné students.
King's history of Diné education mapped to the Four Directions model is challenging and raises questions about correlating historical moments in Diné education with a sacred mountain. Each chapter builds the case that education under an American colonial system has led to the conditions we witness today, which is the ongoing struggle to center culturally relevant education and values within the Navajo relationship to the earth, community, family, and kin as the standard for being Diné.
The effort to realize Diné-centered education remains an elusive vision. The epilogue, in which King relates her travels and relationships with Indigenous and Diné relatives determined to halt the ongoing erosion of Indigenous sovereignty over land, claim the significance of treaties to a distinct relationship to the US government, and ensure the well-being of Indigenous and Diné citizens, reveals that Indigenous struggles to be free from colonial forms of authority are not yet over. Ironically, King's attention to Indigenous and Diné struggles for control over traditional territories, their resources, and their economy is intended to demonstrate the vitality of Indigenous and Diné epistemologies, that the memory compass is intact, but also to demonstrate the failure of Indian and Diné education to address exactly what kind of education may facilitate the realization of sovereignty and self-determination for the Navajo Nation. Certainly, attempts to articulate the meaning of Diné sovereignty and self-determination and what it means in relation to Diné philosophy quickly falls into a quagmire, for the Diné articulate multiple definitions and interpretations. The question of how a culturally relevant Diné education can offer the tools to facilitate understandings that lead to reclaiming lands, territories, and authority over economics and resources, and to restore relationships of k’é (relationships) that acknowledge the natural world as necessary and integral to living Sa’áh Naagháí Bik'eh Hózhó remains the project of a critical Diné education.
Earth Memory Compass adds to the much-researched topic of Indian education and is significant because it is the first Diné-published monograph that offers a Diné-based model. However, predictably, it follows an established trajectory in histories of Indian education, where the language of assimilation and the efforts of well-intentioned white settlers to bring American education to Indigenous children obfuscates the reality of Indian education as a project of ethnic cleansing, as the Dakota historian Waziyatawin called Indian education under the US settler state. To her credit, however, although King fails to name the violence that undergirds the ongoing settler project to “kill Indians,” the stories she collects and offers are testaments to Indigenous peoples’ and the Diné’s fierce determination to remain Indigenous and Diné. Diné education exists in the chasms and ruptures of the established system, and they look to elders, traditionalists, and community organizers for the Earth Memory Compass.
