Product Overview
Just before starting second grade, Jim Kristofic moved from Pittsburgh across the country to Ganado, Arizona, when his mother took a job at a hospital on the Navajo Reservation. Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexisted in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim and his family moved off the Reservation to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that no longer felt like home.
With tales of gangs and skinwalkers, an Indian Boy Scout troop, a fanatical Sunday school teacher, and the author's own experience of sincere friendships that lead to hozho (beautiful harmony), Kristofic's memoir is an honest portrait of growing up on and growing to love the Reservation.
'Jim Kristofic combines the spirits of Joseph Campbell and J. D. Salinger to give readers an intimate look at the complexity of life in Navajo country.' -- Martha Blue, author of Indian Trader: The Life and Times of J. L. Hubbell
'This is a story told on many levels. It can be brutally frank, irreverent in places, and funny in others. But it is so serious that it will hold the reader s attention from beginning to end. It brings to Native life a strongly personal and emotional aspect seldom seen, and it will persist in memory long after a first reading.' -- David Brugge, author of The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy
