Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver

Rebecca Valette's Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver is the first biography of artist Clitso Dedman (1876–1953), one of the most important but overlooked Diné (Navajo) artists of his generation. Dedman was born to a traditional Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, and herded sheep as a child. He was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s at the Fort Defiance Indian School, then at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado. After graduation Dedman moved to Gallup, New Mexico, where he worked in the machine shop of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway before opening his first of three Navajo trading posts in Rough Rock, Arizona. After tragedy struck his life in 1915, he moved back to Chinle and abruptly changed careers to become a blacksmith and builder.
At age sixty, suffering from arthritis, Dedman turned his creative talent to wood carving, thus initiating a new Navajo art form. Although the neighboring Hopis had been carving Kachina dolls for...