Kathy Eckles Hooker

Kathy Eckles Hooker was born in Palo, Alto, California, and grew up in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. Her first introduction to Native American cultures began as a child watching Native dancers at the Department of Interior. She attended The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio and graduate school at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She and her husband moved to the Navajo Reservation in the 1970s, where he practiced dentistry, and she taught English to Dine´ students at Dilcon Boarding School. Amazed how Navajos utilized and honored their land, Kathy studied their traditional lifeways and from her research wrote "Time Among the Navajo: Traditional Lifeways on the Reservation," with photographs by Helen Lau Running. The book was revised in 2024 as "We Walk the Earth In Beauty: Traditional Navajo Lifeways." Kathy taught English at Flagstaff Unified School District for thirty-three years, where again she worked with Dine´students. Later, she longed to know more of the lives of Navajo women, wanting to learn of their hopes, joys, sorrows, and hear their touching stories. Her interviews of twenty-one families from two, three, and four generations resulted in her second book "Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty," published in 2022. Kathy collaborated with photographer David Young-Wolff to create a valuable look into the lives of Navajo women.