Residence
Tucson, AZ

Books:
Keeping the Rope Straight:
Annie Dodge Wauneka's Life of Service to the Navajo

Carolyn Niethammer grew up outside Prescott, Arizona. After college, she lived for about six months in rural Northern California and learned from an elderly Indian man how to gather many of the edible wild plants of the area. When she returned to Arizona to live in Tucson, she began to wonder what the native people who lived in the desert had eaten before the white settlers came bringing European crops. Her curiosity led to two years of traveling throughout the Southwest, talking to and cooking with Native American women. Her experiences resulted in her first book, American Indian Cooking, Recipes from the Southwest. This book was followed by two others on Native American women, Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of Indian Women and the award-winning biography I’ll Go and Do More: Annie Dodge Wauneka, Navajo Leader and Activist. This is her eighth book.