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A life woven through 2 cultures

Former Durango resident to read from her memoir

In the summer of 1950, when Sharleen Daugherty was 8 years old, her father took her to the Navajo Nation, where he gave her a rag doll with a Navajo face and body on one end and an Anglo face and body on the other.

The doll resonated with her, even at that age, symbolizing a desire she couldn’t yet articulate to bridge a gap between the two cultures.

Daugherty grew up, married and become a business consultant working with major corporations in New York City. But the memories associated with the doll – and one in particular of a girl she befriended on the Navajo Nation – haunted her for years, eventually pulling her back to the Southwest, where she began working with traditional weavers and forged relationships that changed her life forever.

Daugherty, who lived in Durango from 1994-2004 before moving to New Mexico, tells her story in Double Doll: Turning Myself Upside Down, part one in her memoir trilogy, which was published in March.

She will be in town Friday for a book-signing event at White Dragon Tea Room that will also feature a weaving presentation by her friend and Diné master weaver, Marie Sheppard.

The book came about after Daugherty started writing essays and short stories under the instruction of Durango’s Michael Thunder around 2001. That led her to attend a writers workshop in Hawaii, where an agent urged her to turn her life-based short stories into a memoir.

After a couple of years of writing, she said, Thunder persuaded her to pursue a master’s degree in creative nonfiction at Goucher College in Maryland. She followed his advice, writing the manuscript for her memoir during the program.

Later, as she was pulling together the stories she wanted to include she decided it was too much for one book, and a memoir trilogy was born.

Double Doll takes readers to the stark canyon country of the Navajo reservation in the 1950s, where Daugherty was an impressionable child, to the frenetic bustle of Wall Street, where she worked in the rat race until she was pushed to the brink, and to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, where a weaving workshop led Daugherty to launching the Durango Trading Company.

Through that business venture, she developed relationships with Navajo weavers that shook up her belief systems and made her reconsider her values. And through these relationships, she gained friends and family who changed the course of her life.

“The main reason for writing the book is to pay honor and tribute to these amazing people who have changed my life,” she said. “I have a very strong attachment to the memory of these women, and I want to share their story.”

She changed the names of many of her characters to honor their privacy. She also offers a disclaimer at the beginning of the book that many of the conversations and details have been recreated from her memories and may not be 100 percent accurate.

But, she says, she tried her best to portray her life truthfully. She tells of her flinty, conservative father, who tried to teach her that a woman’s place is in the home. Of businessmen who later echoed those ideals when she was working in the corporate world. Of Nanabah, the Navajo girl who she met as a child. And of a weaver and friend named Grace, whose life and family became enmeshed with Daugherty’s in inextricable ways.

The book also tells of a Navajo medicine man Daugherty met through her work with the weavers. Years ago, she recalls, they were sitting at a table together when he drew a sketch of two overlapping circles on a paper napkin; inside the common area, he drew a stick figure.

He tapped the figure, and told Daugherty it represented her.

“You will be the eyes and ears to keep us in touch with the rest of the world,” she recalls him saying to her.

Twenty years later, she presented him with her answer to his prediction: her book. And in April, he blessed the book with a traditional ceremony at his hogan in Tachee, Arizona, in the heart of the Navajo reservation.

If you go

Sharleen Daugherty will read from her memoir, Double Doll, at a book signing and weaving demonstration event from 3:00-5:30 p.m. Friday at the White Dragon Tea Room, 820 Main Ave. She will read at 3:00; the weaving demonstration by her friend and Diné master weaver, Marie Sheppard, will start at 3:45.



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