For Shirley Montoya, becoming an ordained Methodist minister carried some challenges. While training in New Mexico, she says leaders wanted her to give up her Navajo traditions.

For Montoya, whose uncle also was a minister, that wasn't an option. "How do you do away with yourself? How do you hate yourself?" she tells The Arizona Daily Star. She never completed the process there.

But after moving to Arizona, Montoya decided to try again. She was ordained in 1996 and blends Navajo traditions with Christian teachings.

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She finds path to Methodist pulpit (The Arizona Daily Star 1/13)