Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon
Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty
A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can White artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.
Background image: Laura Gilpin, The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, 1953. Gelatin silver print, 10 1/2 × 13 7/16 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Bequest of the artist. P1979.128.137. © 1979 Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
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- rightsThe University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book by Oklahoma State University.
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Fund of CAA.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher.
Lines from Adrienne Rich, “Origins and History of Consciousness,” from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978) are reprinted with permission; copyright 1978 by W. W. Norton and Company; all rights reserved.
Excerpt from Janice Gould (Koyangk’auwi Maidu), “We Exist,” in Beneath My Heart (New York: Firebrand Books, 1990) is reprinted with permission.
Manny Loley, “butterfly man tells a story,” Poetry 220, no. 4 (July/August 2022): 304–5 is reprinted with permission of the author.
Portions of chapter 3 were published in an earlier form in “Seeing the Four Sacred Mountains: Mapping, Landscape, and Navajo Sovereignty,” European Journal of American Culture 39, no. 1, “The Cartographic Imagination: Mapping in American Art and Literature since 1945” (March 2020): 63–81. Portions of chapter 4 were published in an earlier form in “‘We Sure Didn’t Know’: Laura Gilpin, Mary Ann Nakai, and the Cold War Politics of Loss on the Navajo Nation,” in Authenticity in North America: Place, Tourism, Heritage, Culture, and the Popular Imagination, edited by Jane Lovell and Sam Hitchmough (London: Routledge, 2019), 75–95; reprinted with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Portions of chapter 5 were published in an earlier form in “The Visual Politics of Queerness on the Navajo Nation,” in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Mey-Yen Moriuchi and Lesley Shipley (New York: Routledge, 2023), 125–39; reprinted with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
- isbn978-1-4529-7059-2
- publisherUniversity of Minnesota Press
- publisher placeMinneapolis, MN
- restrictionsPlease see the Creative Commons website for details about the restrictions associated with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
- rights holderRegents of the University of Minnesota
- doi
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