The Price of Salt

Five Generations

The Diné scholar Bidtah Nellie Becker has emphasized the centrality of “organic sovereignty,” which comes from cultural independence and authority and is carried by extralegal systems and traditions, to the Navajo Nation. “The matrilineal clan system is, from my perspective, the backbone of the Nation’s tribal sovereignty, and may be the single greatest attribute of the organic sovereignty of the Diné people—past, present, and into the future,” she argues.27 Becker’s focus on Diné matriliny recognizes the role played by women in perpetuating tradition—telling their children stories and inculcating cultural values. For the contemporary artist Jolene Nenibah (Bean) Yazzie (born 1978), traditional stories, shared by elders, offered an empowering insight into Diné women’s lived experience that they then translated into superhero stories that celebrate Navajo women’s power. “When I was in first grade, every Friday we would have an elderly person come in to tell us our Navajo creation stories,” recalled Yazzie, in conversation with the Smithsonian reporter Megan Gambino in 2009.28 “They would really get into character”—characters that reminded the child of the superheroes they idolized.

As an adult, Yazzie sought to create superheroes of their own based on the women in their life. A graphic designer by training, Yazzie created a series of digital images of warriors—Navajo women whose regalia incorporates references to masculine warrior traditions, Wonder Woman, traditional Navajo jewelry design, and Navajo weaving. Three of these warriors appear in Sisters of War—including Ko Asdzáá, Fire Woman, who has “long black hair underneath the plume of feathers” in her warrior bonnet, which also displays a five-pointed star, in direct homage to Wonder Woman (Plate 1). She often wears a traditional silver necklace with a small cross-shaped element drawn from patterns used in weaving, and she sometimes carries a short blade. For Yazzie, the strength of these warriors is intended as both homage and inspiration to real women they have known. “Most of the women characters I built have to do with my mother and my sister,” they have said. “My mother is a rape survivor. I wanted to create a character out of my mother in respect of that. . . . Different characters show up because they went through the same thing. Throughout my life, I’ve met some girls who have been through that, so I . . . capture their strength into that one character.”29 Connecting contemporary women’s stories with the Navajo Creation Story, Yazzie notes that these warriors “show other women how to recognize and appreciate the strength that is present inside themselves as well.”30 Drawing the line of Navajo women’s genealogy directly from Changing Woman and other figures from the Creation Story all the way to Yazzie’s mother and sisters, the artist suggests the power of matriliny to enact organic sovereignty among the Diné.

Although Yazzie’s superheroes are invented characters—and despite the controversy they have stirred up among some Diné men—they are themselves an organic outgrowth of a cosmology in which women deities play a vital part. The anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton emphasized in 1946 that the material status of Navajo women—property ownership, independent income, matrilocality, and the importance of matrilineal kinship ties, for example, all of which distinguished them from Anglo women of the same era—was “reinforced by mythology and folklore.” “The oft-repeated songs of [the] Blessing Way drum in the conception that woman is supreme in the hogan,” they wrote. “The fact that some of the most powerful and important divinities (Changing Woman, Spider Woman, Salt Woman) are female speaks volumes for the high place of women in the traditional conceptions of The People.”31 The distance between Navajo and Anglo ideology in this regard had implications that reached all the way back to the treaty negotiations at Hwéeldi in 1868. When the Diné leader Barboncito (also known as Hastiin Dághaa’) asserted that Dinétah had been given to the Diné by First Woman, his words had to be translated first into Spanish and then into English before U.S. Army general William Sherman could understand them. The official translation offers two attempts at the explanation: “Our country . . . was given to us by the first woman of the Navajo tribe,” it records Barboncito as having said initially—a reference to Changing Woman. A few lines later, the transcribed, translated translation presents his second effort to explain the authority behind Navajo claims of belonging to Dinétah: “That our God when he was created (the woman I spoke of) gave us this piece of land and created it specially for us and gave us the whitest of corn.”32 The translation struggles with gender to the point of garbling Barboncito’s words, betraying Anglo anxiety and incomprehension in the face of even a single female deity—let alone the many who populate the Diné pantheon. The colonial heteropatriarchy that rendered Diné knowledge illegible in 1868 likewise rendered Gilpin’s lesbian experience invisible a century later—and continues to render lesbian experience on the Navajo Nation invisible today.

Throughout The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin layers different modes of history over one another, exploiting the juxtaposition of text and image as well as creating layers of signification within the photographs themselves. In The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt (Figure 2.3), which appears in the second section of The Enduring Navaho, titled “The Way of the People,” she uses this strategy to make a point about Navajo perspectives and authority.33 Gilpin’s text tells us that Old Lady Long Salt was eight years old when the Navajo returned from Hwéeldi, inviting us to see history—resilience and resistance—in her aged body and to imagine the stories she has told her daughters and granddaughters. The photograph then directs our gaze to each successive generation in turn, drawing our eyes around the sunlit space until we come to the granddaughter and great-granddaughter at the back of the shelter. They are looking at Gilpin’s “dummy book,” a mock-up of The Enduring Navaho that contains many of the photographs that Gilpin had taken over the past two decades, and which she carried with her whenever she was in Dinétah. In the summer shelter, it acts as a proxy for the photographer.

By 1953, when this photograph was taken, Gilpin had been photographing Navajo people for two decades, so the children may well have been looking at images created before they were born. The dummy book makes an implicit argument for the value of photography as a memorial technology. Often, if people recognized someone in a photograph, Gilpin would pull it out and give it to them, replacing it before her next journey. The dummy book was a way to explain her project to people she wanted to photograph—but it was also an assertion of Gilpin’s own place in the community, a document of her affective ties with multiple generations of Navajo families and her welcome among them. Throughout the shelter, tools including the loom and cookware underscore the cultural continuity represented by the variety of work that Navajo women traditionally undertook. The unopened box of salt that is centered, in a shaft of sunlight, on the floor of the shelter is a subtle but effective pun on preservation and Navajo naming conventions. Potentially a host gift (although when Gilpin and Forster describe them, they never include salt), its commodity status may also signify Gilpin’s recognition of the tension between her own positions as welcome friend and outsider.34

Gilpin took this photograph in the northern part of the Navajo Nation, at Navajo Mountain. In The Enduring Navaho, it is one of only eleven two-page spreads among the book’s 243 photographs, suggesting that Gilpin felt the image had particular aesthetic and symbolic merit. As with most of Gilpin’s work, the photograph has largely been overlooked by scholars. One exception is Goldberg, who claims that the photograph “is more committed to the past than the present,” exemplifying the photographer’s “persistent valuing of native [sic] difference.”35 Throughout this chapter, in contrast, I demonstrate that the photograph makes a consistent, multifaceted argument for Gilpin’s identification with her subjects, articulating a queer relationality between them that is directly tied to contemporary cultural politics, both lesbian and Diné. As we consider the story it tells about queer history and Navajo sovereignty, moreover, we must consider this photograph both as a stand-alone image and as a detail of Gilpin’s larger work. Like the shelter itself, which is both an enclosure and open to the elements, part of the landscape and made distinct from it, The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt is a permeable and permissive text, inviting us to explore what Homi Bhabha has called “the significatory boundaries of cultures, where meanings and values are (mis)read.”36

Frame

At the 2018 Association for Art History conference, the renowned British art historian Griselda Pollock asserted that our job, as art historians, “is to create traces.”37 Photography itself has often been theorized as a trace—an interpretation of photographic technology that privileges its relationship to the physical world, and which has been critiqued for its apparent claims about objectivity and facticity.38 In The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, Gilpin exploits this contradiction, playfully admitting to the constructed nature of her photograph by framing it with the trees that define the perimeter of the shelter. This found-object arboreal frame is also part of the photographic image, and it acts as a sign for Gilpin’s image-making even as we recognize that the trees are part of the real world. At the same time that the circular frame of trees vignettes and echoes the rectangular frame of the image, in other words, it also constitutes a photographic trace that acts as a compositional frame, and vice versa. These doublings and reciprocities set up an interpretive structure for the viewer, suggesting that each time we consider an element of the photograph in one iconographical context, we should look for reciprocal meanings in others. Specifically, Gilpin suggests we seek out slippage between her lesbian context and her subjects’ Diné one.

At its most basic level, a frame is a container, and in this sense a home is a frame for the family within it. Gilpin and Forster consistently contrasted the impracticality of Anglo homes with the “most practical building for life in this desert country”—the hogan and its summer counterpart.39 The Enduring Navaho describes the construction of hogans in material and ritual terms, underscoring the continuity between physical and spiritual order.40 Gilpin organized her text with “Habitation” as the first chapter of part 2, “The Way of the People,” and she begins by outlining the construction of winter hogans—permanent and relatively impermeable structures built of timber or stone. She then goes on to describe summer shelters. “The Navaho live chiefly out-of-doors during the summer months,” she notes. “Built of upright poles, the [summer] shelter has a roof of fresh green boughs from cottonwood trees, or cedar or juniper.” The location of the summer shelter is dependent upon the family’s sheep: “In areas where sheep are taken to the mountains for summer pasture, the winter hogan will be closed. As the Navaho live with a minimum of possessions, they have little to move for life during the summer months. Cooking utensils, some extra clothing, wool for weaving, a few basic food supplies, such as salt, sugar, coffee, and flour, are all that are needed. The women set up their looms under the shelter, the children watch the flocks, and the men haul water and wood and tend to the small farms.”41 Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter is an example of this type of mountain home—but despite Gilpin’s description, there are no men in evidence.

In her description of this specific shelter in The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin makes a point of noting that the trees formed a natural circle within which Old Lady Long Salt and her family lived. This was unusual; in contrast, Gilpin’s 1934 photograph The Summer Shelter in the Cove (also included in The Enduring Navaho) depicts a shelter that is clearly constructed of vertical posts that hold up a loosely woven roof of leafy boughs. There are other differences, to which I return, but for the moment the key distinction between the two homes appears to be the influence of their architecture upon Gilpin’s composition. In the earlier image, the family is spread across the foreground, outside the shelter, which is contained within but clearly distinct from the landscape (the shelter stands up from the desert ground in much the same way as the mesas on the horizon). In the later photograph, the sheltering trees envelop the scene, encompassing the viewer and blurring the distinction between nature and architecture, indoors and outdoors, document and artifice. Exclusively neither one nor the other, Gilpin’s frame gains its rhetorical power from its balance between the two poles of each binary—its existence in the third space of photographic reality. It would be easy to assume that this naturalization of the shelter is also motivated by a romanticizing association of Native subjects with nature—but I propose instead that we consider it as authenticating the queerness of the matrilineal, matrilocal Diné household, which makes space—literally—for Gilpin’s and Forster’s lesbian bodies.

Scholars invested in the photographic trace tend to emphasize the element of repetition and re-presentation inherent in the act of tracing, underscoring the indexical connection between the photographic image and the world it re-presents. But as we survey art historical studies of Gilpin and her work, we may sometimes find the notion of the trace more useful insofar as it is a synonym with scarcity: for instance, we have seen that there is trace evidence of Gilpin in the historical record. Despite her achievements, she is far harder to see than her friends, colleagues, and mentors: Käsebier, White, Ansel Adams, Beaumont Newhall, Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, and Imogen Cunningham all have much more certain places in the canon of photographic history than does Gilpin. What’s more, the scholarship on Gilpin that does exist tends to trace and retrace familiar ground.

On many of their trips to and through Diné Bikéyah, Gilpin and Forster also retraced familiar ground—visiting friends such as Mary Ann Nakai and her family in Red Rock (and, later, Shiprock), for instance—and those geographic preoccupations are evident in The Enduring Navaho. But as Gilpin’s approach to the work became more overtly politicized, she sought to fill in some of the gaps she perceived in her and Forster’s personal narrative. Unwilling to create a volume that appeared backward-looking and unaware of current events on the Navajo Nation, Gilpin proposed to prospective publishers Duell, Sloan, and Pearce in 1947 that the couple “make a trip now to the reservation” to “get material and new pictures, and end the book with an up to the minute note.”42 Gilpin did not have a long-standing relationship with Old Lady Long Salt or her family, who were moreover photographed dozens of times by tourists. Indeed, the photographer acknowledged in her text that she and Forster traveled to Navajo Mountain because it was “still a remote region, one containing much old Navaho life.”43 But, contra Goldberg, the story she told about that old life was not a romantic one. On the contrary, her accompanying text refutes touristic clichés about Navajo Mountain, pointing to the various “up to the minute” effects of modernization, including the absence of men, as well as regional differences and historical developments in fashion. Gilpin’s textual narrative is a vital interpretive frame—albeit still a partial one—for the visual narrative offered in the photograph.

This textual frame around the summer shelter unintentionally offers a concise and humorous critique of the frames that have been imposed on her vision by later historians; it also—more intentionally—revealed the photographer’s own position in relation to the women in her photograph. Here, too, trace-as-absence is more apt than trace-as-index, as Gilpin chooses not to acknowledge the popularity of Navajo Mountain as a destination for non-Navajo photographers in her text. In fact, Old Lady Long Salt’s descendant, the historian and genealogist Corey Smallcanyon, has rigorously documented the extent to which her family, specifically, had been photographed by midcentury. Because it was (and is) relatively remote, life at Navajo Mountain remained old-fashioned for longer than in other parts of the Navajo Nation; as a result, it attracted a disproportionate number of tourists, photographers, and anthropologists who were invested in an idea of “authentic” Navajo culture.44 Similarly, Gilpin’s consistent erasure of White presence—even as she insists on her own and Forster’s specific presence throughout her text—is directly attributable to her own expectations regarding authenticity while also, paradoxically, underscoring her larger argument on behalf of Navajo self-determination.

Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter was a seasonal home, a space created by augmenting natural shelter with shade blankets, rugs, and a cooking fire. One purpose of Gilpin’s frame is to signal to her Anglo readers that the shelter is an intentional, semipermanent domestic space, rather than a transitory shelter or picnic spot. Perhaps this is also why Gilpin chose to describe the shelter as a “hogan” in her original title: despite being technically incorrect, it recalled the Diné metaphor of a hogan as a universe (see chapter 3)—in this case, a homosocial and multigenerational one. Unlike an actual hogan, the summer shelter was a permeable space. In Gilpin’s photograph, thanks to her exceptional technique, we can see the landscape beyond the far “wall” of the shelter as well as the sky above. Although it had a clearly defined perimeter, the continuity and visual coherence of the shelter’s frame is an illusion: Gilpin has exploited the transformation of three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image to create a misleadingly continuous planar circle of trees and grasses around the women in the scene. As if to underscore the fragility of this conceptual frame, its completion depends upon a cat that serendipitously walked past the only visual break, captured by Gilpin at precisely the moment that its nose and tail electrify the arboreal circuit. That break is the entrance to the shelter, a doorway through which Gilpin points her camera, and on the threshold of which the photographer herself is standing. Her literal position mirrors her metaphorically liminal one in relation to her subjects and to her place in history; her frame makes visible the balance between interior and exterior, center and margin.

Looking into The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, we are caught by that flash of sunlight on the box of salt: indeed, by the splatter of sunlight across the shelter floor, which, with a little imagination, transforms the shelter into a camera, the overlapping leaves above creating dozens of ad hoc apertures. Gilpin’s large-format camera, set on its tripod just outside the entrance, was more room-like than the digital cameras we carry today; the shelter, meanwhile, is a latent camera obscura. Accepting this premise, we recognize the shelter as a structuring machine that, like the camera, orders and arranges our gaze.45 And not just ours: as Gilpin’s description in The Enduring Navaho acknowledges, a traditional hogan—and the hogan-like living space of this circular summer shelter—imposes order and structure on all of its inhabitants, as well as their possessions and activities. In a very literal sense, then, as we look at Gilpin’s photograph, our gaze is being ordered by the home-as-camera. In highlighting the slippage between the two structures, the shelter inverts—queers, in fact—the gaze.

Salt

As Gilpin notes in the description accompanying her photograph in The Enduring Navaho, the people and objects in this summer home are arranged according to traditional practice. The cooking fire is roughly central, and the women and their various work- and sleep-spaces are arrayed along the circumference of the interior. Directly in the center of the photograph, however, is the curiously isolated box of salt (Figure 2.4). The photographer offers a narrative explanation for the salt’s presence—it is an ingredient in the bread that Old Lady Long Salt’s daughter is busy making, by the fire—but she does not explain its position, seemingly just out of arm’s reach and caught in a spot of the dappled sunlight that slants across the floor. Perhaps it is a pun on Old Lady Long Salt’s name, wittily centering her symbolically in a way that the conventional living and working positions inside the shelter did not literally allow for. She was worthy of such an honor: “To our astonishment,” Gilpin and Forster recalled of their visit, “we were in the presence of five generations of daughters” (“daughters” despite not all the children being girls). Old Lady Long Salt was a survivor of the Long Walk, the punishing exile to Hwéeldi that decimated the Navajo population in the late nineteenth century. In spite of that and subsequent hardships, she had nonetheless become the head of a long line of daughters—an accomplishment that had particular significance in the context of Navajo matriliny and cultural respect for elders. The many generations of Long Salt’s family embodied Navajo resistance to genocidal federal policies, and the box of salt, a preservative, at the center of Gilpin’s photograph puns doubly, on the matriarch’s name and on her legacy.

Salt is a key component of the first laugh ceremony—a celebration of a child’s full entrance into Diné community. Welcoming a baby into the world, the first laugh ritual is about birth and generations. Unrefined rock salt introduces a celebratory meal, reminding those present “of the Diné’s first meal and connection to the earth,” according to the Diné educator Jaclyn Roessel.46 Gilpin included a photograph of a Diné baby laughing in the lantern slide shows through which she rehearsed the narrative of The Enduring Navaho throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Although her scripts (which she revised constantly) do not survive, it seems likely that she would have discussed the first laugh ceremony as she showed it. In 1986, the Diné photographer Monty Roessel published a photo of his new son, Bryan, in the Indian Trader, which described the first laugh ceremony: “During the ritual, which must be under way by noon the day after the first laugh, chants are sung and corn pollen is placed on the baby’s lips. To honor those attending, salt is placed in the baby’s hands and the child is helped to serve it to the guests.”47 Salt is a key component of a first-laugh ceremony: as the protagonist in Warren Perkins’s 2009 novel, Putrefaction Live, observes, “The first-laugh party for the baby, Rosie, was bigger and more complicated than it needed to be. All you really had to do was feed some relatives and give out salt, just the bare essentials.”48 Bryan Roessel’s grandmother, Ruth Roessel, who taught Navajo culture at Navajo Community College, pointed out to the Indian Trader that the first-laugh ritual is “not exactly a ceremony, because use of a Navajo medicineman or woman is not necessary if someone else in the community knows the necessary chants.”49 Half a century earlier, the anthropologist Malcolm Carr Collier documented the importance of women’s networks to the organization of ceremonies—countering Anglo anthropologists’ usual focus on male ceremonial singers. She noted that “food donated from outside the camp came from sisters of the woman at whose place the ceremonial was being held and was cooked by her sisters, daughters, and mother.”50 As we look at the five generations of women in Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter, we know that each of the women and children in the photograph, except the old lady herself, had their first laugh celebrated in rituals facilitated by those around them.

Salt is a highly valued natural resource found throughout the American Southwest; Salt Woman is one of the primary Navajo divinities. As Kluckhohn and Leighton remarked in 1946, “Many Navahos still make long journeys to various ‘sacred’ salt deposits,” even though “salt can be bought at every trading store. Although this procedure is often more expensive, the ancient habit persists, partly because, as The People say, this salt is not so ‘bitter’ as the commercial variety.”51 In The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, however, the salt is packaged and commodified—perhaps a bitter reminder of the changing economics of the Navajo Nation. The salt in Gilpin’s photograph is a commodity; unlike rock salt, which is embedded in the landscape of Dinétah, it has been purified and closed off—closeted?—from its natural context. And because we encounter the salt only through the mediating presence of the photograph, we must trust (or not) that the box labeled “salt” really does contain what it advertises—not necessarily a safe assumption in a domestic setting in which containers of all sorts were routinely repurposed.

The implied presence of the salt invites us to consider other absences, at least from the visual field of the photograph. Gilpin herself is only implicitly present, via the image exposed in her camera and her dummy book. Likewise Forster, who is nonetheless present in the “us” that narrates the text throughout The Enduring Navaho, including the story of the summer shelter. In The Enduring Navaho, Forster’s letters are intertwined into Gilpin’s narrative, and Forster’s coauthorial presence is underscored in Gilpin’s dedication, which begins the book with “Dear Betsy, This is as much your book as mine,” as well as letters from friends that acknowledged “Betsy, without whose knowledge and keen insight and affection there would have been no book at all.”52 “Not only have you shared completely in the making of it,” the photographer wrote, “but also you have taught me to understand the Navaho People.”53 This enthusiastic inclusion notwithstanding, Forster is scarcely visible in the book’s photographs. And where Gilpin’s absence from the portrait of Old Lady Long Salt and her family is unremarkable—as photographer, she was looking through the camera and could not simultaneously stand in front of it—Forster was evidently present for the visit yet absent from the scene. And not for the first time: although Gilpin rejected the idea that she posed her photographs, Betsy’s absence from all but one of those in The Enduring Navaho can be nothing but intentional.

And yet—perhaps she is visible in this photograph after all, in that defiant little box of salt at the center of the photograph. The first chapter of The Enduring Navaho opens with the Navajo Creation Story, about which Gilpin writes, “Like our Old Testament, the Navaho story contains a flood, expulsion from one world to another, and, throughout, a strong suggestion of evolution.”54 The Old Testament also tells a story about salt: turning back to look at the destruction of her home in Sodom, Lot’s wife is transformed into a pillar of salt. Gilpin and Forster were atheists, but their familiarity with the Christian Bible surely included the association of Sodom with homosexuality—and so, consistent with the rest of the punning that already characterizes this little box of white crystal salt, we might choose to see it as a stand-in for Forster.

Mass-produced and packaged for commercial trade, the transformation of salt from a natural resource to a commodity available for sale raises the question of its price.55 In 1953, that would have been a question with resonance beyond the Navajo Nation. Patricia Highsmith, writing under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, published The Price of Salt in 1952—just a year before Gilpin took her photograph. Written as a literary novel, it found widespread mass-market success as a paperback, sold with a cover that presented it as a lesbian pulp novel—a genre with an audience in the millions throughout the 1950s and ’60s.56 Unlike other pulps, however, The Price of Salt received critical attention from mainstream publications like the New York Times—increasing the visibility of the lesbian community and contributing to its understanding of itself as such. The Price of Salt was quickly located within a genealogy of lesbian literature—Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was an oft-cited foremother—and, indeed, as we have seen, long before Highsmith’s novel was published, Forster and Gilpin were engaging with Cather, another icon of the lesbian literary scene. Packing for her move to Red Rock in 1931, Forster exercised extreme minimalism, bringing only “clothes, a radio, a game of checkers, and a much-loved copy of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop”—which she soon lent to her Navajo translator, Timothy Kellywood.57 Although Cather avoided explicitly lesbian storylines in her novels, many critics have explored the coded references to homosexuality in her work, and it was well known that Cather herself was a lesbian.58

Cather and her partner, Edith Lewis, were friends with Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Taos, and with the writer and folklorist Mary Austin, in Santa Fe, and the couple would have been a familiar sight to New Mexicans in the region—often chauffeured around the countryside by Tony Luhan, Mabel’s husband and a member of Taos Pueblo.59 The Price of Salt likewise features a lot of driving: the narrative follows New Yorkers Carol and Therese on a road trip, ostensibly to Santa Fe. As Therese and Carol travel westward, their relationship is stalked by a private detective, paid by Carol’s husband, from whom she is trying to get a divorce. The detective’s voyeurism—he watches the two women across dining rooms, and bugs their hotel rooms in each city they visit—is presented as a critique of the intrusive and punishing male gaze, reminding us that Highsmith’s text was not, in fact, part of the lesbian pulp genre—which often explicitly marketed itself to straight male readers. On the contrary, Highsmith’s protagonists move through worlds in which men are present and even sometimes pleasant, but ultimately tangential to the point: the two women consistently create spaces for themselves in which, as in Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter, men are kept at a distance. “The sons and grandsons were away at work,” Gilpin noted of the summer shelter, “and sons-in-law would never be there, for the old rule is still imposed in most areas, that a man must never speak to his mother-in-law.”60 A story that Forster had recounted to Gilpin in 1932 reinforced the seriousness of this taboo, which had resulted in death for young newlyweds who could not bear to be kept apart by the bride’s jealous mother.61 Reflecting the conventions of traditional Navajo culture, Old Lady Long Salt’s shelter creates a space in which women, and their work, are privileged.

Loom, Labor, and the Absence of Men

That work took several forms: childcare, cooking, and weaving are all clearly on view in Gilpin’s photograph. The prominence of the loom on the north perimeter of the shelter is a sign of the occupants’ financial independence, as well as of a traditional craft and skilled labor (Figure 2.5). Indeed, the occupation of the summer shelter itself—a seasonal home used when sheep are moved to summer pastures—is an indication of these women’s independence and pastoral labor. In the 1930s, weaving was an occupation often used by White women to initiate significant cross-cultural experiences. When Forster first moved to Red Rock, she faced skepticism from a Navajo community that had experienced condescension and mistreatment from White missionaries and healthcare professionals. She quickly realized that to build trust she had to demonstrate her difference from her predecessors, and she did so by intentionally presenting herself as a novice, rather than as an expert, not only in traditional medicine but also in weaving. Learning to weave from the Navajo women with whom she lived, Forster quickly built trust and rapport with them despite the language barrier.62 Weaving was also a cultural access point for the anthropologist Gladys Reichard, who likewise became a student—in her case, moving in with a Navajo family in 1930 and spending several years learning to weave. “Because [Reichard] was a woman,” the anthropologist Louise Lamphere has emphasized, “she developed a sense of the internal core of Navajo kinship: a mother and her children. In a matrilineal society, with a tendency to matrilocal residence, the closest relations within an extended family are between a woman and her daughters.”63 Reichard’s contemporaries recognized the unique access and insight that she had, due to her embedded position in Navajo women’s spaces and community—indeed, Gilpin cites Reichard’s work several times in The Enduring Navaho.

In the 1930s, weaving was primarily a commercial endeavor for Navajo women, whose income from selling rugs often supported their families. But by the early 1950s, when Gilpin took this photograph, Navajo labor was in flux: U.S. government policy and tribal politics were changing the profile of work on the Navajo Nation and disrupting traditional gendered patterns of both income and expenditure. As the poets David Herd and Stephen Collis once reminded us, one function of capitalism is to decide who gets to work and what counts as work—both unwaged labor and natural labor (the work of nature) are left out, excluded, and exploited.64 On the Navajo Nation in the 1950s, traditional unwaged pastoral labor—including shepherding, spinning, and weaving, all of which were typically managed by women—was being displaced by logging, mining, and other industries whose waged laborers were almost all men. This displacement was hastened by the federal stock reduction program, which devastated Navajo sheep herds in the 1930s, and by the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation program in the 1940s and ’50s.65

The appeal of postwar industries for Diné men was artificially inflated by the economic devastation that had been wrought by the federal stock reduction program in the 1930s. As Lamphere has noted: “Wage labor . . . increased in the 1930s, though not nearly enough to replace declining pastoral activities. Most of the early wage jobs were for men, who were recruited on the basis of Anglo definitions of male versus female jobs.”66 In addition to jobs within the borders of the Nation, industry and federal policy joined forces in the 1940s and ’50s to offer Navajo people—again, primarily men—the option of leaving the reservation to find work.67 Government relocation started as part of a postwar “rehabilitation” program—a process that was formalized by the 1950 Navajo Hopi Rehabilitation Act, but that first appeared on the Navajo Nation in the form of BIA recruitment for agricultural and railroad work.68 In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin refers overtly to this history only briefly, in the context of a photograph captioned “Men leaving Gallup for work on the railroad” (Figure 2.6).69 The accompanying text explains:

During the past thirty years, it has become more and more necessary for young Navaho men and women to seek employment off the reservation. Those who had learned to speak English were the first to do so. For many years now, both the Santa Fe and the Union Pacific railroads have employed Navaho men for maintenance work along their lines, and occasionally one may see them boarding a train for work at some distant point. Many other Navaho go into off-reservation parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado for seasonal crop harvesting. . . . The Indian Service has made some effort to relocate families, which has been partially successful, some Navaho moving to California, Colorado, the larger cities of New Mexico and Arizona, and even farther afield where they have found satisfactory work for their livelihood.70

Although Gilpin seems neutral—or even positive—about relocation programs in this text, she concludes her discussion with a statement about the industrial opportunities available on the reservation in which she quietly notes that they “replace the sheep industry on the overused land.”71 Elsewhere, Gilpin discusses the failures of the stock reduction program more extensively; here, her careful neutrality means that the reader must take responsibility for reading between the lines, and understanding the complicity of stock reduction with resource extraction of other sorts.

Throughout The Enduring Navaho, text and image work together queerly, offering counternarratives and subtext along with the more straightforwardly illustrative relationship we mistakenly expect. Occasionally, images and text only seem to work against each others’ grain when in fact they are both rubbing up against externally imposed expectations or stereotypes. The photograph of men leaving Gallup for work that accompanies her apparently gentle narrative about relocation depicts a cluster of men waiting beside a train. Its windows create an aggressively geometric one-point perspective that is augmented by the rails of a second, empty track and a line of telegraph poles. The horizon itself is almost completely obscured, blocked by the train and the men. There are perhaps two dozen of the latter, although their bodies are silhouetted, forming a single dark mass that is arrayed horizontally, flatly refusing the directional insistence of perspectival lines. In the foreground, a puff of smoke that recalls Claude Monet and Alfred Stieglitz at their most romantic surely delighted Gilpin, whose own shift from Pictorialism to this more documentary style echoed the debates—which she found equally artificial—over tradition versus modernization on the Navajo Nation. Scholars of the American West expect something from trains and telegraph poles—something along the lines of John Gast’s 1872 painting, American Progress, or, on a more modest but widely reproduced allegorical scale, Frances Palmer’s 1868 lithograph for Currier and Ives, Across the Continent (Plate 2). In those nineteenth-century images, Native people are present only in order to be displaced and erased by the advent of Euramerican settlement and the march of technological progress. In Gilpin’s photograph, in contrast, the Navajo men are insistently present and attentively participating in the process of modernization, even as that process reduces them to a faceless, corporate mass.

Emerging vertically from this mass of men, a lone telegraph pole vertically bisects the upper half of the composition. What might have been a flaw is transformed into the photograph’s punctum: it dwarfs the standing men, even as it rhymes with them, and it acts as a barrier between the mountains in the distance and the train—between nature and technology.72 The men traverse that barrier horizontally, visually anticipating their imminent travel across the landscape. But this is not a triumphant journey. Instead, it recalls photographs by colleagues with whom Gilpin corresponded throughout her life: Dorothea Lange’s 1933 photograph White Angel Bread Line (Figure 2.7) and other Depression-era images—or, in contrast to Lange’s insistent individualization of her subjects, early photographs and cinematic representations of New York by Paul Strand, in which anonymous masses of workers move through a city, skyscrapers towering over their ant-like silhouettes. In Gilpin’s photograph, the Diné men waiting to board the train appear to be acted upon by colonial frameworks, rather than acting within or against them. In contrast to this passivity, the women in Old Lady Long Salt’s family appear to reject colonial frames altogether, but Gilpin’s intent in photographing them is not to participate in a naive or touristic nostalgia. Permeable and temporary, the traditional architecture that surrounds these five generations of women and children is a powerful visual metaphor for the transitional, precarious state of Navajo cultural and political sovereignty in the 1950s—and an argument for solidarity among all women-outsiders against the incursions of patriarchal colonialism across cultures.

The disconnect between Anglo conceptions of labor as masculine and the traditionally women-centered economy of the Navajo became a central problematic in midcentury conversations about Navajo cultural and political sovereignty. The Diné educator Gloria Emerson has noted that historically, “men’s roles were almost secondary. And it’s changed, flip-flopped it seems with . . . men returning from the wars, with their attitudes about gender roles . . . with Westernization processes, education and so on.”73 Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and ’40s, Kluckhohn and Leighton claimed in 1946 that “there can be no doubt that the position of women among The People is very good. Their ownership of property, the system of tracing lineage through the female, the prevailing pattern of residence with the wife’s people, the fact that more women than men have a ready and continual source of extra income (through their weaving), all give women a strategic advantage.”74 But in the 1940s and ’50s, new wage work went to men working in timber or mining. This change followed the livestock culls of the 1930s, which had devastated the pastoral economy. As the ethnographer Laila Shukry Hamamsy observed in the 1950s, the result was to make women dependent upon those men. She quoted a Navajo woman who made the connection between men’s waged labor, women’s sudden dependent status, and the stock reduction program explicit: “When we had lots of sheep, we [didn’t] care when [our] husband[s went] away and [didn’t send] money. We butcher[ed] sheep and [sold] lamb. We [made] rugs and [had] money that way. [But w]e don’t have [any sheep] now.”75 And although, as the anthropologist Mary Shepardson observed and Gilpin recognized in The Enduring Navaho, women’s “high status has been regained [in the 1970s and ’80s] with education and wage work,” both of those options were closely allied to U.S. government-supported capitalist enterprise on the Navajo Nation.76

In 1954, the year after she photographed Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter, Gilpin made a portrait of the Navajo tribal treasurer, Maurice McCabe (Figure 2.8). “One of his great prides was the [Navajo Tribal] Council Room with its fine murals by Gerald Nailor,” she wrote—and so in her photograph, he stands in front of a section of that mural (titled The History and Progress of the Navajo People) that depicts two shepherds with a large flock of sheep.77 The standing shepherd holds his necklace—also a traditional form of wealth—in his hand as he looks out over the flock, toward a shadow that anchors the left side of Gilpin’s photograph along a vertical line of sheep. For McCabe, who presumably sought to be photographed in front of the part of the mural that would most evidently act as a sign for his official position in the tribal government, Nailor’s representation of traditional Navajo wealth felt most appropriate—despite the fact that during his tenure as treasurer, he oversaw much of the industrial growth also depicted by Nailor, including the development of oil and gas extraction as well as uranium mining on the Nation. In her portrait, Gilpin creates an implied line from the standing shepherd, through the woman who kneels next to him, holding a sheep, to McCabe, implying a lineage of responsibility. McCabe’s gaze, like those of the painted shepherds, is averted from ours. We can only speculate about what he and Gilpin meant by this conventional gesture of interiority; are we to see McCabe reflecting on his own legacy, on the tribe’s history, or, as the title of Nailor’s mural proposes, on the progress of the Navajo Nation?

Gilpin considered McCabe a friend and collaborator; as this portrait suggests, the treasurer supported the production of The Enduring Navaho and helped connect Gilpin with other government officials. Their friendship embroiled the photographer in Navajo politics against her will. Raymond Nakai was elected tribal council chair in 1964; supported by the tribal council, McCabe stayed on as executive secretary. The journalist Chet MacRorie’s obituary for McCabe recalled that “this was a very trying time as a result of the controversy between the Old Guard who supported McCabe and the Nakai faction which opposed him.”78 Indeed, McCabe was subject to a prolonged investigation that became known as “Navajo Watergate.”79 When Gilpin tried to get Nakai’s permission to make a portrait of him for The Enduring Navaho, she received no reply. “I wrote immediately to Raymond Nakai . . . but as yet have not heard a word from him,” she wrote to Frank Wardlaw at the University of Texas Press. “He has now fired Maurice McCabe, and he doubtless knows that Maurice was a friend of mine. I am writing now to Ned Hatathli who seems to have kept himself above politics to see if he can arrange an appointment for me.” Gilpin was eager to make a portrait of Nakai so that her book would be as up-to-date on Navajo government as possible—and she wanted to make it in his office, because, as she explained to Wardlaw, “the new Chairman’s office has the Navaho Seal on the wall behind the chairman’s desk. It will make one more step toward modernization”—and one more assertion of Navajo sovereignty.80

Although Gilpin had been friends or collaborated with several Navajo officials who were at odds with Nakai—McCabe, but also Norman Littell, the first general counsel for the Navajo tribe—she privately supported many of Nakai’s demands for sovereignty, including the creation of Navajo Community College (today, Diné College), which was the first tribally controlled college in the United States.81 However, no portrait of Nakai appears in The Enduring Navaho, and Gilpin’s archive documents no reply from the chairman’s office. Her discussion of the tribal council simply stops at the administration of Nakai’s predecessor, Paul Jones, turning to other tribal workers and activists. Gilpin chose not to pass public judgment on internal Diné politics, although her text affirms her affection, respect, and support for individuals. She also did not hesitate to criticize the negative impact of U.S. government programs such as livestock reduction on Navajo people. The federal livestock reduction program destroyed much of the Navajo pastoral economy and had direct implications for the larger question of Navajo sovereignty. Industrial capitalism completely disrupted traditional lifeways and rendered the Navajo economy dependent upon outside—Anglo, often federally negotiated—contracts. It introduced entirely new concepts of gender, home, and wealth, all of which were in direct contradiction to ancestral Navajo culture. The damage done by colonial policy is still felt by Diné individuals and communities today.

In discussions of their artwork, Yazzie is quick to point out that Euro-American colonization—and the actions of missionaries and their schools—in Navajo communities introduced and enforced heteronormative and patriarchal ideologies that disrupted ancestral gender systems and local norms for gendered spheres of activity and influence.82 Their work, in turn, seeks to disrupt imposed colonial values. In the process, Yazzie is sometimes at odds with perceived tradition as well: “I spent time drawing women warriors . . . and have gotten [a] lot of flack for it from the men, who take offense to the fact that my warriors wear hats that the men wore for war.”83 Yazzie studied at Diné College and then completed a BA at IAIA. While at the latter institution, Yazzie acknowledged that the women warrior superheroes “also represented a more personal revelation of my sexual orientation. I have been drawing for as long as I can remember, but I’m only just now becoming comfortable with being ‘out’ as a lesbian. . . . Most of my characters are women that I’ve loved at one point or another . . . women who’ve also broken my heart.”84 The artist’s heartbreak has not always been personal—in 2018, Yazzie made a point of connecting their work to “the sex trafficking of Native women and girls she witnessed while living in North Dakota.” But Yazzie also sees it as part of a larger resistance movement from women all over the world—including the calls for increasing visibility and investigation of murdered and missing Indigenous women made by the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, founded in 1996 by Peggy Bird (Kewa), Darlene Correa (Laguna Pueblo), and Genne James (Navajo), and other organizations. More recently, this movement became mainstream with the introduction of a federal Missing and Murdered Unit in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo).85

In Bik’eh Hozho, a 2011 mural commissioned by the Albuquerque gallery 516 Arts, Yazzie depicted a group of three superheroes collectively titled Sisters of War (Plate 3).86 The women stand in front of a landscape that contains a hogan, a loom, and a yei (a Holy One)—reminders of matriliny, women’s labor, their cultural and economic significance, and their role in the creation stories. But the mural is not a simple celebration of women’s power: echoing the fraught history of Navajo weaving, Yazzie uses the loom at the far right of the mural to introduce a disquieting note. Two pairs of hands, one larger than the other, push through the weft. Together, they suggest a mother and child are on the other side of the loom—inviting comparison with a photograph that Gilpin took the same day she made The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, tightly cropped to the loom, the weaving woman, and a young granddaughter who turns back to look at the camera (Figure 2.9).87 Yazzie’s graphic composition takes advantage of the ambiguity of the black stripes in the weaving, transforming them into negative space through which the hands penetrate, reaching toward the viewer. The empowerment of weaving is thus balanced by a sense of entrapment—perhaps an uneasy admission on the artist’s part of the constraints posed by traditional gender roles, as well as the freedoms to be found therein.88

Like shepherding and weaving, photography is also labor, and the loom in Old Lady Long Salt’s shelter reminds us of Gilpin’s work as a photographer, its warp and weft offering a concise table of value—white, gray, and black—that brings to mind her colleague Adams’s zone system for establishing exposure.89 Adams and Gilpin were close friends and frequent correspondents, and Gilpin used Adams’s exposure charts assiduously when she was completing commissions for clients like the Museum of International Folk Art and others. In her own photography, however, she preferred to trust her eye—indeed, her work has been described as “literally defy[ing] classification according to Ansel Adams’ zone system” due to its “delicate and subtle nuances of tone”90—so while we might consider the utility of the loom for her as she measured up the significant technical challenge of the scene before her, we should also see the humor in its substitution of women’s expert hand- and eye-work for the mechanistic aid of an exposure chart.

Commissions from museums and other commercial work were vital for Gilpin, who was the breadwinner for her family just as Navajo women traditionally were for theirs. In Colorado Springs, Gilpin had run a successful portrait studio and worked in theater promotion; her move to Santa Fe was made possible by the increasing strength of her network of professional women working in the interlinked and overlapping fields of arts, culture, education, anthropology, archaeology, and tourism. In both Colorado and New Mexico, Gilpin was hired to photograph theatrical performances, museum collections, archaeological digs, and more—and in combination with her entrepreneurial pursuit of postcard sales throughout the Southwest, she generated enough income to support her relentless pursuit of the vision that would become The Enduring Navaho. This commercial work, however, sometimes worked against Navajo interest. Debates about the appropriation of Navajo cultural heritage and spiritual knowledge challenged the authority of museums for which Gilpin worked, and the politics of visual sovereignty pose obvious and ongoing questions about the ethics of selling photographs of unpaid or poorly compensated Navajo people to tourist audiences. The professional network of White women that Gilpin circulated within to make a living, in other words, sometimes sat uneasily alongside her respect for the Navajo women with whom she was friends and, in some cases, collaborators. The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt theorizes this unstable position without resolving it.

Landscape and Lesbian Labor

Evidence suggests that Gilpin sometimes occupied a similarly liminal position in relation to the queer community of New Mexico. Despite her embeddedness in a geographically distributed lesbian network, Gilpin’s letters reveal a variety of missed connections and minor acquaintances alongside lifelong friendships: for example, she was politely friendly with the allegedly bisexual Georgia O’Keeffe, but not close; and as we have seen, Gilpin and Forster’s friend Alice Boughton commiserated over their “hard luck in missing” Cather.91 On the other hand, when the couple was struggling financially just before the publication of The Enduring Navaho, Elinor Gregg—who had been a field nurse, like Forster, in various Native communities—raised funds for them primarily from other queer women in a vital material gesture of community support.

For those in the New Mexico lesbian community of the 1980s, money was a defining distinction between the older generation and themselves: they acknowledged “a separate Santa Fe lesbian network of older wealthy women who had settled in Santa Fe or Taos and participated in the artistic circles of those cities.”92 Cather was one member of those older, artistic lesbian circles, and her literary representations of the southwestern landscape—which she “‘consistently’ associated . . . with ‘Eros and sexual desire’”—participated in a collective lesbian love affair with the region that was expressed publicly and privately by women throughout the first half of the twentieth century.93 Like much of the language used for lesbian relationships throughout the twentieth century, the sexualization of the landscape was at once overt and coded. The anthropologist Molly H. Mullin reminds us that “attempts to connect the landscape with any particular gender only reveal the way that genders and landscapes have continually contested meaning,” but the attempt itself on the part of so many lesbian or otherwise queer women—women invested in discarding stereotypical gender identities and roles—is telling, as is the fact that regardless of the precise way in which they gendered the land, it was always in relation to a queer, woman-identified homosociality.94 According to Julia Lukas, who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Santa Fe in the 1930s, the landscape “attracted strong women . . . women who weren’t really one thing or another. You know, maybe their genes were mixed up. Women who were powerful without men, powerful together as a group.”95 For some women in this period, the southwestern landscape became an object of desire in itself.

The well-known anthropologist Ruth Benedict, for example, wrote to her colleague and lover Margaret Mead about her fondness for Zuñi several times. “It came over me with a rush,” she reported in 1925. “We drove in with the rain pouring down in great white separate drops and sunlit clouds and soft veils of rain shifting and forming against the far off mesa . . . When I’m God I’m going to build my city there.”96 Reichard similarly wrote, to colleague Elsie Clews Parsons, that “there is a kind of unexplainable balm about the [Southwest] . . . I found it last summer and needed it even more this. There is a peace which comes to us at evening . . . I love it. It is the sort of thing some writers (a few) have gotten across, but somehow needs experiencing.”97 Both Benedict and Reichard emphasized the phenomenology of the southwestern landscape—an insistence on experiential knowledge that Gilpin echoed in her description of flying over Dinétah in her opening chapter, as well as her own passionate identification as a westerner (see chap. 3). Benedict and Reichard, along with fellow anthropologists Parsons, Austin, and others, joined writers including Cather, Luhan, and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant—as well as many other women, including Gilpin and Forster—in the “influx of writers, artists, and other weary Americans into Northern New Mexico,” throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They saw the Southwest as a “place of freedom from the conventions of gender and class”—freedom that had particular appeal for the “growing colony of lesbian women [that] flocked to the Santa Fe area during the ’20s and ’30s.”98

I have quoted a variety of commentators whose descriptions of Santa Fe—“bohemian,” and attractive to “strong women”—hint at queerness. Throughout the twentieth century, though, innumerable observers have also been explicit about the appeal of Santa Fe for lesbians: Truman Capote, for example, described Santa Fe as “the dyke capital of the United States” in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. “What San Francisco is to les garçons,” the gay author observed dryly via the character of Sarah Lawrence alumna and socialite Lady Ina Coolbirth, “Santa Fe is to the Daughters of Bilitis.”99 The O’Keeffe biographer Jeffrey Hogrefe noted that in the 1920s and ’30s, “Santa Fe had become a mecca for women who wanted to live openly with other women . . . a woman who had switched her sexual preference [from straight to lesbian] was said to have ‘gone Santa Fe.’”100 As this all makes clear, when Highsmith picked Santa Fe as a destination for Carol and Therese in The Price of Salt, the novelist was not choosing at random: it was a city whose educated, wealthy lesbian community reflected the values that her protagonists (a wealthy patron of the arts and a theatrical set designer) espoused. The city’s reputation for conforming (at least nominally) to social norms while paradoxically allowing lesbian women to live openly would likely have held equal value for Highsmith and Gilpin.

As the literary scholar Tom Perrin has noted, Highsmith purposely distanced herself from pulp fiction, publishing instead with “the respectable firm Coward-McCann.”101 Indeed, the paradox of Santa Fe was also evident in readers’ reactions to the novel: “What many of Highsmith’s early readers found most radical about the novel was its insistence that its lesbian characters were completely conventional.”102 “It’s not normal,” observes the literary scholar Kate Adams, “for Therese to assume that she’s normal”; indeed, according to Adams, that assumption is at the root of the novel’s “profoundly radical message.”103 The presumption of lesbianism’s normalcy in The Price of Salt is key to the success of the middle-class social norms that drive the novel: Highsmith’s readers are encouraged to see Therese and Carol as the ones violated by the actions of the working-class detective and, implicitly, the husband who hired him. Their behavior, in contrast, is always appropriate, considered, and careful. Gilpin, too, offered this quiet radicalism to friends and colleagues, as she consistently and clearly included Forster in conversation and correspondence, expecting her to be accepted without any equivocation. This matter-of-factness was an expression of privilege; Gilpin was raised in a prominent Colorado Springs family by a mother steeped in East Coast society expectations for behavior, and the photographer adhered to those standards throughout her life. Despite Gilpin’s elite upbringing, however, she and Forster often lived hand-to-mouth just as Therese does in The Price of Salt, waiting for the next commission to bring in just enough money to cover their mortgage, and, in the instance noted above, accepting help from their friends much as Therese repeatedly accepts money from Carol in Highsmith’s novel.

In The Price of Salt, Carol and Therese are heading for Santa Fe because they perceive it as a place where they can live together—dare I say, happily ever after. Stymied by the actions of Carol’s husband and his hired detective, the couple does not reach Santa Fe in the novel—but the book ends with Therese’s fantasy of escape as she and Carol are reunited in New York, both finally free to be with one another. Highsmith constructs Santa Fe as a mythic space, a lesbian utopia to which her characters aspire and which her narrative, constrained by the moral codes of its moment, can only obliquely promise them. As Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891 (incidentally, the year that Gilpin was born), “[a] map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at”104—and the idea of a mapped utopia, simultaneously known and unknown, comes very close to Highsmith’s aspirational city of Santa Fe, as well as to Gilpin’s intimate yet seemingly inaccessible summer shelter. More than half a century later, Yazzie likewise discovered the freedom of Santa Fe: it was there, while enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts, that they first felt comfortable identifying both as an artist and as a lesbian.

Despite Gilpin’s active participation in the Anglo lesbian community, there is no documentary evidence that she considered the question of queerness in Navajo society—or of how Navajo people reacted to her unselfconsciously loving relationship with Forster. The anthropologist Sue-Ellen Jacobs has documented the rise of homophobia in southwestern Native communities since the 1960s, but before then, she suggests, Navajo people traditionally identified and celebrated queer community members in a variety of contexts.105 Singers, also known as medicine men (hataałii, in Diné bizaad), sometimes derived the source of their spiritual authority from their identities as nádleehé (third gender); other people also crossed social categories of gender and sexuality in various ways that are sometimes collectively described today as “two-spirit.” The Mohawk poet Beth Brant has recently characterized Indigenous lesbian writing as a much-needed labor: “What of Native lesbians who put their mark on paper,” she asks. “Their words can feed a Nation. Just as our labor, our constancy, our faith has kept our Nations strong. . . . We write not only for ourselves but also for our communities, for our People.”106 Brant’s argument has particular resonance in a traditional Navajo context, where gender was historically defined partly in terms of occupation—the work a person chose to do was in some sense more significant as a gender marker than their sexual acts or preferences. If a young person’s perceived biological sex did not match the gender role of the occupations to which they were drawn, they had the option of identifying as a third or fourth gender.107 Revisiting reactions to Gilpin and Forster in this framework, we might wonder if Forster was perceived as an Anglo version of nádleehé. There is some evidence for this: in 1932, for example, called to participate in a healing ceremony, she was greeted with laughter as she entered the hogan. “I knew, of course, that it was at my expense,” she wrote to a friend, “but it sounded good natured. . . . Timothy [Kellywood, her translator] told me afterwards that the remark had been, ‘Oh, this is one of our own medicine men, so it is all right.’ The idea that I am a medicine man and at their service is a source of kindly amusement to them always.”108 Although the process of translation, both literal and cultural, makes impossible any direct claim about how the Navajo perceived Forster, her enactment as a woman of a traditionally masculine social and professional role on the Nation would have resonated with the Diné understanding of third-gender (dilbaa) identity—and her community was clearly entertained by the gender-bending aspect of her position.109 Her relationship with Gilpin may likewise have fit relatively comfortably into Navajo concepts of gender and sexuality.

The Dummy Book

So far, I have addressed The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt primarily from the point of view of Gilpin’s camera—and, implicitly, Gilpin herself. But there are other gazes at work in the photograph: as Gilpin herself points out in her description of the scene, the women sitting farthest away from the camera are poring over a book of her photographs (Figure 2.10). As Martha Sandweiss notes: “Everywhere Laura traveled she carried a mock-up of her book with high-quality prints of her photographs. She used it as her entry into the Navajo world and would sit quietly while the Navajo studied the pictures, deciding how they would respond to her request to make a photograph.”110 Gilpin called this her dummy book—an appropriate name for an object that served in lieu of conversation between people who did not share a language but which also invokes the practice of ventriloquism—of speaking-for and speaking-through. When she offered the book to Navajo viewers, she was offering her labor as a commodity: because she could not always afford to pay cash for photographs, as many White visitors to the Navajo Nation did, she traded her photographs instead. “She always gave a copy of the picture to the one in the picture,” recalled the Farmington trader Edith Kennedy in a 1998 oral history interview.

She didn’t have a lot of money at all, and she came in this old dilapidated car, driving while on crutches. She just wanted her last trip through the area. She loved the people, and that’s why I was upset at this author that wrote that she exploited the Indians, because she didn’t, and they loved her. So she’d still camp out. She’d go up on the mountain and camp out in her little tent or in her car—she stayed in her car this time, her van, an old van.111

Acting as an itinerant photographer, Gilpin entered into the barter economy that was traditionally favored by the Navajo—and thereby transformed herself from someone whose gaze evaluated the people before her into someone whose gaze was being evaluated by them.

The process empowered the Navajo people with whom she worked: few, if any, other White photographers so consistently showed the results of their work to the people in their images—and none were dependent, as Gilpin was, on a positive critical assessment of that work from their subjects. When Gilpin insisted that she was not an anthropologist, as she did repeatedly, she was not being self-deprecating: on the contrary, she was asserting the particular, distinct relationship that she had with Navajo communities and with the individuals in her photographs. “I do not like the way the anthropologists go about getting their information,” she declared, and her use of the dummy book was part of her effort to resist the methods of social science, including the ethnographic gaze.112 Whereas the ethnographic gaze is the “mechanism by which the nonwhite subject has been and continues to be fixed in [their] otherness,” the multiplied and reversed gazes in The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt implicate the participants in a reciprocal, rather than hierarchical or oppositional, relation to one another.113

Gilpin told a reporter in Colorado Springs that it was important to have the “full approval and co-operation” of the people she was photographing, and she used the dummy book to that end. It seems to have worked. “From what a number of Navaho People have told me,” Gilpin wrote to her editors in the summer of 1968, “we are going to have a good number of Navaho buyers.”114 Her optimism anticipated a letter she received from Hatathli, by then executive vice president of the Navaho Community College, that autumn. “I have received your most wonderful book,” wrote this old friend. “We think it is ‘The Book’ of all Navaho books. . . . Our daughter, Gloria, the little girl in the picture, is a grown lady now. . . . She is interested in obtaining one of these books.”115 Hatathli’s chatty letter underscored the longevity of the families’ connection with one another. By 1971, Gilpin’s prediction was confirmed: the bookstore in Farmington, New Mexico, she reported, “had sold a lot of books to the Navaho and told me of one girl who went to the store every week to pay $1 down until she paid for the book. This touches me greatly.”116

Even before The Enduring Navaho was published, the dummy book resonated with Gilpin’s Navajo acquaintances; in about 1962, she wrote to Mitch Wilder, then the director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, about a visit from Rose Benally, whose portrait was in the book: “Rose . . . came up with her sister. They spent the night on a mattress on the floor of our living room. After breakfast they spent three hours going over the dummy, reading every word I have so far. As Rose closed the book she said with a sigh, ‘this is the third time I have looked at this.’”117 Sharing the dummy book—and her living room—with Rose and her sister was a typical act of hospitality for the photographer. When she was in Navajo homes, her sharing of the dummy book became a request for hospitality rather than an instance of it—and as the two women at the back of Old Lady Long Salt’s summer shelter make clear through their gestures and body language, it instigated lively conversation and recognition.

Gilpin’s description of the shelter in The Enduring Navaho makes manifest the balancing act of her relationship with the Navajo, juxtaposing her work—experienced as an opportunity for leisure by the Navajo women—with theirs, which is likewise an opportunity for leisure on the part of Gilpin and Forster. Here is the photographer’s text:

We spent a memorable day with the family of Old Lady Long Salt at her summer hogan. Through our interpreter, who was her great granddaughter-in-law, she told us something of her long life. The Old Lady (94, we figured, and still vigorous) sits at the extreme left of this picture; directly behind her, our interpreter; making kneel-down bread near the fire is the Old Lady’s daughter; beyond the Old Lady, looking at my book of pictures, are her granddaughter and great-granddaughter. . . . They were interested in us and in the things we observed. They looked at every picture in my book with the greatest of interest, pointing out differences in costume, ornaments, or possessions. We watched the making of kneel-down bread—green corn cut from the cob, put through a meat grinder, salted, packed into the green husks, and baked in an outdoor oven. It was very good.118

The products of Gilpin’s labor entertained the women in the shelter, and in return for the time they took looking at the photos, they offered the couple food and stories of their own. This exchange of labor echoes the reciprocity of the women’s gazes; although Sandweiss described the Diné women as continuing “to go about their chores while Laura made her picture,” a closer look reveals the exchange of labor—and the resulting sense of collaboration—that was at the core of Gilpin and Forster’s visit.119 The curiosity came from all sides, and all the participants worked to satisfy that of the others in the group. The Diné artist Gloria Emerson connects the exchange of time with the maintenance of social ties: “Women’s time is owned by others,” she explained to the art historian Nancy Marie Mithlo. “You belong to your family, your clan, your mother, your parents, your relations. In Navajo, it’s even stronger, that sensibility of belonging to a community of relations, clan, family. . . . If you want to be honored and respected, you have to respect others, too. And part of respecting others is giving up your time.”120 Although Gilpin and Forster are not literally part of Old Lady Long Salt’s family, they participate in the exchanges expected of Diné families—and specifically of women—as a sign of respect to those they visit.

The images in the dummy book alone were not always sufficient for communication: on several occasions, they actually prompted confusion rather than recognition, and in such instances, a translator became necessary rather than simply convenient. Again, Gilpin’s experience stands out from that of her ostensible peers. Whereas photographers and anthropologists generally hired translators to travel with them across the Navajo Nation, Forster and Gilpin traveled alone—for financial reasons, but also because they typically visited friends, and knew they’d be able to make themselves understood, or visited families that included an English speaker. At the shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, the matriarch’s great-granddaughter-in-law, seated behind her at the extreme left of the photograph, acted as interpreter. Noted by Gilpin’s text, she is also notable for being the only woman in the scene who looks at the camera, directly returning Gilpin’s gaze. Her expression is enigmatic—has she looked up at a word from the photographer that the others, uncomprehending, were free to ignore? Is she simply responding to the presence of the camera? By the 1950s, photography was common on the Navajo Nation—many Navajo had their own cameras, and at special events like the annual Shiprock Fair, photobooths were a familiar sight. Linked by language and by the conventions of photography, Gilpin and her interpreter gaze at one another. In the later life of the photograph, the Navajo woman interrogates us as viewers: why are we looking into this domestic space, she asks us, and what do we hope to find? The dummy book discloses and prefigures the Anglo audience that Gilpin intended for her work, and an element of suspicion is legible in the translator’s gaze, even as her sister-in-law and mother-in-law constitute an enthusiastic Navajo public for the work in progress.

Photographs can be misleading, however: the apparent suspicion on the translator’s face in the group portrait reproduced in The Enduring Navaho is nowhere to be found in Gilpin’s portrait of the woman—named, this time, as Florence—taking during the same visit (Figure 2.11). The smile in that portrait is equally evident in a second group photograph—this time in color—that Gilpin included in a set of lantern slides (Plate 4). Old Lady Long Salt’s family is clustered around the dummy book, with the translator seated in the position of reader. She is smiling, with a child next to her apparently turning the page to reveal a photograph of a silversmith removing a cast medallion from a mold while a woman looks on (it was published in The Enduring Navaho, followed by a photograph of a young woman filing down a cast piece, captioned “In recent years Navaho women have also become silversmiths”).121 The translator’s open mouth in the lantern slide image suggests that she is explaining something either to her family members or to the photographer; answering smiles document the pleasure engendered by the exchange. The reciprocity of their gaze with Gilpin’s is on full view in portraits like this, and it is therefore no surprise that Gilpin showed audiences this image and other similar ones as evidence of the collaborative nature of her project. When she shared these slides with non-Navajo audiences, Gilpin was establishing the legitimacy and intimacy of her project—but she was also inviting them to identify directly, through their shared gaze, with the people looking at her photographs. Taken all in all, Gilpin’s Navajo slide shows rejected the anthropological gaze of early twentieth-century modernism—including her own—in favor of a collaborative, immersive narrative of contemporary lives.

At her lantern slide shows or otherwise, Gilpin did not “play Indian”—she did not dress in Navajo-style clothing, participate in ceremonies, or adopt Diné life- or foodways—but she described herself more than once as photographing from a Navajo point of view. Self-fashioning was a particularly fraught aspect of cross-cultural expression: it was often appropriative, as in the uniforms of tour guides—“There won’t be any difficulty recognizing our uniform,” announced an Indian Detours advertisement, “with its brilliant Navajo blouse, flashing Navajo belt of figured silver conchos, and squash-blossom necklaces”—and just as often was accompanied by Anglo claims about speaking for or even as Indigenous people.122 The novelist and cultural critic Mary Austin, for example, disclaimed any sort of academic “authority on things Amerindian” while claiming to have “succeeded in being an Indian.”123 Capote’s character, Lady Ina Coolbirth, likewise makes it clear that the lesbian community of Santa Fe was guilty of performative appropriation. “Oh, it’s a bit corny,” she sighs, “the piñon fires, the Indian fetish dolls, Indian rugs, and the two ladies fussing in the kitchen over homemade tacos and the ‘perfect’ Margarita.”124 Gilpin and Forster’s home was indeed decorated with gifts from those with whom they had worked and items they bought themselves, including katsinam, ceramics, and textiles—but the two women stopped short of adopting Navajo-inspired fashions like concho belts and squash-blossom necklaces.

Domestic Politics

In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin consistently called her readers’ attention to women’s roles as political, as well as cultural, actors. Because she considered the book a complete object, rather than a collection of discrete photographs, we must also consider the ways in which Gilpin sought to imply continuities between domestic and political spaces. The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt was a domestic space with political meaning. By 1953, photography had a specific role in the civic life of the Navajo—again, like Gilpin’s dummy, as a substitute for written language. “Voting registration was adopted in 1938,” Gilpin records in The Enduring Navaho, “and ballots with pictures of the candidates on them were used, as there were still many voters who could not read or write.”125 The question of literacy recalls Barboncito’s struggle to be understood clearly in the 1868 treaty negotiations at Hwéeldi, as well as the complexity of discussions around education and linguistic sovereignty among the Diné and other Indigenous people throughout this period. Navajo elections were held using photo ballots in order to include the widest possible cross-section of the community; Gilpin’s photographs of a 1955 election focus variously on voters making their decision and putting their completed ballots into the ballot box. In the image that Gilpin finally selected for The Enduring Navaho, two women are casting their ballots (Figure 2.12).

The election in Gilpin’s photograph is being held in a space built in the log-construction style of a traditional hogan. Hogans are homes, but they are also ceremonial and civic spaces: purpose-built hogans are used for healing ceremonies, and community meetings are traditionally held in hogans. Outsiders understood this, even as they tried to force Diné assimilation into Anglo-style frame houses: when the Tribal Council building was constructed at Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, it was designed and built in the style of a hogan, complete with an east-facing door and a windowless north wall.126 As the art historian Jennifer McLerran notes, “It is not coincidental that the council chamber was the only structure at Window Rock designed to represent a traditional Navajo architectural form.” And although the cultural references were imperfect—McLerran points out that the mural cycle progresses counterclockwise rather than sunwise, and that Navajo ideology discourages the appropriation of the hogan form for nontraditional uses—it was still in this space that McCabe chose to be photographed in front of Nailor’s mural. In Gilpin’s photograph of the women voting, a support pole stands tall behind one of them, visually rhyming with and extending her body. Part of the hogan-like structure of the building, it connects her political action with the powerful role of women in Navajo mythology and history. The hogan is a model for the world in Navajo epistemology; in McLerran’s words it is “the site of production of individual and collective Navajo identity, . . . the microcosmic expression of the greater macrocosm.”127 The four sacred directional mountains that mark the extent of Dinétah function as the support poles for the conceptual hogan that is the homeland; the sky forms its domed roof.128 In an actual hogan, those support poles are associated with Navajo divinities, whose identities—Earth Woman, Mountain Woman, Water Woman, and Corn Woman—remind us of the high status of women in Diné society.129

This photograph of two women using photographic ballots to mark their political sovereignty in a space that mirrored traditional hogan architecture—but within a political system that undermined Navajo sovereignty by its very design—is a powerful figure for the complex politics of the Navajo Nation in the 1950s. The electoral process in which the two women were participating took as its ideal the notion that people can create the values and determine the character of the society in which they live. Paradoxically, however, that process was developed, modeled on, and imposed by the colonial government of the United States, rather than the Navajo people themselves. Like the lesbian women who moved to the Southwest in order to become part of a chosen community, the Navajo fight for sovereignty throughout the twentieth century was a fight for ideological and cultural sovereignty, as well as political freedom, for their Nation. In both cases, the ideal has historically been tempered by the reality of the Southwest, and the Navajo Nation, as spaces that were—and are—occupied and governed by groups with conflicting interests.130 The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt does not thematize contemporary politics in the same explicitly institutional terms as this image—but it, too, speaks about the political power of women’s spaces and cultural authority on the Navajo Nation and beyond. The Summer Shelter is neither a simple-minded celebration of women’s domestic spaces and communities nor a comfortable narrative of cross-cultural solidarity. Throughout the image, Gilpin continually destabilizes her own position in relation to the women she photographs (and by extension to the Navajo Nation and its people as a whole), and she reveals their gazes in order to balance them against her own. In both of these photographs and throughout The Enduring Navaho Gilpin points to the gender politics embedded in federal attempts to assimilate Navajo politics to colonial models.

As Kluckhohn and Leighton observed just after World War II, “The Indian Service has made the mistake of dealing too exclusively with men (just as social welfare agencies in White society tend to deal too exclusively with women) only to wonder or be annoyed when agreements reached with them were not carried out.”131 Kluckhohn and Gilpin were correspondents, and the former was surely aware of the latter’s active involvement with a variety of “social welfare agencies” on the Navajo Nation—not to mention Forster’s nursing work with the Indian Service, which “was part of an experimental public health program sponsored by the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, a group organized in Santa Fe in 1922 to represent the political interests of the Pueblo Indians.”132 The Association on American Indian Affairs involved itself in everything from medicine to the arts, and Gilpin had taken a leading role in the organization since the 1930s, along with many other White women. Once Gilpin and Forster began working in the Navajo Nation, the gendered distinctions made by colonial agencies were visible everywhere from the missionary priest at Red Rock to the men employed as translators for Forster and others—in contrast to the women and children who were the nurse’s primary patients. As federal and corporate interests introduced various industries—many tied to resource extraction—to the Navajo Nation, they also brought their gendered prejudices about labor and political leadership.

In photographs that she intended to document community participation in tribal politics, Gilpin was careful to emphasize women’s participation—something she knew her Anglo viewers would not necessarily anticipate or expect. “There is general agreement that Navajo women are active participants in domestic life,” noted Lamphere in 1989, “while their participation in political and ritual activities has been the subject of some controversy.”133 The anthropologist points out that the distinction between the domestic and the political is itself a colonial frame; such a dichotomy is alien to historical Navajo forms of social organization and decision-making. Much decision-making both before and after the advent of the federally mandated Tribal Council happened within and among family units, with women exerting equal (or more) political authority as they did economic authority, thanks to their weaving. In a photograph Gilpin published of a meeting at Counselor, New Mexico, for example, women dominate the scene, visually and numerically (Figure 2.13). Other negatives she created throughout the meeting, which was about developing land claims based on archaeological evidence of continuous Navajo occupation of Dinétah beyond federal reservation borders, show almost exclusively men and boys. This may have been in part an aesthetic decision: in the black-and-white photograph that Gilpin selected for The Enduring Navaho, the patterns of the women’s Pendleton blankets and floral silk headscarves create a rhythm in counterpoint to the organic texture of the hogan walls, while in the color lantern slide photograph Gilpin took a few moments before or afterward the same blankets—now vibrantly colorful—become a compelling motif of forward motion, both literal and metaphorical. The aesthetic success of Gilpin’s photographs was ultimately, in her eyes, a tool for engaging viewers in the political realities of Navajo experience, from women’s political enfranchisement to their active engagement in the defense of their legal and cultural sovereignty.

Sovereign tribal politics were at the heart of the third section of The Enduring Navaho, titled “The Coming Way.” Throughout this section, images and narrative work together to convey some of the complexity of the relationships that Diné were crafting with new industries and outside influences. Gilpin’s use of the present participle in the section’s title underscores the ongoing nature of change on the Navajo Nation—as well as the uncertainty of the outcome. In both chapters in this section, she is explicit that the decision being faced is not between tradition and innovation but between paternalism and self-determination. Consistently optimistic about the potential for collaboration between Diné and outside/Anglo individuals and organizations, Gilpin acknowledges that such collaborations are necessary because the balance of power remains starkly in the U.S. government’s—and corporations’—favor.

“The Coming Way” opens with an overview of tribal government, starting with that based on family and clan groups, and extending through the makeup of the Tribal Council in the mid-1960s. That overview is concluded by a series of biographical sketches of key political leaders: McCabe’s portrait is here, along with tribal chairmen Sam Ahkeah (1946–54) and Paul Jones (1954–62), and Council member and chair of the Committee on Health and Welfare Annie Wauneka. As she did for McCabe, Gilpin included formal portraits of Ahkeah and Jones as quarter-page illustrations accompanying brief biographies in the text. Of Wauneka, in contrast, she included two portraits, one of which fills an entire page (Figures 2.14, 2.15).134 Both were taken outdoors, so that Wauneka’s head is framed by trees and sky, rather than the generic office interiors occupied by Jones and Ahkeah. In both, Wauneka wears characteristic Diné clothing: a velveteen blouse, and silver and turquoise necklaces and other jewelry—in contrast to the suits and ties worn by her male colleagues. In one portrait, taken in 1964, Wauneka wears the Presidential Medal of Freedom alongside her other jewelry. As Gilpin notes in the accompanying narrative, it was awarded to her on July 4, 1963, by John F. Kennedy after he participated in the American Indian Chicago Conference (see chap. 4), and conferred in a December ceremony by President Lyndon B. Johnson.135 It is printed at a similar scale to the other portraits in this section, and like them is surrounded by text. Facing this small portrait is a full-page portrait of Wauneka taken a decade earlier. At the bottom of the frame, we see a Pendleton blanket wrapped around her waist. In both photographs, Gilpin has placed her camera below her subject’s line of sight so that we look up at her. In the 1955 portrait this effect is particularly pronounced, inviting us literally to look up to Wauneka’s monumental figure while she looks out across the landscape beyond the camera as though contemplating the enormity of her responsibility toward her people rather than meeting our gaze. “Large in stature, vigorous and strong in both mind and body, Annie Wauneka is a dynamic personality,” Gilpin begins her biography—and the statuesque effect created by her lowered vantage point, as well as the full-page reproduction of the 1954 portrait, lends authority to the description.136

The second woman elected to the Tribal Council (in 1951), Wauneka was the daughter of Chee Dodge—the first chairman of the Tribal Council.137 Wauneka’s half-brother, Thomas Dodge, had also been a chairman of the Council, from 1933 until 1936. Her authority among the Diné thus came from her kinship ties as well as from her own expertise and authority. Wauneka’s foremost achievements were in the field of public health. Most famously, she took on the fight against tuberculosis, which ravaged the Diné population in the 1950s; she also took on education and alcoholism. Forster, a public health nurse whose brother ran a tuberculosis sanatorium, no doubt understood Wauneka’s contributions to contemporary Navajo life with particular clarity. Just as Forster attempted to blend her Anglo approach to healthcare with Diné medical practices when she worked in Red Rock, so did Wauneka move strategically between local and outside structures of government and diplomacy in order to serve tribal members. To that point, as Gilpin again notes in her text, soon after her election, Wauneka was named chair of the Committee on Health and Welfare, and her role became, “almost immediately, one of interpretation and communication.”138 The attention Gilpin pays Wauneka in The Enduring Navaho suggests that she identified with that role—and the responsibility it entailed. Describing Wauneka as “heroic,” Gilpin noted that in addition to working directly with individuals, Wauneka marshaled diverse media resources—making a film about tuberculosis and regularly broadcasting a Navajo-language radio show, for example—in order to reach as many tribal members as possible.139

Much as the five generations of women in The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt suggest matrilineal cultural continuity, the doubled portraits of Wauneka in The Enduring Navaho gently underscore the longevity of her commitment to public service. Framed similarly to the first photograph, small differences due to aging stand out in the second: Wauneka’s graying hair and her glasses, for example. Perhaps Gilpin saw her own aging reflected in Wauneka; certainly, the paired portraits resonate with other instances in The Enduring Navaho in which Gilpin emphasizes the passage of time. For instance, two facing photos earlier in the book are described with the following caption: “Once as Betsy and I left a hogan where she had been on a nursing visit, we encountered this woman carrying her small son and two lambs. Twenty-five years later we found the same woman again, and while we were talking to her, her husband rode up with a small boy in the saddle in front of him. This baby turned out to be the son of the boy held by his mother in the earlier picture.”140 In another instance, an extended narrative connects Gilpin’s 1932 portrait of Forster caring for Hardbelly in his hogan, surrounded by his family, to a portrait she made of his wife thirty-three years later:

No one recognized [Betsy], nor she any of them, so by way of conversation I produced my portfolio. When we came to the picture made in Hardbelly’s hogan in 1932, excitement spread amid a rapid flow of Navaho. I pointed to the nurse in the picture, then to Betsy standing beside me, but the oldest of the three kept shaking her head. Just then a teenage boy came to see what was happening. “My grandmother says this is not the nurse, she had dark hair.” Betsy leaned over, taking a lock of the old lady’s hair, and said, “Tell your grandmother she did too.” Recognition broke through; the old woman stood up, put her head on Betsy’s shoulder and her arm around her, and wept.141

In the early photograph of Forster in Hardbelly’s hogan, the nurse’s gentle touch unintentionally foreshadows the encompassing embrace and emotional expression of Hardbelly’s wife at their later encounter. As I suggested in the previous chapter, Gilpin uses touch as a code for queer care. In Gilpin’s story of the second meeting between Forster and Hardbelly’s wife, in addition to marking Forster’s care for Hardbelly and his wife’s gratitude for that care, touch signals a cross-cultural identification: Forster touches the other woman’s hair in order to call attention to the time that has altered both women in the same way. When Forster worked in Red Rock in the early 1930s, she came to know the Hardbelly family well enough that they began using kinship terms to address her: “Mrs. Hardbelly calls me ‘Shedazy’—Little Sister,” she wrote to Gilpin, adding that “your Navaho friends and I are all eagerly looking forward to your long promised visit.”142 When they did meet again, decades later, Gilpin’s portfolio—her dummy book—participated in the act of communication just as the teenager did; together, they facilitated mutual recognition and understanding. In this story, the photograph’s uncanny preservation of the past initially blocks the women’s ability to recognize each other in the present—but at the same time, it makes that recognition possible precisely through its material preservation of the past. Photography, like salt, is a preservative. Together, all these acts of memory and translation—and intergenerationality—underscore the role played by time in the construction of society and culture. Throughout The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin’s insistent observations about time both resist the notion of unchanging indigeneity characteristic of the ethnographic present and inscribe her and Forster within the ever-changing landscape and community of Dinétah.143