Seeing the Four Sacred Mountains

Mapping Dinétah

A vast number of books about the Navajo appeared at midcentury, and almost all start with a map of the Navajo reservation. In most, the map is offered as a visual corollary of the scientific, anthropological, and historical claims made by the accompanying text. For example, the frontispiece to a 1939 study by the philanthropic Phelps-Stokes Fund of what the authors call “The Navajo Indian Problem” is a map titled “Indian Tribes, Reservations and Settlements in the United States.” This language prioritizes the United States over Native national identities, and the map reflects this understanding: state borders are clearly articulated, and they dwarf the territories marked as Indigenous.6 And while a map by E. H. Coulson of the Office of Indian Affairs in Chicago, published by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton at the beginning of their 1946 book, The Navaho, ostensibly focuses on “Navaho Country” (Figure 3.2), it actually describes the changing borders of the land allotted by the U.S. government to the Navajo reservation over time—a decision that reinforces the authority of the U.S. federal imaginary over the Diné understanding of their homeland. Fifteen years later, Sonia Bleeker’s study, The Navajo: Herders, Weavers, and Silversmiths, was prefaced with a map labeled “Navajo Indian Reservation.” Bleeker’s map gives visual prominence to the outline of the federally recognized Nation, but its landmarks are all colonial: from the states of the Four Corners (Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico) to highways, national monuments, cities, and river names.7 Elements of Navajo geography, such as the sacred mountains that define the original borders of Dinétah, are not mentioned. And while it is true that not all midcentury maps so utterly disdained Navajo frames—for example, another map by Coulson, on the endpapers of Leighton’s 1947 psychological study, Children of The People (Figure 3.3), includes Navajo names for cities—there is no escaping the insistent inclusion of the state borders that meet at the Four Corners, or the cropping of territory that leaves some or all of the four sacred mountains beyond these maps’ edges.8

All of these midcentury maps imply that Dinétah is an imaginary imposition over the real geography of the United States, rather than the other way around. In other words, their colonial mindset inverts precedence, suggesting that the United States “created” the Navajo homeland by treaty only after annexing the Southwest during the Mexican–American War. As a result, the reservation border is drawn over the borders of American states and cities, which thereby retain their implicit prior authority. Typifying colonial cartographies, many of the new borders of the Navajo Nation are straight lines across apparently unmarked land—contravening the ancestral Navajo perception of the distances, bounds, and relations between natural features of the landscape and the people who live in them. These border lines are most evident in the so-called Checkerboard area to the east of the Navajo Nation, where tiny parcels of privately owned rectangles render the colonial commodification of the landscape particularly visible.

In aggregate, these borders—and the midcentury maps that reproduce them—assert the primacy of a cartographic logic that is consistent with the position of the U.S. government: Native nations exist at the will of the United States. This position is itself consistent with the federal legal stance that persists in considering Native nations “domestic dependent nations” rather than the autonomous, treaty-defined, sovereign nations they also are.9 More covertly, these maps reinforce a sense of American identity and belonging that accords with the logic of termination: the Navajo Nation is within the national borders of the United States, and readers of these maps are invited to imagine their residents as Americans, rather than as Diné—upon whom, indeed, the very concept of national identity was itself a violent colonial imposition.10 When more recent scholars write sentences like “The Navajo . . . reservation, primarily located in Arizona, spreads also into parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah,” they continue implicitly to privilege colonial borders over Indigenous understandings of space and community, in the same way that political maps do when they place state borders over the landscape of Dinétah.11

It is instructive to compare these twentieth-century maps with those made throughout the process of Euramerican colonization. As Gilpin implied in her letter to Steinem, the first European awareness of the American Southwest came from Spanish colonizers. Following coasts and rivers, early Spanish maps (and other European and American ones for which they were a source) focused on what is now Mexico, California, and the Rio Grande and Rio Colorado watersheds. By the nineteenth century, maps of the region were being created in the United States. They were almost exclusively military in origin and purpose, and encompassed surveys of natural resources as well as planning for campaigns against Spanish/Mexican and Indigenous residents. When U.S. Captain John G. Walker and Major Oliver L. Shepherd engaged in military reconnaissance through “Navajo Country” in 1859, on the eve of the American Civil War (1861–65) and in the wake of the Mexican–American War (1846–48), for example, the geography of their maps was necessarily defined by natural features identified with Spanish names, and similarly identified pueblos, rather than Anglo settlements—of which there were only a few military outposts.12 Other mid-nineteenth-century maps reveal similar strategies of representation: a map “of the Route pursued in 1849 by the U.S. Troops under the command of Bvt. Lieut. Col. JNO. M. WASHINGTON, Governor of New Mexico, in an expedition against the Navajos,” spans the region from the Canyon de Chelly (Tséyi’, in Diné bizaad) to Santa Fe (Figure 3.4). It inadvertently offers the viewer a striking formal contrast between the densely identified pueblos and colonial settlements along the Rio Grande and the empty space across which the word Navajos is joined only by a rumored wagon trail: “Of its particular location and character Lt. S. knows nothing.”13 Again, we are reminded that blankness carries political import.

Scholars are increasingly interrogating the violence of this colonial cartographic imaginary, and Native American artists and writers alike have deconstructed the semiotics of political mapping—a European introduction to North American societies who conceived of space and its occupation by humans very differently.14 The concept of mapping space was historically present in both Indigenous and colonizing cultures, but the ideological uses of mapping often diverged.15 Indigenous maps “existed prior to Anglo contact,” according to the ethnogeographer William C. Meadows, and although few are extant, Indigenous scholars such as Annita Hetoevėhotohke’e Lucchesi (Cheyenne and Italian descent) are beginning to substantiate that claim with material evidence.16 Other scholars are challenging the privileged position of cartography within the study of geography, suggesting its epistemic limits in relation to Indigenous worldviews. Some Native writers and artists, meanwhile, have taken up maps and made them speak differently: the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, opened her epic 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, with a map containing explanatory captions that critique its colonial logic. As the literary scholar Shari Huhndorf notes, “While the map in Almanac testifies to such forms of conquest, it also serves . . . as an expression of protest that challenges colonial constructions of landownership and history in the Americas.”17 Deconstructing the erasures of history performed by colonial cartography, Silko decolonizes the map by reinscribing history—people’s experiences of and in places—onto its surface. Like Silko’s fictional characters and their Pueblo neighbors in reality, Navajo people have historically conceived of geography in terms of lived experience on the land, rather than with the abstractions of political borders. In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin attempted to convey this experiential relationship to her readers as part of an argument for their political sovereignty.

The distance between Navajo and Anglo perceptions of land and nation is further evident in the documentation of the 1868 treaty negotiations at Hwéeldi. Asked to evaluate the failure of his people to survive their four years of exile, the elected Navajo leader Barboncito explained: “When the Navajos were first created four mountains and four rivers were pointed out to us, inside of which we should live, that was to be our country and was given to us by the first woman . . . I think that our coming [to Hwéeldi] has been the cause of so much death among us and our animals.”18 Within the area roughly circumscribed by the sacred rivers and mountains, land was synonymous with life—according to Barboncito, Dinétah had natural boundaries beyond which the Diné and other beings indigenous to that land could not survive.

Indeed, in a Navajo framework, geography is a vital component of personal health—and health is synonymous with ecological balance. It is all part of the broad Diné conceptual category of hózhó. As Barboncito clearly explained in 1868, to be separated from one’s homeland is to invite sickness and death to both oneself and the land one has left behind—and without returning to the land, there is little possibility of recovery for either. The medical anthropologists Elizabeth Lewton and Victoria Bydone have reaffirmed Barboncito’s understanding: “Within [the four sacred mountains], the Navajo are connected to the land and protected from harm.” One of their patients confirmed this, observing that even when one gets ill, “within the four sacred mountains . . . you get easy help” from traditional medical practitioners, called hataałii.19 For many Navajo people, the land of Dinétah is the body of Changing Woman herself. “What ties the Navajo community to the land and produces a cohesive identity is their relationship to Changing Woman (Asdzáá Nádleehé), the female deity who brought Navajo people into being through the use of corn and her own skin,” explains Mishuana Goeman.20 Barboncito noted during the 1868 treaty negotiations that Changing Woman “gave us this piece of land and created it especially for us.”21 Sherman’s map of a reservation could not accommodate Barboncito’s understanding of the landscape and ecoculture of Dinétah.

When Sherman replied to Barboncito, he showed a concern only for clear, specific borders: “We have got here a map which, if Barboncito can understand, I would like to show him . . . his own country . . . we must have a clearly defined boundary line and know exactly where you belong to. . . . Tomorrow at 10 o’clock I want . . . [you] to delegate ten of your men to come forward and settle about the boundary line of your own country.”22 According to the historian John L. Kessell, Sherman pointed out the four sacred directional mountains on a map. “It would be interesting,” Kessell noted in his 1981 study of the treaty, “to know which mountains Sherman pointed to—particularly the sacred mountain of the east, still debated even among Navajos.”23 The historian observed that both the San Juan and Jemez mountains, contenders for the eastern boundary, appear on maps of the period—as they do, for example, in an 1867 map of the “Old territory and military department of New Mexico, compiled . . . chiefly for military purposes under the authority of the Secretary of War.”24 Specific peaks, however, are not identified on this map, with the exception of Mount Taylor (the southern sacred mountain; Tsoodził in Diné bizaad). What it does show is the reservation at Fort Sumner: a tiny, arbitrary square on the eastern edge of the map, distant from Dinétah and minuscule in comparison.

The disregard for Navajo landmarks had a significant impact on the 1868 negotiations—even before Sherman lied about the extent of the agreed area, taking advantage of the unfamiliarity of his maps to Barboncito and the other Diné leaders, as well as the confusion of double translation (English to Spanish, and Spanish to Diné bizaad) to imply that he was offering twice as much territory as the treaty actually described. While Sherman’s treaty “spoke of artificial lines on maps, of parallels and meridians, the Navajos [spoke] of geographical features, of canyons, mountains, and mesas. The white men talked about ownership of the land, the Indians about using the land.”25 Political maps, by their very existence, define borders as arbitrary and alterable; the space they describe is conceptual rather than concrete and has discrete components with precise limits. Landscape, on the other hand, as Gilpin’s visual metaphor of the horizon would remind her readers, is imprecisely bounded, relatively immutable, and always inhabited.

Early in her publishing career, Gilpin took maps at face value. In her 1941 book, The Pueblos, A Camera Chronicle, a map prefaces the text and its authority is referenced throughout.26 During and immediately after World War II, however, Gilpin began creating work that reframed borders as regions, and began to undermine cartographic authority in favor of a diachronic, culturally defined understanding of land and space. Her 1949 book about the Rio Grande, for instance, considers it the heart of a fertile and productive ecoculture whose people are united, rather than divided, by the river—defying its Johnny-come-lately redefinition as the border between the United States and Mexico. The political implications of Gilpin’s project are highlighted by the extensive correspondence that prefaced her work, including her pursuit of permission from Mexican authorities to cross—and to photograph—the border.27

Throughout her life, Gilpin felt a profound and even urgent sense of connection to the landscape of the American West. In 1957, she wrote an essay titled “Why I Live in New Mexico,” in which she explicitly connected the landscape with its history and her experience in it:

I love the big open spaces, the rich form of contour, the magical light of this land, the limitless sky, and the delicate or rich play of color. In addition to all this, New Mexico contains our oldest history, not only our oldest history of European origin, but also the cultural past of the North American Indian, dating back hundreds of centuries. . . . We feel here the deep roots of long past centuries. Once this is [embedded] in one’s consciousness, other parts of the country seem shallow by comparison. Here one has time to think, to give time to the ripening of expression. To me this all adds up to a richer life, a life where unessentials [sic] are cast aside, and the genuine has a chance to emerge.28

Gilpin’s insistence on defining herself, her character, and her work in terms of the landscape and history of the Southwest resonated with Navajo experiences of Dinétah—a land without which they would die, and which would likewise die without them. The photographer understood this: when called upon to give her opinion of Navaho Means People, the 1951 book authored by Kluckhohn and Evon Vogt with images by Life photographer Leonard McCombe, she exclaimed in dismay that there was “not one landscape!” For Gilpin, the Navajo were “a people to whom the land in which they live means everything,” and she summarized her response to Navaho Means People by asserting that “I see it all so differently.”29 Although Gilpin began The Enduring Navaho, as she had The Pueblos, with a map—apparently reiterating the familiar anthropological pattern of asserting colonial authority at the outset of her text—she insistently subverts its apparent meaning throughout the rest of the book. Beginning with the landscape photography of her opening pages and its narrative explication, Gilpin overturns the epistemics of mapping in favor of an understanding of geography learned from her Navajo friends and colleagues.

The map that Gilpin asked the cartographer Mary Blue Huey (American, 1924–2009) to create for The Enduring Navaho sets up that work, reframing Navajo space by challenging the terms of the map itself (Figure 3.5). It is similar to the maps that Gilpin used when she did lantern slide performances about the Southwest and Navajo culture. In both, the “Checkerboard area” on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation is visually distinctive, called out as an area within the four sacred directional mountains that cannot straightforwardly be defined in nationalizing cartographic terms. Legally speaking, the Checkerboard is land that was divided up by the federal allotment process and partially sold to non-Navajo buyers; when the allotment process was ended, the result was a region that was partially reservation land and partially privately owned colonized land. Also marked in both maps is “Old Navaho Land,” a region well beyond the reservation borders that reminds viewers of the full historical extent of Dinétah, the fourth world (or fifth; as the Diné poet Esther Belin writes, “this world / some say fourth others say fifth”; similarly, Gilpin, who does indeed describe the current world as the fifth, writes, “The Navaho believe that the People came from lower worlds, passing through four of them (some say twelve) to emerge into this present Fifth World”).30 This is the world into which the Navajo emerged according to their Creation Story, loosely bounded by the Continental Divide, the San Juan and La Plata Mountains, and the Carrizo, Lukachukai, and Chuska ranges.31

Huey’s map emphatically foregrounds the Navajo Nation. U.S. state boundaries are minimized and distanced from their status as borders thanks to the grid of the Four Corners, which fades simply to latitudinal and longitudinal lines, easily crossed by the word Country. Dinétah itself is labeled, not “Navaho Indian Reservation,” as it had been in Gilpin’s 1941 book, but “Navaho Country.” The map also includes the rivers and mountains described by Barboncito a century earlier, even though they fall outside the U.S. government’s designation of reservation lands. Specifically, the four sacred directional mountains are clearly marked with their Navajo names: Sisnaajiní (east), Tsoodził (south), Doko’oosłííd (west), and Dibéntsaa (north).

These sacred mountains define Navajo land for the Diné. The geographer Kevin S. Blake has pointed out that Gilpin (and Huey) did not mark another sacred mountain, Gobernador Knob (on Fir Mountain—Ch’óol’í’í), on her map. Gobernador Knob was the site where “First Man created Changing Woman,” and where she in turn “gave birth to her twin sons.”32 In the text that follows her map, Gilpin begins with a retelling of the Navajo Creation Story, which culminates in the appearance of Changing Woman at Ch’óol’í’í, symbol of fertility and regeneration.33 Once again, Gilpin appears to be following convention: many anthropological surveys of Navajo culture at midcentury begin with a version of the Creation Story, offered simultaneously as evidence of the author’s cultural knowledge and rational superiority over the superstitious subjects they study.34 Instead of simply repeating a Euramerican anthropologist’s record of the story, however, Gilpin tells the Creation Story via the more specific—and more personal—record of a petroglyph of Changing Woman that she photographed in 1959 and which was submerged in 1962 by the U.S. government’s construction of the Navajo Dam (Figure 3.6).35

Clearly aware of Ch’óol’í’í, identifying it by name as a sacred mountain and describing its role in the Creation Story in her text, Gilpin nonetheless chose to highlight only the directional mountains on her map—the ones that offer a direct alternative to the linear bounds of federally imposed political borders. As the Navajo sovereignty expert Justice Raymond D. Austin has observed: “Sovereignty and place (or land) are intertwined, and give real meaning to being sovereign. The traditional Navajo homeland . . . is marked in each cardinal direction by a sacred mountain . . . The four sacred mountains define Navajo territorial sovereignty when considered under Navajo sense of place.”36 Michael Lerma likewise rejects externally imposed legal definitions, including maps, of the Navajo Nation, its territory, and its sovereignty, arguing instead that “Indigenous accounts of sovereignty are best understood in terms of ceremony, language, homelands, and sacred histories.”37 Gilpin’s decision to open her text with aerial photographs of the four sacred mountains was part of a larger plan to design The Enduring Navaho in accord with Diné ceremonial structure—a decision that her editors did not initially perceive, but that her Navajo readers appreciated. In a letter to Barbara Spielman, her editor at the University of Texas Press, Gilpin wrote:

Perhaps the most important change that you wish to make is the elimination of the four parts as I had them. . . . I did not make myself clear . . . my first reason was to carry the Navaho symbolic four into the book. All the individuals here, museum people and others have commented on this most favorably . . . Also the educated Navaho who have seen my dummy have been particularly pleased that I had related their feeling about this symbolic figure to the book. It is what a Navaho would have done.38

This last statement echoes comments about taking photographs from a Navajo point of view for which Gilpin has been criticized. But while Gilpin indisputably occasionally overstated her ability to adopt a Diné perspective, we can also hear her pride in receiving approval from Diné readers when we read statements like this one in context.

Blatchford, a Diné activist and community leader, was one of the friends Gilpin invited to review her text for The Enduring Navaho. Although Blatchford was a frequent and respected public speaker, his ideas have rarely survived in print. One of his few published writings is an undated essay titled “Religion of the People,” anthologized in 1972. In the essay, he describes the connection between Navajo ideas of harmony and moral action.

Because of his belief in harmony and in following the natural course of events, the Indian does not project his aims and aspirations far into the distant future, but rather he thinks in terms of the present and the past so as not to disrupt the blessedness of harmony. . . . We may see, then, that the universe is thought of as a whole made up of composite parts. . . . The natural balance between the parts of the whole, which is maintained by nature, is recognized throughout the stories, and the recognition of this balance tends to lead the listener to observe moral behavior.39

Throughout his essay, Blatchford suggests that rather than being allegorical object lessons in proper behavior, Navajo stories were epistemological models: by embodying balance and harmony within themselves, they modeled a mode of thinking and acting guided by those values. In the context of his political activism, it is clear that Blatchford was thinking about Navajo religious values as a basis for political action. In other words, the moral actions that result from a recognition of balance and harmony as fundamental values lead to correct political action. In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin creates a similar effect—an epistemological shift away from Euramerican ideas about nationhood, toward a Navajo model of land and identity. And although the ramifications of that shift could have been perceived in purely cultural terms, she is emphatic throughout her book about the importance of this viewpoint for an accurate understanding of contemporary Navajo politics.

As Charlotte Davidson, a Diné / Three Affiliated Tribes scholar and weaver, has explained, the traditional practice of “walk[ing] in beauty,” or, in Diné bizaad, hózhó, “compels Diné to be conscious of our historical and contemporary capacity as human beings to harm or heal, and to be mindful of the aftereffect that occurs by our pursuit of either possibility.”40 From the very beginning of The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin enacts this philosophy of hózhó and Blatchford’s understanding of the ability of stories to set their listeners on a path toward balanced morality. Within Navajo epistemology, it is up to the individual to determine how that balance might be struck, although singers (hataałii) can perform ceremonies to assist in restoring hózhó. As Davidson makes clear, the pursuit of hózhó is a political as well as spiritual practice; one aspect of balance in The Enduring Navaho, for instance, is that negotiated by Gilpin between the landscape and Diné history. Instead of ending her story of the Changing Woman petroglyph and the Navajo Dam at the moment of the figure’s submersion, for example, Gilpin chooses to affirm the creator’s role in reestablishing balance throughout Dinétah. She writes, “Now these ancient pictures are submerged beneath the waters of the reservoir; but surely the spirit of Changing Woman will bless this water as it goes forth onto the dry and barren land, fulfilling her mission of renewal, and bringing new crops and a richer life to many of the Dinéh.”41 Seamlessly, the Creation Story in The Enduring Navaho has become a story about continuous and ongoing Navajo presence in the contemporary landscape.

The Four Sacred Mountains

The four sacred directional mountains are marked on Gilpin’s map at the beginning of The Enduring Navaho—but the photographer really introduces them to her readers via four full-page black-and-white aerial photographs in her opening chapter, “The Creation Story” (Figures 3.7–3.10). They are presented in traditional Navajo order—sunwise, from east to south, to west, to north—and are accompanied by a narrative that blurs the boundaries between author and reader, implicating them both in the experience of the book while foreshadowing the book itself as a figure for the land. It begins with Gilpin’s observation of her own process of reading: “While I was reading the Creation Story, my thoughts traveled to the four sacred mountains bordering the Navaho World.”42 Facing this text is an aerial photograph of the first sacred mountain, Sisnaajiní, of the east. Our eyes, just like Gilpin’s thoughts, are drawn to the sacred mountain.

Alongside and amid the four directional mountains, Gilpin tells the history of the Navajo from their prehistoric ancestors through their return to the Nation after their captivity at Fort Sumner. Condensing twenty-five thousand square miles and hundreds of years into a single experience of the Navajo landscape created by the narrative synchronicity of images and text, Gilpin overwrites cartographic and legal models of nation and homeland with experiential, lived models of belonging.43 In so doing, her text underscores the continuity between Navajo culture and the politics of Navajo nationhood and sovereignty. Within and around this history, she describes the land itself. Moving fluidly between discussions of the power of Changing Woman and the construction of the Navajo Dam, and between traditional landways and the conflicts brought on by U.S. colonization of the Southwest, Gilpin’s narration refuses to create a distinction between “tradition” and present political needs. As she tells the reader about her flights over the Navajo Nation in pursuit of these photographs of the sacred mountains, Gilpin collapses space and time. “In the air one goes deep into the past,” she sets out, and throughout her narrative she continues lithely to elide distinctions between descriptions of terrain and historical events. “As I watched the passing landscape, the procession of Navaho historic events filled my mind, and I thought of all that had happened to these people since they had come under the rule of Washington,” Gilpin recalls—inviting her readers to discover that same history in her landscape photographs.44 It is a narrative that recalls her description of living in New Mexico—“We feel here the deep roots of long past centuries”—but politicizes it, reminding viewers that the most recent, briefest part of that history has also been the most traumatic thanks to colonization. Her decision to interpret recent changes on the Navajo Nation through Diné cultural frames underscores the connection between Navajo cultural sovereignty and the midcentury politics of Navajo nationhood. On an epistemological level, Gilpin’s text and photographs work together to remind her Anglo readers that the Navajo perspective should be the one with authority in this place.

At the same time, her medium—aerial photography—had distinct colonial overtones. Gilpin had been fascinated by flight from its beginnings—long before commercial flight was commonplace, or even available at all. In 1917, Gilpin’s instructor at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York City, Alice Boughton, wrote to Alice Shinn, a dancer who was also a friend of Gilpin’s, that the young photographer was “the most brilliant pupil of the season.” More alarmingly for her reader, however, Boughton also related Gilpin’s desire “to fly for the army and take photographs. A wonderful idea, Laura,” Shinn wrote admiringly, “but slightly dangerous! Do reconsider it and come work with me in a hospital.”45 The photography curator and historian Beaumont Newhall—also friends with Gilpin—recalled that “America was totally unprepared for photo reconnaissance when she joined England and France in the Great conflict [of World War I].”46 Newhall went on to document the 1918 founding of a School of Aerial Photography in upstate New York—housed jointly at the Eastman Kodak Company and Cornell University.

As it transpired, the modernist photographer Edward Steichen—with whom Gilpin exhibited and corresponded—led the Photographic Section of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. He later suggested somewhat disingenuously, “The aerial photograph is itself harmless and valueless. It enters into the category of ‘instruments of war’ when it has disclosed the information written on the surface of the print.”47 Ironically, Gilpin succumbed to a more domestic danger before she could get to Europe: the Spanish flu epidemic sent her back to Colorado Springs to convalesce for the duration of the war. Her home city was a center of aviation development: from 1925 to 1932, the Alexander Aircraft Company was based first in Englewood and then in Colorado Springs, and by the advent of the Depression was the top producer of airplanes in the country. Thanks in part to Alexander and in part to its central location (and existing transportation links) in the era before transcontinental flight, Colorado Springs was an early hub of both private and commercial air traffic.

“I hear that you came out here by air,” Gilpin wrote excitedly to family friend Dorothy Haven in 1932. “How I envy you!” Although Gilpin’s family was part of the cultural elite in Colorado Springs, their finances were often insecure—and flying was an expensive proposition in the early 1930s.48 It would be another decade before the photographer had the opportunity to combine her love of flight with her professional practice: it came with World War II. Gilpin was fifty when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but her age did not stop her from seeking war work. “Jobs are very scarce here,” she wrote to Clyde Fisher, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who had written a positive review of The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle. After explaining that she had tried unsuccessfully to get work in the Photography Division of the Farm Security Administration, she asked him if the museum might be seeking replacement photographers. “I am ready to go anywhere where I could be of use either in defense work or to relieve a young man for war work,” she declared.49 Fisher wrote back apologetically to say that there was nothing available; it was a familiar response to Gilpin, who had conjectured to her friend Isabel Herdle, assistant director at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, that “I am afraid a woman does not have too good a chance.”50

Fortune finally smiled on Gilpin, and as if to make up for the earlier disappointments, the war work she eventually found was in aviation. In November 1942, she was offered the position of photographer in the public relations department of the Boeing Airplane Company in Wichita, Kansas. It was “a great up-rooting” for the artist, but her brother was already there, and they decided to share a house with their father. Despite the fact that it meant leaving Forster in Colorado Springs, Gilpin concluded that “it seems much the most sensible thing to do, to say nothing of the fact that I shall be doing a very real war job.”51 Working for Boeing, Gilpin took photographs that were intended to glamorize and glorify the construction of military aircraft, and to celebrate the people who did the work. Many of her photographs from this period are still life compositions, fully invested in the abstraction and fragmentation of modernist photography as in At Boeing (Figure 3.11). In others, men and women are at work—most strikingly in Building a Bomber, of 1944, which depicts three women and three men through the nose of a B-29 bomber plane (Figure 3.12). “I suddenly found a wonderful subject in circles,” Gilpin recalled; intriguingly, the composition foreshadows that of The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt.52 The shell of the plane becomes an industrial frame for the labor it encircles, with cinematic effect; meanwhile, the concentric rings of the plane’s skeletal girders evoke radar grids and targeting rings. Despite the evident presence of women on the factory floor, Gilpin became the first woman to fly in a B-29—a fact in which she took significant pride, although as time passed she also reflected on its darker implications. In 1945 she made her first trip to White Sands National Monument—“a region I have long wanted to see.” On that trip, as we have seen, she took some strikingly abstract photographs—but as she wrote to a friend in Wichita, “How strange that part of that area should be so closely connected with the war and B29, the testing ground of the atomic bomb.”53 Gilpin might have seen similar paradoxes in her photographs of Navajo uranium mining, as its poisoned promise of Diné prosperity carved its way into sacred landscapes.

After World War II, Gilpin moved to Santa Fe—in part because she wanted to work on her book about the Rio Grande, and in part because she wanted to reunite with Forster and rescue her from an unhappy recuperation from polioencephalitis, which the nurse had undertaken first with her sister Emily Forster Stuart and then in Colorado Springs with her brother, the doctor Aloysius Forster. The illness was so bad that Forster was declared “mentally incompetent”; as she began to fall ill, she wrote to Gilpin of “terrible headaches at night and extreme fatigue + acute neuritis in both arms all day.”54 Her concerns were initially diagnosed as an allergic reaction, but by the fall it was evident that something more serious was the matter. By December 1944 Forster’s handwriting was shaky, confirming reports that she was “often in a fog.” “Your letters are the joy of my days,” she reassured Gilpin in spiky, uncertain letters, before offering a kind of apology for her own shortcomings as a correspondent. “I know you understand my not writing oftener and more fully all that is in my heart. Writing seems to grow more + more difficult + I am reluctant to force it.”55 In the spring of 1946 Forster joined Gilpin in Santa Fe, and the change seemed to benefit them both.56 “Wish you could see how Miss Forster has improved since we have been here,” Gilpin wrote to a friend in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1946. “It does me good just to look at her.”57 Once she and Forster were settled in Santa Fe, Gilpin began serious work on her book about the Rio Grande, including significant plans for aerial photography—setting a vital precedent for her aerial vision in The Enduring Navaho.

Indisputably, as Gilpin’s own biography reveals, aerial photography was developed and actively used as a military tool for surveillance and domination—and equally indisputably, her own aerial photography resisted that genealogy. By the middle of the twentieth century, aerial landscape photography had been embraced by artists who were attracted to its radical reframing of a familiar subject.58 Aerial photographs flattened and abstracted landscapes that were previously seen as picturesque, and the favored point of view for modernist appropriation was straight down. Although Gilpin had discussed her aerial photography extensively with Newhall, the critic’s 1969 book on the subject, Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space, completely ignored Gilpin’s body of aerial work.59 Instead, he focused on the imperialist use value of aerial photography, echoing his own earlier commentary. Moreover, throughout Airborne Camera, Newhall privileged the “vertical view”—with a camera poised directly over the earth’s surface, looking straight down—over the “oblique view”—the one most frequently used by Gilpin, which retains a horizon line.60 He claimed that the former gives us a sense of “our position in the universe,” and his topics of focus—war, mapping, resource extraction, and archaeology—imply along with his narrative tone that he sees that position as one of omniscient technocracy.61 Unsurprisingly, the contemporary photographs that he selects are almost all these vertical views, and his captions underscore the abstraction created by this perspective.

Gilpin was actively working in modernist vocabularies throughout the development of The Enduring Navaho, and her aerial photographs of the four sacred mountains participate in the world-building discourse described by Newhall. Instead of his military-industrial worldview, however, Gilpin’s aerial photographs of the four sacred directional mountains communicate a sensibility in keeping with Navajo ideology, exploring the physical space of Dinétah from an explicitly embodied and experiential perspective that echoes Navajo geographies. Each of her oblique views offers a singular vantage point rather than the schematic, omniscient, impersonal perspective of the map or the “vertical” aerial photograph, and thereby embeds the viewer in the landscape and in relation to the natural features—rivers, mountains, mesas, and forests—depicted. Formally speaking, the four photographs are extremely similar, sweeping from the dropped foreground below Gilpin’s airplane all the way up through the horizon line to the peaks of each mountain, which brush against the upper bound of her frame. The high horizon in each photograph is so perfectly matched between them that were it not for the radically different ecosystems in each setting, one could line them up side by side in order to create the illusion of a continuous landscape.

If we imagine doing so, the transformation of the individual photographs into a continuous image calls attention to another way in which Gilpin refuses Euramerican landscape tropes: her aspect ratio in each individual photograph is vertical rather than horizontal. This subtle alignment of the images with the conventions of portraiture, rather than landscape, reinforces a sense of embodiment that includes the land itself: Are the four photographs actually portraits of Changing Woman? Thematically, it is an idea reinforced by the fact that each photograph depicts a strikingly different ecology, from desert to lush valleys, implying great distances between them; similarly, deep shadows in the East and North contrast with the midday light in the West. As if to underscore the political significance of these aesthetic choices, Gilpin recalls the conventions of Euramerican landscape painting briefly via the insertion of a color photograph of Monument Valley between her images of Doko’oosłííd and Dibéntsaa (Plate 5). Contrasting the touristic spectacle of a conventional (if beautiful) image of Monument Valley against the striking monumentality of the four sacred mountains, Gilpin subtly shifts our expectations of the western landscape.

Appearing in sequence, the four mountain photographs imply a movement across and around Dinétah that Gilpin describes explicitly in her accompanying text. She invites us to see the landscape in terms of the people who have been living in it for centuries, contrasting its apparently “barren and uninhabited” state with the rich reality of “fifteen thousand years” of human and animal occupation. It is an invitation that once again recalls the misleading emptiness of the region as represented on the Cambridge globe: Gilpin is inviting us to look more closely—and more queerly—at the landscape bounded by the sacred mountains. Undermining our initial perception of the photographs as indexical documents of untouched and uninhabited expanse, Gilpin’s text prompts us to see the real impact of centuries of agriculture and technology on the terrain.62 As if to remind us of her own immersion in the landscape she photographed, moreover, she underscores the bodily impact of traveling that distance, minutely relating the details of dawn and dusk as well as the meals and rests she and her pilot took along the way.

Homeland and Hogans

Embedding her viewers in the landscape being traversed, and moving them sunwise as in a Diné ceremony or prayer, Gilpin’s aerial photographs of the four sacred directional mountains refuse the unrelentingly westward motion—and visuality—of Manifest Destiny and Anglo colonialism. Instead, the land between the four sacred mountains cradles us, surrounding us like a bowl—or, more accurately, like a hogan. “In a Navajo epistemology of place, the universe is conceptualized as a hogan,” a circular or polygonal single-room log-framed home, with a doorway facing east and a stove at the center.63 The four sacred mountains of Dinétah function as the support poles for the conceptual hogan that is the nation; the sky forms its domed roof.64 Janet Berlo has described the Navajo landscape as “both a real place and a spiritual construct,” and the anthropologist Kelli Carmean notes that the landscape of Dinétah is “a kind of sacred geography—that literally grounds the culture to the land. To the Navajo, these landscapes are the physical manifestation of events that occurred during the creation of the Navajo people and of the earth itself.”65 In the narrative accompanying these four photographs, Gilpin very clearly describes Dinétah as inhabited by Navajo people past and present, as well as by the Holy People, the natural creatures, and the geological features of the landscape itself. Her photographs likewise cradle us within their structure: the land encircles the photographer, her airplane, and the viewer.

Gilpin learned to see the hogan as a core metaphor of Diné spatial epistemology from the Navajo people whose voices she sought to amplify in The Enduring Navaho. In the decades since the appearance of her book, Diné artists themselves have explicitly addressed its relevance to questions of cultural and environmental sovereignty. In 2005, for example, the contemporary Diné/bilagáana artist Will Wilson created a biosphere inside a hogan as part of his series Auto Immune Response. AIR began with photographs in which Wilson depicted himself as a character in a lonely, dystopian future. Roaming the landscape of Dinétah, the man “is searching for answers. Where has everyone gone? What has occurred to transform the familiar and strange landscape that he wanders? Why has the land become toxic to him? How will he respond, survive, reconnect to the earth?”66 Although we may be tempted to read the toxicity of Wilson’s landscape in terms of colonial depredations—the end effects of coal and uranium mining, logging, and other environmentally disastrous industrial developments on the Navajo Nation—the artist himself attributes the ill health of the land to the abandonment of Diné culture.67

According to Wilson, the series “is an allegorical investigation of the extraordinarily rapid transformation of Indigenous lifeways, the dis-ease it has caused, and strategies of response that enable cultural survival.”68 As Indigenous people are alienated from the land, both the people and the landscape become sick, and their healing must come from “cultural survival”—which is not quite the same thing as tradition. Alongside the photographs, Wilson constructed a steel-frame hogan greenhouse, a “research facility” in which he grew Indigenous crops in the gallery.69 At once an ecosystem and a refuge, Wilson’s greenhouse invokes the hogan as an epistemological model for the world in a project that explored the intersecting necessity of cultural and ecological balance. Just as Changing Woman created Dinétah from corn and her own skin, so does Wilson’s AIR Research Facility underscore the connection between the perpetuation of cultural traditions such as foodways and dwellings, and individual and ecological well-being.70 The notion of a “research facility,” moreover, posits traditional knowledge as a process rather than a fixed product: just as plants grow in response to their environment, so do Indigenous cultures. Like Gilpin and her Diné consultants, Wilson presents Navajo epistemology as experiential, recognizing space as inhabited and honoring the need for balance between people and their land.

Fifty years before Wilson created AIR, Gilpin was also thinking about the landscape-as-hogan in terms of ceremony—which, in Diné terms, was to be thinking in terms of healing as well as of home. We have seen how she consistently shared her dummy book with Navajo people, collecting feedback from them about the images she included; she was careful likewise to consult with Diné colleagues about the content of her text, inviting them to exercise final editorial control that in some cases radically altered her original draft. “I want to see Sam, Maurice, you, Cato, and maybe one or two others for your final O.K. on the whole job,” she wrote to Ned Hatathli, a longtime friend who was working as director of the tribal Resources Division, in 1964.71 In her letter requesting help from Annie Wauneka, Gilpin not only expressed her conviction that she would “feel better about it all if you read and approved” the section on healthcare but also mentioned an enclosed release form provided by the University of Texas Press, which she asked Wauneka to sign.72 The photographer made other references to release forms—for example, in an aside while confirming the spelling of Two Grey Hills weaver Daisy Tauglechee’s name with the Bureau of Indian Affairs linguist Robert Young.73 At the same time, when she inquired with Frank Wardlaw, director of the University of Texas Press, about the need for permissions to publish portraits of individuals, he told her they were unnecessary. “I have discussed this matter with our legal counsel and he doesn’t think that you have anything to worry about,” Wardlaw wrote. “This book cannot really be considered a commercial undertaking in the same way that advertising is.”74 While few critics—or later historians—have considered the implications of Gilpin’s decision to publish with an academic rather than commercial press, it accorded with her own sense of intellectual responsibility. In Gilpin’s mind, that responsibility was first and foremost to the Navajo people she was portraying; permissions were one way to acknowledge it, and asking for their help reviewing her content was another.

Gilpin’s discussion of healing ceremonies was reviewed by Blatchford. He had the authority to make changes in part because he had been thinking about the relationship between Navajo religion and politics for some time. Gilpin first met Blatchford in 1955 while he was a student at the University of New Mexico. To the photographer he represented a new mode of Native political engagement. As she wrote to Wilder in 1956:

Toward the end of the Navaho series [of lantern slides] is a portrait of Herbert Blatchford, Honor Student. Do you know that the Tribal council is voting $100,000 a year for the education of honor students? This boy is in his last year at U. of N.M. specializing in education. He is a thoroughly acculturated highly intelligent boy. Has done his stint in the Army, is married and has one, soon two children. I first knew of him when he gave a talk here at a youth conference sponsored by the N.M. Asso. on Indian Affairs. All tribes were invited and they chose their own topics. Herbert’s was “How is the passive minority to get along with the aggressive majority?”! And I assure you it was a remarkable talk.75

The historian Bradley G. Shreve gives a more explicit gloss of Blatchford’s subject, observing that the young man “maintain[ed] that Native people needed to protect the many good qualities of Indian culture from an overly aggressive Anglo-American culture.”76 Gilpin’s admiration of Blatchford’s talk is marred by her use of the word boy to describe him—a condescending tone in relation to the married father of two that is only partly mitigated by the realization that the photographer herself was sixty-five at the time. To their credit, however, the two developed a relationship of mutual respect over the ensuing decade. After graduating from the university, Blatchford worked as a public school counselor before becoming director of the Gallup Indian Community Center in 1963, where he focused on programs that supported cultural preservation.

Diné healing ceremonies have both religious and medical components (Navajo practice would not, in fact, make a distinction between the two). In his 1965 corrections to her text, Blatchford altered Gilpin’s language, which initially borrowed heavily from Christian ideology and European notions of mythology. “Benediction” became “act of balance,” “evil influences” became “disharmony,” “magical” became “harmonious,” and “myth” became “story.” The effect of these changes is primarily to reflect Navajo ideology more accurately: to underscore the notion of hózhó (often interpreted, imperfectly, as “harmony” or “beauty”) rather than an oppositional construction of good and evil, and to eliminate the implication that Navajo stories are fiction (“myth”), rather than oral history. Elsewhere, Blatchford criticized the tendency of outsiders to describe Navajo stories as “myths and legends.”77 In keeping with this assertion of Diné worldview, Blatchford also added “spiritual, emotional” to Gilpin’s “psychological and physical needs” of an ill person. One final change subtly altered the meaning of Gilpin’s text in a way that also reflected a difference between Euro-American and Navajo values: “control” becomes “adapt to.”78 Blatchford decolonized Gilpin’s description of Navajo medicine, and she adopted his changes throughout her text, not just in the sections he reviewed directly—as, for example, in her alteration of the description of the opening narrative of The Enduring Navaho, which tells the story of Changing Woman, from “creation myth” to “creation story.”79 The final version of The Enduring Navaho consistently reflects the Diné belief that both spiritual and physical health depend upon one’s active, participatory presence within the metaphorical hogan created by the land of Dinétah.

From the outset of Gilpin’s book, the map and the aerial photographs of the four sacred mountains declare all of Dinétah as Navajo space; as she observes, for the Diné “there is no individual ownership of land,” and the official federal boundaries set around the Navajo reservation are entirely distinct from traditional conceptions of Diné homeland.80 The logic of this is underscored by Gilpin’s formal presentation of the mountains as supports for the metaphorical hogan of the nation: she would no more excise the edges of Dinétah than, in her occasional role as an architectural photographer, she would arbitrarily avoid particular corners of a building she had been commissioned to document. Ultimately, as the authors of the Phelps-Stokes Fund study recognized in 1939, “For the Navajo Indians, health, hogan, and heritage are inextricably bound together.”81 Nowhere are these connections more evident than in the practice of traditional medicine—which also happens to be one of the moments in Navajo visual culture in which maps play a central role.

In a Diné healing ceremony, the goal is to restore hózhó to the patient. Healing begins with diagnosis and selection of an appropriate ceremony. The ceremony itself is conducted in a hogan, the floor of which is prepared with a sacred schematic drawing made of colored powders, popularly known as a sand (or dry) painting. The patient sits in the middle of the drawing while the singer (hataałii) conducts the ceremony. Sacred schematic drawings describe the world, always oriented in relation to the cardinal directions. They often include physical features of the world as well as holy people and other characters. According to Berlo:

Those who make sandpaintings for ritual purposes seek to create ideal cosmograms of relationships among the Diyin Dine’é (the Holy People or Supernaturals), Dinétah (the Navajo land), and the Dine’é (the Navajo or “Earth Surface People”). Navajo sandpainting—like related imagery in other media such as weaving or drawing—seeks to be merely a reminder of a multidimensional universe in which there is no viewer per se, only participants.82

When the patient sits within the world of the drawing—entered from the east, as one enters a traditional hogan, and as Gilpin’s aerial photographs invite us to enter her book—they sit within the balance and harmony of Dinétah. The specific elements of the drawing, and of the ritual and medicines provided, address imbalance within the patient, drawing them back to hózhó. Gilpin—thanks to Forster—had experienced this return to balance directly, both as a spectator at various ceremonies and as an onlooker as the nurse herself participated in the act of healing—“one of our own medicine men,” as Kellywood had translated for her in 1932.83

Between 1921 and 1937, the Navajo hataałii Hastiin Klah worked closely with Mary Wheelwright in Santa Fe to record and preserve Navajo history, including documenting ceremonies both verbally and visually. Both Wheelwright and Klah were part of Gilpin’s queer network; she photographed Wheelwright in 1954. Klah created four sacred schematic drawings for Franc Newcomb that Wheelwright reproduced in her 1942 book, Navajo Creation Myth. Used for the Hozhonji (Blessing Chant), they narrate the Creation Story, and their iconography represents salient aspects of the world—understood simultaneously in conceptual, spiritual, and geographic terms. Along with Klah’s designs, Wheelwright included those of two other hataałii, Bitahni-bedugai, from Tohatchi, and Hasteen Yazzi. In the first drawing in Bitahni-bedugai’s series, a blue diamond represents the Fourth World (the one in which we live). The Fourth World is surrounded by the four sacred mountains—Dibéntsaa is black, Sisnaajiní is blue and white, Tsoodził is solid blue, and Doko’oosłííd is multicolored. White and turquoise rectangles at top and bottom (east and west) are the homes of Asdzáá Nádleehé and White Shell Woman, and a circle at the center of the world is the place of Emergence, surrounded by representations of the three worlds through which the Navajo traveled, along with the fourth world into which they finally emerged. From a yellow oval representing the third world, a path leads into the fourth, within which are Coyote, Badger, the Moon, and the Sun.84

In the next drawing, the four mountains appear once again, surrounding two circles marked with crosses, where the patient and the hataałii sit facing one another, continuing the ceremony. Like the land of Dinétah itself, the sand paintings serve their purpose only when they are inhabited and sung over. As the ethnologist Barre Toelken has observed of Navajo healing ceremonies: “Virtually all actions, words, tunes, movements, colors, and places are phrased in such a way as actually to articulate and dramatize the desired condition of balance for the patient in the setting of the natural world and universe.”85 Healing ceremonies and the schematic drawings associated with them are, in a very real sense, performative: a viewer is always a participant, always affected by and affecting the balance of the world.86 Likewise, when Gilpin orchestrates her reader’s entry into Dinétah as an envelopment within the hogan supported by the four sacred mountains, she invites them to understand the Navajo Nation in terms of the natural world that defines it—and to understand themselves as a part of the ecosystem that will either maintain or unsettle hózhó.

Near the end of The Enduring Navaho, three photographs appear: a hand in the process of creating a sacred schematic drawing; a completed drawing seen in isolation; and a drawing inside a hogan, in use as part of a healing ceremony (Figure 3.13).87 Gilpin carefully choreographed this moment, ordering her text so that the landscape of Dinétah comes first and the discussion of ceremony and healing comes last. The photographs of sand drawings are part of a sequence themselves—one that Gilpin was careful to protect during the editorial process. “As to the shifting of pictures, some of your suggestions are good,” she wrote to Spielman, but “some do not follow prescribed Navaho order.” The drawings in the photographs that Spielman had moved, Gilpin explained, were part of the Night Chant, and as such had to appear in the appropriate sequence in relation to her photographs of other parts of the same ceremony. “A Navaho would laugh at us,” she observed, “if we had the order wrong.” Rather than reorder the Night Chant, she suggested, they could insert a photograph of a different composition in addition. “I have a color transparency of a whole sand painting design. It is not . . . the real thing in sand, but a copy of the design belonging to the Museum of Navaho Ceremonial Art here in Santa Fe”—the museum founded by Wheelwright, and therefore likely a design documented by Hastiin Klah. Gilpin warned Spielman that the photograph might be refused by Wardlaw, the press’s director: “He had me take out a copy I had made of a painting of Harrison Begay’s,” she explained.88 But apparently Wardlaw felt that the schematic drawing fell into a different category than Begay’s painting—perhaps informed by Euramerican aesthetic categories that elevated painting, but not ephemeral sacred drawings, to the status of art—and was not, therefore, subject to the same copyright restrictions.

By the conclusion of The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin’s reader is to understand that the ceremonial drawings, too, are representations of the land that resist colonial mapping. Although they are diagrammatic, they are maps within which the patient acts, the meanings of which are determined by their existence in the time of the patient and in the space of the hogan. Representations of the world, sacred schematic drawings are always created inside hogans, which themselves model the world. The songs of the ceremony likewise model the world, their fourfold repetition of healing words echoing the four cardinal directions—and in some ceremonies, such as the Blessingway, invoking the four sacred mountains by name.89 In the drawing, in the hogan, in the world, in the songs, a patient is fourfold embedded in Dinétah, the fourth world. Although she had originally anticipated ending her book with a section on “how the Navajo were adapting to current American life,” in 1959 Gilpin wrote to friends with the admission that she had “suddenly clicked” and “moved the ‘Tradition’ section to the last, following the contemporary . . . . Tradition is still going on and is the essence of the Navaho, and ofcourse [sic] with this section last, it completes the circle” that began with the four sacred mountains and her narrative layering of past, present, and future.90 In Gilpin’s construct, her Anglo readers of The Enduring Navaho travel ceremonially through and within Dinétah: from the map that prefaces the text to the land in her aerial photographs, through the four sections of her book, which intentionally echo the fourfold structure of Diné epistemology, to the sand painting—where they become patients, perhaps starting on the long journey toward healing themselves of the colonialist impulses that had long disrupted the hózhó of Dinétah. In reality, of course, the road leading to balance is longer—and bumpier.

Drawing and Driving: Steven J. Yazzie

The minute-long opening sequence of Draw Me a Picture (2007), part of an ongoing project titled Drawing and Driving by the artist Steven J. Yazzie (Diné / Laguna Pueblo / Anglo, born 1970), crosscuts serene, mostly still views of the buttes of Monument Valley with loud, blurry video of the ground rushing past the camera. There is no transition between the two: the serenity of the former is uncompromisingly interrupted by short bursts of barely comprehensible sonic and visual texture. The effect is violently antiromantic, disrupting the complacency with which we view the landscape—and it is one of these intercut motion blurs that crossfades into the first shot of Yazzie and his drawing vehicle (Plates 6 and 7).91 Throughout Draw Me a Picture, Yazzie’s body is seen either from a distance, as a tiny figure seated on the unpowered, gravity-driven vehicle somewhere between a tricycle and a buggy on which he mounted a drawing board, as it rolls at a slightly alarming speed across the valley floor—or as an arm reaching into the frame, drawing a landscape whose representational accuracy seems to have an inverse relationship with its phenomenological indexicality. “The act of drawing and driving ultimately became a true point of contact between the natural world and the man-made one,” Yazzie explains on his website. “The drawings could in a sense be created by both myself and the moving ground below me.”92

More recently, he has described the “shift” that occurred when “the car hitting the land was informing the gesture. Moving through the land is just as much a part of it as me putting the pencil down or me even bringing the vehicle to the space.” As if in confirmation of this joint attribution, the motion-blur crosscuts of the road reappear at the end of the video, rapidly interspersed with shots of the drawing board and Yazzie’s pencil in action. The experience, as captured by a variety of cameras mounted on the artist’s body and vehicle, is mesmerizing; the finished drawings reveal the erratic road surfaces and Yazzie’s constantly shifting viewpoint in their spare, frenetic lines. For the artist, this collaborative experiment with the landscape was epitomized by an accident: “There was one drawing I did that fell off while I was driving and went underneath the tire; when I came back to pick it up it had the drawing and then a tire mark. That was a moment when I really thought about how truly connected I was to that place, to the vehicle and the land.”93

Drawing and Driving began as a side project while Yazzie was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. “I was trying to figure things out with painting,” he explains, and the idea to build a soapbox car was simply a practical—if also whimsical—response to the distance between his studio and the rest of the campus. “I had driven up from Phoenix,” he recalls, “and I was in this space of car culture. Phoenix, everywhere you go, it’s in a vehicle. The way things are spaced out, how roads are designed without sidewalks, you’re stuck in this car and it’s an identity that you’re living with.” Yazzie’s awareness of these issues on a practical level is informed by his wife’s work as a transportation planner, as well as his interest in the history of western settlement: “The way space is managed in the West is very different—the Jeffersonian grid, the roads.” When he took the idea of Drawing and Driving back to the Navajo Nation, Yazzie sought permission from the Nation to work in Monument Valley: “The way I saw it was, I was getting approval from my people, I was in line and in spirit with my community.”94

The landscape views in Draw Me a Picture are reminiscent of the color photograph of the same place that Gilpin inserted between her aerial photographs of Doko’oosłííd and Dibéntsaa (Plate 8). Like Gilpin’s photograph, Yazzie’s stills feel like postcards, the rich red of the buttes rising up from dusty earth to be silhouetted against the bright blue sky. The touristic nature of such images is intimately linked with the history of road touring: as Yazzie observes, “The road through Monument Valley is designed to be experienced through a vehicle.”95 For some viewers of both, the landscape surely evokes western cinema classics such as John Ford’s 1956 Technicolor and VistaVision epic, The Searchers—with its cartoonish cowboys-and-Indians plot. But just as Gilpin refuses antecedent anthropological models of narrating Navajo culture, so too Yazzie flips the script, so to speak, on Ford: as the Heard Museum curator Joe Baker suggested when he exhibited Yazzie’s video, the urgency and alertness of Yazzie’s drawing/performance challenge stereotypes of Indian identity as well as perceptions of the landscape itself. Baker and Yazzie juxtaposed Draw Me a Picture with the 1925 silent film The Vanishing American—whose Navajo protagonist is portrayed in advertising posters wearing Plains regalia, foreshadowing the Comanche tipis that find themselves on the floor of Monument Valley in The Searchers.96 Against these blatantly uninformed panderings to non-Native audience expectations, Draw Me a Picture is a playful, humorous reimagining of the perils of the Southwest—against which Yazzie equips himself with a motorcycle helmet and visibility flag.

In the second minute of Draw Me a Picture, we transition through a gentle fade from an extended shot of motion blur to a view of Yazzie and his vehicle from behind. His pace seems relatively gentle, and the next shot, a view from his perspective of the passing landscape, also appears to have a relatively gentle pace. As we crossfade to the rear view of the vehicle, however, we see the ground roughen and Yazzie’s body leaning hard to the right as he approaches a curve. Quickly, the shot changes again, this time to the drawing board. Watching Yazzie draw his first few lines, we immediately understand that the jostle of the camera only hints at the turbulence of his ride: the pencil jumps almost uncontrollably on and off the paper’s surface. A brief, still view of a butte fleetingly interrupts our view of the drafting process before the camera changes again, this time to a view of Yazzie rolling toward us. The flag at the back of his vehicle waves playfully as his speed picks up; cutting back to the drawing board, the footage of his drawing repeats—for the second time, we see his pencil leap across the paper and off it as the vehicle hits a particularly sharp bump. It is a subtle piece of editing, and one that first-time viewers might miss, but it recalls Gilpin’s fluid representation of time as she described her flights across Dinétah. Like the geological striations revealed by the differential erosion of the landscape, and the layers of time in the opening narrative and aerial photographs of The Enduring Navaho, Draw Me a Picture represents experiential time as nonlinear and shaped by the landscape.

If we consider contemporaneous referents rather than historical ones, then Draw Me a Picture may well bring to mind—albeit in parodic or resistant fashion—the mapping cars used for Google Street View, which launched in 2007, the same year Yazzie exhibited at the Heard. The concept of documenting the landscape from a moving vehicle is the same, but the dense city streets newly visible on Google Maps in 2007 seem to have almost nothing in common with the spare vistas of Monument Valley, and the measured iteration that moves one through space in the software has little affinity with the chaotic rush of Yazzie’s progress in Draw Me a Picture.97 Where Yazzie’s finished drawings are spare, monochromatic compositions whose charged variations in intensity are direct records of the contribution made by the “moving ground,” the digital homogenization of the built environment in Street View has the smooth artificiality of a video game. Perhaps most important, Street View has the implicit aim of omniscience, whereas Draw Me a Picture defiantly and joyously celebrates the uniqueness of every interaction between us and the landscape we traverse. Yazzie’s performative act of drawing offers a sustained critique of this twenty-first century mapping technology, offering us instead the richness of immersive, experiential knowledge.

Maps are created through the exploratory experience of landscape, whether the military expeditions that generated the first U.S. maps of Dinétah, the systematic Jeffersonian surveys that created the Checkerboard area, or Google’s mapping of Monument Valley. They are driven by the desire for natural resources: people have historically mapped land because they want to exploit it. In the case of Dinétah, outsiders have often missed the value of the land; it remains blank for them even as they move through it. Yazzie cites an example of this phenomenon as formative:

I lived in Page, Arizona, for a long time, which is near Lake Powell—and Lake Powell was named after John Wesley Powell, who led the first White expedition down the Colorado River. I’ve always been a fan of that trip of his, and curious about the lake region, how it’s dammed and the hydroelectric power output, but the irony is that it’s named after this guy whose takeaway was that you can’t exploit this region, it’s not sustainable.98

Yazzie’s memory recalls Gilpin’s story of the petroglyph of Asdzáá Nádleehé being submerged by the Navajo Dam; like hers, his story points up the paradoxes of colonial erasure and exploitation of the land. Powell’s perception of Dinétah as lacking in natural resources echoes the 1849 military survey that knew “nothing” about Navajo land—and yet, in keeping with the generative power retained by Changing Woman in Gilpin’s imaginary, Yazzie notes that the river Powell followed is an important resource, and his own work, including Drawing and Driving, is also a product of this landscape.

At the narrative center of Draw Me a Picture is the drawing of the landscape itself, but like the blankness of the Cambridge globe—and its queer echoes in the erasure of sand drawings and the misleadingly barren landscapes of Gilpin’s aerial photographs—that landscape is rendered only imperfectly by the medium in which the artist chose to document it. The camera is bouncing so much, moreover, that our glimpses of the drawing are blurred or pixelated even when the paper is not obscured by Yazzie’s hand and arm. When we encounter the drawings themselves, in the gallery, we are struck by their indecipherability: the direct result of the collaborative irregularities of the road over which Yazzie drove while he drew. His lines have a seismographic quality, and although mesas, buttes, trees, and roads are all legible, they have a staticky, staccato quality that indexes the conditions under which they were produced (Figure 3.14). There is an obvious reference here to the theoretical and historical frame of action painting; to borrow the words of Harold Rosenberg, Yazzie’s drawings are “not a picture but an event.”99 But where Rosenberg concluded that the logical outcomes of action painting were biography and psychology—a turn toward individual interiority, in other words—Yazzie’s collaborative action, drawing with the landscape, points us outward. We must ask not only how Yazzie found himself in the position to create these drawings but also how the land, and specifically the “moving ground” of the road beneath his wheels, became what it is.

Land Claims

Navajo history clearly documents the extension of the Diné homeland to the four sacred mountains, and throughout the 1950s archaeologists and others, including Gilpin, sought to confirm the historical presence of the Navajo throughout the region in support of Diné land claims. Gilpin photographed some of these efforts and shared them as part of the lantern slide shows about the Diné that she presented around the United States. She used these presentations as rehearsals for the story she would eventually tell in book form in The Enduring Navaho—a title that echoes the final sentence of the script she had created for an earlier lantern slide set, “Pictorial Lantern Slides of the Southwest”: “Above all he has endured.”100 But whereas in the earlier series the concept of endurance invoked an unchanging ethnographic present, in the slide show that became The Enduring Navaho it encompassed a living story of adaptation as a strategy of resistance to colonization. As we have seen, her lantern slide performances opened with a map of the Navajo Nation in which Gilpin was making a visual argument for Navajo precedence and sovereignty over their land: for instance, she used color to foreground the geographic area of Dinétah over the colonially imposed state borders. On the right-hand side of Dinétah is the Checkerboard, its chaotic structure likewise emphasized by the photographer’s use of color. What did Gilpin tell her audiences about the history of Dinétah, and how did she explain the Checkerboard area?

No record exists of her earliest scripts, but in 1957 Gilpin wrote excitedly to her friend, the photography critic and historian Nancy Newhall, describing a significant revision: “[I h]ave an entirely new opening . . . with a brief telling of the Creation and my air shots of the Sacred Mountains. This gives a completely new approach for it gives the cultural background first and puts it all on another plane.”101 Introducing her narrative with the Creation Story, Gilpin establishes Navajo cultural claim to the land of Dinétah—including the Checkerboard. Immediately after asserting this historical territorial claim in Diné epistemological terms, she reinforces the ongoing validity of Navajo land rights with a discussion of their legal claims under the auspices of the Indian Land Claims Commission. For the Navajo Tribal Council, the Claims Commission was an opportunity to reclaim land that had been annexed by the United States both in the 1868 treaty signed at Hwéeldi and during the process of allotment that created the Checkerboard area. However, the commission’s provisions were intentionally limited and limiting: the U.S. government’s goal was not restorative or reparative justice but the elimination of future threats to its colonial sovereignty over Indigenous land.102

In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin introduces her discussion of the Claims Commission by underscoring the challenges faced by Navajo leaders, who had to navigate federal systems and institutions in order to defend and exercise their sovereignty. The commission, she observes, was yet another new international law imposed on the Navajo Nation by the U.S. government. Gilpin points out to her audience that it was not the first time that the United States had used new laws to bully their way into ownership of Diné land: “At the time of the Homestead Act in 1916 the Navaho People could have filed” for their right to land in the Checkerboard area, “but who was there to explain to the People who had lived on this land for generations that they must establish legal claim?”103 Her outrage is palpable and calls attention to the arbitrary imposition of American—foreign—law on the Diné without their knowledge or involvement.

Gilpin’s discussion of the Claims Commission appears in part 3 of The Enduring Navaho, “The Coming Way.” It is a section that deals explicitly with the effects of colonization on the Navajo Nation, particularly in terms of institution building, and throughout the section Gilpin underscores the federal government’s use of policy to intimidate Native nations into ceding their sovereignty. Gilpin notes that Diné leaders had learned from earlier experience how vital it was to collaborate with Anglo experts in order to negotiate federal systems successfully. In this instance, the tribal government began by hiring legal counsel. “Following the creation of the Indian Land Claims Commission by the Congress of the United States in 1946,” she wrote, “the Tribal Council, under the chairmanship of Sam Ahkeah, passed a resolution to employ an attorney to function both as claims attorney and as general counsel.”104 In one straightforward sentence, Gilpin reminds her readers of the sovereign status of the Navajo Nation in relation to the United States and informs us that engagement with the U.S. legal system requires trained lawyers—which, in 1946, meant non-Navajo lawyers. Even today, the need for Navajo lawyers is greater than the available supply: as Attorney General Ethel Branch noted in a 2018 interview, “The way to ensure that there are more attorneys on the Nation . . . is to have more law-trained Navajos.”105 Branch’s work is still dominated by international disputes: she estimates that “half her work is suing the U.S. government to enforce treaties and agreements, and to otherwise protect and defend the rights of the Nation.”106 In 1947, the Tribal Council approved a ten-year contract with Norman M. Littell, the fiery and controversial former assistant attorney general of the United States. Littell served as general counsel for the Nation for almost two decades, overseeing “vital and volatile developments in Navajoland.”107 Littell’s staunch advocacy of tribal rights was, in the eyes of the Navajo Council as well as Gilpin, an example of productive collaboration between Diné and bilagáana people.

A color slide of the Navajo land claims board—which Gilpin chose not to publish in The Enduring Navaho—reveals that not only Littell but other bilagáana men were on the board, easily outnumbering its Diné members (Plate 9).108 In the photograph, Littell holds a section of tree trunk while the archaeologist Richard Van Valkenburgh appears to explain something about it—perhaps a dendrochronological point about dating construction materials at archaeological sites. Behind them and laid out on the table in front of them are surveying maps, and above their heads on the far wall is a Navajo weaving. Perhaps the weaving explains her distance from her subjects: the photograph is oddly composed, giving as much or more weight to the generic office furniture in the foreground as to the men gathered at the far end of the room. By including the textile in her frame, Gilpin implicitly juxtaposes the experiential knowledge it represents with the abstracted logic of the cartography strewn across the tables. At this meeting, in August 1953, Van Valkenburgh explained potential archaeological evidence for Navajo presence in the Checkerboard area that would support land claims. Gilpin’s photograph underscores the extensive role played by non-Navajo experts as consultants for the Navajo government—a category into which Gilpin herself fit, as acknowledged by Ahkeah, who wrote to Gilpin “to express, on behalf of the Navajo people, our gratitude for your generous and kind cooperation with our efforts in the land case.”109 Gilpin and Ahkeah enjoyed a close working relationship throughout his term, exemplifying the kind of service that Gilpin believed Anglos could offer Navajo leaders—and it was in their correspondence that she made her powerful declaration that “good pictures are a strong weapon” for protecting Navajo sovereignty.110 She extended this optimism to the audiences of her slide shows, implicitly suggesting that they—through the exercise of their political will, or the simple donation of money to Navajo organizations—could become allies in the pursuit of Diné sovereignty.

With the permission of the land claims board, Van Valkenburgh convened a meeting in Counselor, New Mexico—in the eastern Checkerboard area just west of the Jicarilla Apache Nation’s reservation land—to ask the Navajo people living there if they would help him gather the evidence the Tribal Council needed. Gilpin was allowed to photograph that meeting, and she focused on the attendees, training her camera on Diné engagement with the land claim more often than on the archaeologist as he made his case. She attended both to the variety of people present—men, women, young, old—and to their diverse reactions to the information they were receiving—engaged, listless, enthusiastic, and skeptical by turn (Plate 10). Surveying all these responses, Gilpin’s photographs invite us to consider the breadth of participation in and opinions on issues that concerned the community. In 1970, seventeen years after the meeting at Counselor and two years after The Enduring Navaho was published, and thanks in part to Gilpin’s photographs, the Navajo Tribe was awarded compensation for twenty-eight million acres of stolen land.111

Gilpin chose to reproduce one of her color slides of the meeting at Counselor in black and white in The Enduring Navaho (Figure 2.13). It is a double-page spread with the simple caption, “The meeting at Counselor, New Mexico.” In the accompanying text, Gilpin tells a story that is likely close to the version she shared with her slide show audiences. “During the period of work on the land claims,” she wrote, “I joined Van Valkenburgh at a meeting held in the eastern part of the Checkerboard Area, where he was seeking help from older Navaho men in his effort to locate Old Navaholand hogan sites where the Navaho lived nearly four centuries ago.”112 Several aspects of this introduction stand out: Gilpin’s emphasis on the longevity of Navajo habitation, and her assertion of the value of archaeology to the process of establishing Diné land rights and sovereignty. Both are important because they contribute to the assertion of Navajo presence throughout Dinétah—as described in oral history—from time immemorial. “Time immemorial” is a term of art with roots in English and other European nations’ law. As such, it has a variety of specific definitions that always depend upon a span of time, whether specific (since 1189 in Great Britain, for example) or relative (the state of Louisiana defines immemorial possession as “that of which no man living has seen the beginning, and the existence of which he has learned from his elders”).113 Similarly, Paula Gunn Allen wrote of “time immemorial” that it was how “the old folks refer to pre-contact times.”114 Van Valkenburgh trusted Diné oral history to lead him to material archaeological evidence that Navajo people had lived in Dinétah since time immemorial. The land claims process required not only collaboration between Anglo and Diné people but also an alliance of Diné and Anglo ways of knowing.

Gilpin’s assertion that the archaeologist was seeking help from “older Navaho men” raises obvious questions about gender—as did the homogeneity of the land claims board. Was she echoing an unthinking sexism in Van Valkenburgh’s own request for assistance, which included manual labor along with site identification? Were both archaeologist and photographer aware that men were more likely than women to have flexible schedules that would allow for their participation in a project that would require significant travel? As was so often the case, Gilpin’s photograph—visually dominated by women—gave the lie to her masculine-gendered language. Women as well as men attended the meeting, evaluated the archaeologist’s request, and offered their knowledge of where communities had historically been located. On the other hand, Gilpin’s later photographs in the field portray only men helping the archaeologist with the manual labor of excavation. As a result of that work, “old sites were found . . . and from the logs valuable tree ring data were obtained. . . . Much archaeological evidence was gained that summer to establish proof of Navaho habitation in areas no longer within the present reservation boundary.” In The Enduring Navaho, the fate of the project is still unknown; as Gilpin tells her readers, “The land claims work is finished now and awaits the decision of the United States Supreme Court.”115 Her photograph echoes the indexicality of the archaeological evidence; readers are left to judge for themselves the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s authority regarding questions of Diné land sovereignty.

Roads

Like every story of federal responsibility on the Navajo Nation, the story of roads is one of neglect and mismanagement.116 On the 1924 road trip that took them from Colorado Springs south across the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation, Gilpin, Forster, and Putnam discovered that roads were often semi-imaginary lines through the landscape. In some sense this is always true: roads must accommodate the limits of the terrain they cross, even as they offer unprecedented access to its reaches. On a practical level, this meant frequent discomfort and occasional inconvenience for the three women; although Putnam occasionally exclaimed about the smoothness and speed of the road, she was far more likely to document its inaccessibility—and examples of the latter increased as they moved onto reservation land. Near the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation, the weather conspired to exacerbate the difficulty of driving along a road that was already poorly maintained. Putnam called attention to the precarious names that heralded danger: “As we began the perilous ‘Knife-Edge Drive’ and the ‘Switchback Curves,’” she recorded, “we struck bad mud-holes, and the car needed a pretty steady hand at the wheel to keep from skidding in all directions. Once down off the Mesa, we found the shortest road to Cortez closed, so had to make a wide detour.”117

We can hear a bit of anti-tourist—or perhaps even anticolonial—schadenfreude in Putnam’s version of events: “The people of Cortez, who had assured us we’d find plenty of water en route, must have laughed in their sleeves. Water there was—or rather, liquid mud. Utterly unfit for use. And the road, which had been churned into deep ruts and holes during the rain, had hardened into unspeakable shapes with the sun on it, and grew worse and worse as we progressed. . . . A viler road was never seen.”118 The Dodge—which became a prominent character in its own right in Putnam’s history—managed to limp into Ship Rock, where it took refuge in a garage, eager for “a new spring, new helpings of grease, etc.” “She needed all her courage,” Putnam empathized, to “brave the road once more,” because, as the women had come to expect on reservation land, the road was still “vile.” They persisted, however, and arrived in Gallup, New Mexico, on Saturday evening, September 13. Taken as a whole, Putnam’s narrative reminds us that the early twentieth-century American frenzy of road-paving (and resultant road-tripping) often left out or circumnavigated Native land—as, for instance, Route 66 did around the Navajo Nation, running instead through the border town of Gallup.

In 1969, Navajo tribal councilman John Brown Jr. published an open letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Navajo Times, in which he pointed out that “although the Navajo people have been paying state gasoline taxes since 1936, not one foot of road has been built in the Navajo Nation by the state. . . . We want our children to go to school, but our roads are unsafe, and school buses cannot use them. . . . We believe that the revenue from gasoline taxes in the Navajo Nation, if turned over to the Navajo Tribe, could be properly utilized in building tribal roads where we Navajos need them the most.”119 His suggestion was not taken up, of course, and between 1969 and today roads on the Navajo Nation have barely improved. In 2019, 9,000 of the 11,600 miles of roads in the Navajo Nation were still dirt, and Navajo Nation Council member Amber Kanazbah Crotty “called the lack of infrastructure an abuse of human rights and a violation of the federal government’s treaty obligations.”120 Recent media coverage has emphasized the connection between roads and school attendance, in part because access to education was explicitly agreed to in the 1868 treaty that is the U.S. legal basis for Navajo sovereignty. But it is also a practical issue: the roads that Gilpin, Forster, and Putnam found impassable a century ago are still, in bad weather, impassable today, and the average Navajo student misses twelve days of school per year as a result.121 Once again, the empty space of the map is politically loaded. As former New Mexico state representative Sharon Clahchischilliage observed in 2018, the blankness of the road-building and -paving map on the Navajo Nation represents “institutional racism, loud and clear.”122

Gilpin made it a point throughout The Enduring Navaho to highlight positive collaborations between Diné and bilagáana people, but she always concluded by emphasizing Navajo governance and celebrating Navajo leadership. Her book consistently advocates for Navajo economic and political sovereignty, arguing through both word and image for Diné control of resources—although her language remains problematic, invoking essentializing ideas about Navajo people that obscure her progressive intent for contemporary readers. “As many of the new projects on the reservation have developed,” she notes alongside a photograph of a Diné man operating road-building equipment, “more opportunities for Navaho People have arisen at home, such as work in road building. . . . Mechanical ability seems to be natural to all young Navaho boys, and they find work in garages along the border towns of the reservation. It is interesting to see the skill with which these young men handle big machinery, so far removed from the old life of a generation ago.”123 Forty-odd years after Putnam documented the “vile” roads of the reservation, road construction was still a growth industry in Diné Bikeyah, and the demand for auto mechanics was still limited to the borders of the Navajo Nation. A 1951 study of Navajo families by John M. Roberts, a Harvard anthropologist, noted that “no automobiles were owned or driven by household members, all of whom, however, had ridden in vehicles belonging to friends, relatives, or the missionary. The households were often visited by persons driving automobiles—friends, relatives, White ranchers and traders, the missionary, and occasionally people associated with the Indian Service.”124 In keeping with these observations, Gilpin and Forster both had many experiences of offering rides to their Navajo neighbors—often to and from border towns.

Before the advent of Route 66 (in 1926), Gallup was connected to other cities along the route of the Santa Fe Railroad by a car track that, as it was graded and paved, became known as the Old Trails Highway. In 1921, the Automobile Club of Southern California published maps and logs for the Old Trails Highway that encouraged tourists to drive through Gallup—and the city, in turn, encouraged them to stay a while.125 Their primary marketing gambit was Native American culture and art—and indeed, when they arrived in Gallup, Gilpin, Putnam, and Forster stayed at the brand new El Navajo Hotel—a Harvey House.126 Putnam took a moment in her history to admire the “beautiful interior, designed by a Miss Colter, full of Navajo designs, and planned with much discrimination.”127 The El Navajo’s opening ceremonies in May 1923 included many of the show events that had featured at the first Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial, held the previous September—indeed, Gilpin and her companions had hastened to Gallup in order to catch the last day of the 1924 Inter-Tribal themselves. Although there had been widespread skepticism when Hubert Phenecie, secretary of Gallup’s chamber of commerce, first proposed an “all-Indian show,” it proved wildly popular among tourists and locals alike.128 Thanks to the Inter-Tribal, “Gallup was the outstanding tourist event in New Mexico.”129

If Gilpin took photographs on that 1924 visit to Gallup, none survive. But her photographs of later Inter-Tribal Ceremonials make it clear that many Native people were among the tourists who flocked to the city for its events. On their way into Gallup in 1924, Putnam took note of the “many Navajos” “streaming out of town from the 3-day dance-fiesta, in broken-down wagons, on horse-back, and afoot.”130 Noting as well their “colorful” clothing and “beautiful” jewelry, she makes it clear that for Anglo visitors, the Native members of the Inter-Tribal’s audience were as much a part of the spectacle as the show itself. As the three women left Gallup, driving south to Zuni, they were caught up in a similar flow of Native people leaving the city. “Most of them traveled in small prairie-schooners:—ramshackle affairs, with elliptical wheels and a perfect chorus of squeaks and creaks from the broken-down springs and wobbly axles.”131 The Dodge had also required attention to its brakes, springs, and axles itself over the past two weeks, so even though it had the advantage of a motor over the wagons driven by Native people, Putnam’s condescending tone seems a bit misplaced. Despite its fragility, however, the Dodge—already quite full, with the women, their luggage, and their large dog, Ruby—was soon additionally occupied by two Zuni men who unexpectedly appropriated what they perceived to be the vehicle’s remaining available passenger space. Crammed in, Laura could hardly have taken photographs, even with the small Kodak VPK (“Vest Pocket Kodak,” produced from 1912 through the 1930s), nicknamed the “Vippick,” that she carried with her as a more portable alternative to her tripod-mounted large-format camera. But Gilpin was also restrained by her sense of professional propriety: “We dared not even ‘Vippick,’” Putnam admitted, “before we got their Governor’s permission.”132

Perhaps surprisingly for a tale of three women driving through remote landscapes in an unreliable vehicle, this is the first expression of fear in Putnam’s narrative. Another follows shortly thereafter, directed at the Zuni men who uncompromisingly joined their party, despite Gilpin’s half-hearted expressions of concern for the well-being of the car under so much additional weight. “They were big men, with coarse, hard faces, and we were too much afraid of their getting cross if we attempted to turn them out, to do anything but go on.”133 As it is throughout her narrative, Putnam’s class prejudice is evident in this description along with her racism, and perhaps because as contemporary readers we hear those things clearly and with distaste, we are not surprised when all ends perfectly well. But it also reminds us of all the times that Gilpin, Forster, and Putnam avoided the company of strangers, at campgrounds and farmsteads throughout their journey; perhaps the Zuni men chose Gilpin’s car, full of women, because like queer women they were threatened by White men much of the time. It perhaps also configures the city as a space of heightened danger for these queer women, as well as for Indigenous people who were welcome only as spectacle for a few days and then expected to leave.

As it transpired, it was the first of many rides that Gilpin and Forster would give Native people across the Southwest—although their connection with Navajo people began with a breakdown. An oft-told story of the couple’s first drive out to Red Rock from Colorado Springs puts their broken-down car—a Buick, this time—at the center of the action. Twenty miles north of Chinle, they ran out of gas. They slept on the problem, and in the morning, Gilpin left Forster with the car as she walked for two and a half hours, somewhat lost. Finally arriving at Frazier’s trading post, Gilpin bought gasoline and accepted a ride back to her car. “Never will I forget,” she wrote to Forster later, “topping a gentle rise in the undulating desert and seeing the lonely car completely surrounded by Navaho Indians, like a swarm of bees around a honeysuckle. When we arrived, there you were in the midst of the gathering, happily playing cards with your visitors!”134 In later letters, Forster’s “Chevvy” was a feature of many stories: taking her friend, Mary Ann Nakai, to see the textile collection at the Laboratory of Anthropology; chauffeuring assortments of people across the country to ceremonials; and getting stuck in snow, mud, and sand (depending on the season) as she tried to reach patients or get them to hospitals. In other stories, Forster borrowed cars, or failed to: taking Navajo students to a basketball tournament, or being forced to deliver Lilly Benally’s tricky pregnancy at home when no vehicle was forthcoming. On June 8, 1932, Forster noted that she had driven over a thousand miles since arriving in Red Rock. “I have estimated that my mileage is averaging over a hundred miles a day,” she recorded.135

Forster’s delivery of Benally’s baby led to the creation of one of Gilpin’s most famous—and also most controversial—photographs. But it also underscored the problems of alcoholism and inaccessibility in the Navajo Nation. In Forster’s experience at Red Rock, the Navajo were victims of Anglo alcoholism rather than subject to the disease themselves. In letters home to Gilpin, and to friends and family, Forster repeatedly described her disgust with the Presbyterian missionary, Angelo James Luck, who was ostensibly her liaison and primary support at Red Rock. In a letter to her sister Emily, she wrote of him, “The Missionary is a reformed drunkard, a reformed auto mechanic and a reformed Roman Catholic, having become a Presbyterian. He is a highly nervous, irascible individual, constantly planning big things and never accomplishing adequately the small ones which present themselves.”136 Although she eventually redacted this passage while planning for the publication of her letters as a memoir, the nurse’s anger and frustration come through clearly in the manuscript. For Gilpin and Forster, alcoholism was an American problem, not a Navajo problem, and it was racist to suggest otherwise.

Benally went into premature labor in 1931, after a multiday Christmas celebration presided over by Forster, who took the place of the excessively inebriated Luck. Benally’s husband, Grant, arrived at Forster’s door with some urgency; they went back together and determined that the young mother’s labor had progressed too far for her to risk being taken to the hospital. Forster sent Grant for the missionary’s car, with which to fetch a doctor, but he refused to lend it, sending word back to the nurse that she should handle the situation alone. While the nurse continued to assist Lilly, weakened by hours of labor, Grant went on to the home of the local trader. He did agree to go for a doctor, but by the time the three men returned, they were too late—with Forster’s help, Lilly had delivered her baby boy. Both the missionary’s callousness and the doctor’s remoteness come through clearly in Forster’s telling. The nurse’s hostility toward Luck was not simply personal. From her perspective, religion was a pernicious tool of colonization, intended to destroy Native culture and people rather than save them. When Putnam, on that 1924 road trip, suggested that Christianity was a positive influence on Pueblo people, Forster acidly rebutted her: “We brought them drink and disease along with religion, so they might have been about as well off without it.”137

Border Towns and Relocation

Forster’s account of the missionary’s drunkenness refuted the stereotype of Indian alcoholism, even as she acknowledged that drinking was an increasing problem among the Navajo as well. Alcoholism among Navajo men in urban spaces was hypervisible to outsiders throughout the postwar decades, exacerbated by racist confirmation bias and, perhaps relatedly, by its extensive coverage in social documentary work after World War II. Alcohol sales were prohibited on federal land, including in the Navajo Nation (which is held in trust by the federal government), and so Native alcohol consumption throughout the region was displaced to and concentrated in border towns like Gallup. As cars became more common, drunk driving likewise increased.138 Gilpin was surely thinking of documentary photography such as McCombe’s series of intoxicated men in border cities, published in the 1951 book Navaho Means People, when she asked Mitchell Wilder for his opinion on the issue. She wrote to him in 1956, “Some people say that I must cover the alcohol problem. I have held off on this. . . . I know how the Navaho feel about it. To me no one seems to have portrayed the very fine Navaho Dignity. The alcohol problem is bad so is ours! Why should we pick on them any more than ourselves.”139 Wilder backed Gilpin’s instinct to avoid such material, pointing out that in addition to showing Navajo people in a negative light, it also “tends to pick up more of the sociology,” and risked relegating Gilpin’s photographs to the status of illustration rather than art.140 This was an ongoing concern of hers—“this book is not a book of manuscript illustrated with pictures,” she reminded her editors repeatedly—and Wilder’s warning was a canny encouragement to Gilpin to focus on her “visual statements.”141 Although Gilpin did photograph a few instances of inebriation, as well as its implicit effects, as in three archive negatives of car wrecks near the Chaco Canyon Trading Post, she repeatedly explained her reluctance to show images that were disrespectful to the Navajo as a people and ultimately stood firm in her decision not to include them in her book.

Although she avoided images that she considered exploitative and unfair, Gilpin did address alcoholism in her text—in terms of the leadership being shown within the Navajo community to combat it. She may have been aware of the messaging being spread in Diné media—cartoons in Adahooniłigii, a monthly Navajo-language newspaper produced by the U.S. Indian School in Phoenix, Arizona, for example, often took on alcoholism (Figure 3.15). In The Enduring Navaho, however, the student activist and community organizer Herbert Blatchford is Gilpin’s example. “At present,” she wrote, “he is also working with some Alcoholic Anonymous groups in the big effort to overcome alcoholism in this area. He gave me encouraging figures, that more than fifty percent of those treated are remaining in good health. Certainly on my last visit to Gallup in 1964, I saw very little evidence of alcoholism, a great improvement over previous years. It is to be hoped that this will continue, for this has been a serious problem ever since the Indian prohibition law was repealed.”142 Blatchford’s commitment to fighting alcohol addiction in his own community legitimized Gilpin’s discussion of the issue in that specific context. Through that discussion, moreover, the visual lacuna in The Enduring Navaho is rendered visible as a political choice on Gilpin’s part.

Blatchford appears twice in The Enduring Navaho; in both instances, Gilpin presents him as a well-groomed member of established tribal government systems, rather than as a radical activist. Both portraits appear in the chapter titled “Tribal Government,” presumably because he was a scholarship recipient and then a government employee. Gilpin describes his work for the Navajo Nation: “Blatchford . . . graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1956, where he majored in education. His first work was for the McKinley County Public Schools as an attendance counselor, working out of Gallup, New Mexico. In these schools Navajo children were being accepted with the regular school body, and it was Herbert’s duty to check on any absentees.”143 In one notable case, Gilpin rode along with Blatchford:

I went with Herbert into the area surrounding Gallup, to see just what his field work was in this capacity. At one hogan there was an eleven-year-old girl who had been absent from school for several weeks. . . . Seeing that she was very shy, I thought my presence there might be disturbing to her, so I went outside to wait. Soon I heard voices in conversation as Herbert was getting answers to his questions. . . . As we drove off, I asked Herbert what had been the difficulty. “Oh, teacher trouble.” . . . In the course of our conversation it emerged that Herbert had organized an evening class for [Gallup] teachers to help them understand the Navaho children. This he did on his own initiative, showing unusual judgment in finding a practical method to solve some of the problems of these children.144

In the photograph she chose to publish from that day, Blatchford smiles at the camera from amid a cluster of children (Figure 3.16). Two adult women both avert their gaze, but the children are openly curious, albeit apparently a little shy. There is nothing overtly staged about the photograph: indeed, Gilpin appears to have striven for a candid quality in both photographs of Blatchford that appear in TheEnduring Navaho—in contrast to the more formal portraits that she includes of other students, community leaders, and tribal officials in the same chapter. From this early position as an advocate for Navajo schoolchildren, Blatchford went on to become a leader in Native politics nationwide, on both official and activist fronts.

Blatchford began working at the Gallup Indian Community Center in 1963. According to Gilpin: “This building, erected in 1952 through the Navaho-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, was operated for a number of years by the Unitarian Service Committee. Now the Board of Directors of the Community Center has taken it over, and is operating it with the united help of the Navaho Tribe and the city of Gallup.” As director of the center, Blatchford acted “as a counselor to any young Navaho who are seeking employment off the reservation, or are having difficulties in their present jobs.”145 In the second photograph of the young man that she includes in her book, Gilpin literally portrays Blatchford as on the side of his Navajo clients (Figure 3.17)—a conscious choice, as we can see when we compare her published image of the counselor giving advice to a visitor with one of the outtakes from the same session (Figure 3.18). In the outtake, the visitor is seated across from Blatchford, leaning in with his arms on the desk and looking intently at the counselor, who mirrors his pose but jabs a pen in the air as if making a point. The tone of the image is slightly remonstrative, suggesting a hierarchy between the two men. But in the image that Gilpin chose to publish, Blatchford’s visitor has moved to the counselor’s side of the desk. The two men confer, and Blatchford’s hand is lowered, his pen poised over a notepad as though he were taking note of what his interlocutor is saying. The impression we get is cooperative rather than confrontational.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Blatchford was committed to institution building as a way to support Diné cultural independence. His work at the Gallup Center brought him to the attention of the federal government, which was changing course on its Indian policy yet again. Blatchford became chairman of a presidential task force initiated by U.S. president Richard Nixon to examine the needs of “racially isolated Indians.”146 As Nixon observed in a special message to Congress on Indian affairs delivered on July 8, 1970, this isolation was most often the result of U.S. federal termination and relocation programs that had offered Native people funds for travel and training in urban centers.147 Nixon’s support of Native communities was a striking contrast to the federal policy of termination that preceded it. Termination had been introduced during World War II to eliminate federal support for—and thereby the functional existence of—Native tribes and nations. In response, Navajo people and their allies in nongovernmental organizations sought to increase tribal control of resources and improve conditions and opportunities for Navajo people on their own terms. The national Association on American Indian Affairs, with which Gilpin was closely affiliated through its New Mexico branch, supported the National Congress of American Indians (founded in 1944, the year after Congress announced termination as an official policy) in their attempts to fight termination-oriented legislation in the 1950s.148 In 1953, the Navajo government established a scholarship fund, and in 1954, the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs partnered with the University of New Mexico’s Kiva Club to sponsor the first of a series of conferences that brought together Navajo, Pueblo, and Apache participants to address social and political concerns—the conference at which Gilpin heard Blatchford speak. Throughout the same decade, new economic opportunities—sawmills and uranium mines, specifically—were added to the oil production that had provided the Navajo Nation with consistent income (an income that the U.S. government argued was justification for termination). For some Navajo leaders, these were positive developments, and for others, they were dangerous exploitations of the land that were leading to environmental devastation.149 As usual, Gilpin stuck to a gently positive neutral tone in her discussions of resource development, always highlighting Navajo decision-making.

One key instrument of termination was relocation: an umbrella term for the federal programs by which Native people were offered incentives to move away from reservations and into cities. Navajo veterans returning from World War II found themselves in a difficult position in relation to both U.S. nationalism and the Navajo Nation. They were celebrated for their contributions but still denied civil rights; they were welcomed home but then shunned as they exhibited symptoms of PTSD and cultural alienation. Veterans were therefore particularly susceptible to the appeals of relocation programs that offered them vocational training, housing, and jobs. In 1950, only 16.3 percent of Native people lived in urban areas, but by 1970, thanks to aggressive federal funding of relocation and urbanization initiatives, 44.9 percent of Native people lived in cities. As Gilpin attests, the Tribal Council starting sponsoring education initiatives in the 1950s, countering federal relocation with training and job programs of their own that allowed people to stay close to home. The Education Scholarship Fund established by the Navajo government in 1953 helped students go to college; one recipient was army veteran Blatchford.

Federal relocation programs—often underimplemented in ways that left Native people jobless and even homeless, in addition to removing them from the traditional support networks of family and tribal community—exacerbated crime and alcoholism among urban Indigenous people. Equally, however, in response to relocation Navajo people began to generate new networks and resources, including new conceptions of Dinétah that included Diné living far beyond its borders. A 1971 textbook history of the Navajo, edited by Ethelou Yazzie for the Navaho Community College Press, underscored the communal responsibility of the Diné in relation to preserving hózhó in Dinétah: “When the population increases so much that The People spread out beyond the boundary represented by the God’s body, that will be the end of the Navajos. Because people live beyond that boundary now, it could be that they will run into difficulties with nature and will be out of harmony with the plan of the Gods.”150 In partial solution of this problem, the anthropologist Thomas Biolsi has suggested that we consider four definitions of Indigenous national space, characterized in terms of the sovereign unity of the people: “The first is tribal sovereignty within a national homeland. . . . The second is territorially based rights to off-reservation resources. . . . The third is generic (supratribal) indigenous rights . . . which I will call ‘national indigenous space.’ . . . and [the fourth is] hybrid indigenous space in which Indian people claim and exercise citizenship simultaneously in Native nations and in the United States.”151

Belin has written extensively in her poetry about her relationship to Dinétah as an urban daughter of parents who were relocated in the 1950s. Her poetry echoes and extends the invitation made by Biolsi’s fourfold model of sovereignty, embracing the slippage between the Diné and Dinétah to extend the latter into all the spaces occupied by the former. Goeman has observed that Belin “relies on Native epistemologies to reconfigure violent cartographies of U.S. nation-building, stating, ‘I always forget L.A. has sacred mountains.’” The poet’s statement suggests that sacredness is in our awareness of and relationship with the land, as well as in specific landscapes. For Goeman, Belin’s superimposition of Dinétah’s sacred mountains over the Santa Monica and San Gabriel ranges that encircle the Californian city “refuses to absent the Native ‘brothers and sisters’ from the landscape of L.A.,” but it also, vitally, extends the Navajo homeland to encompass Diné who might otherwise be far from home.152 In so doing, Belin likewise extends the protection that Dinétah offers its people from the effects of separation from their home. In “On Relocation,” published in 1999, Belin reflects on the irrelevance of borders to the Diné understanding of space:

The physical is easier to achieve

a boundary drawn to separate people

Navajos say no word exists

establishing form to the air we breathe.153

Like Belin, Gilpin uses the four sacred mountains to push back against the fixed borders of colonial nation-building, and throughout The Enduring Navaho she presents Navajo space as metaphorical, communal, and extensive beyond the literal limits of the reservation, echoing Biolsi’s and Belin’s observations that Indian space is transnational and metaphorical even as it is also tied directly to specific lands. Gilpin’s insistence on embedding her images of the landscape of Dinétah within a transhistorical narrative of human relationships in and with the land, moreover, echoes—or foreshadows—Belin’s strategy of “presenting geopolitics as a matter of narrated relationships embedded in Native epistemologies.”154

Despite—or more likely because of—Blatchford’s success in building political and cultural community both locally and nationally, he was ultimately pushed out of his position as director of the Community Center. In 1972, after raising funds across the country for the center, including for its alcohol programs, Blatchford was suspended by its board in a move led by Gallup mayor Emmet Garcia. The suspension was the conclusion of controversy between Indian and non-Indian board members over Blatchford’s politics, although they blamed it on his poor management skills and the resulting struggling finances of the center (a particularly ugly irony, given the director’s effective fundraising efforts). Blatchford himself said at the board meeting: “I haven’t seen any of you [non-Indian board members] at this center. You have come here only to take something from us.” Speaking directly to Garcia, he said bluntly, “Your father gave us (the Indians) the greatest debt we have, with that bar he established near the reservation.”155 Garcia’s father had established the Navajo Inn, which in 1970 was “one of the most dangerous and profitable liquor stores along the border of the dry reservation.” It was famous for its “remarkable and disgusting litter, its traffic fatality rate (thirty-six in three years), and its human dramas of sex and public urination played out for highway travelers to see.”156 Garcia, profoundly corrupt as a politician and directly profiting, privately, from alcoholism in the Navajo community, had little incentive to support Navajo dignity or sovereignty—both of which were represented by the Indian Community Center and Blatchford’s own work both within and beyond it.

In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin wrote of Blatchford: “In whatever future work Herbert undertakes, his clear thinking and scholarly mind will stand him in good sense. He has an extraordinary command of the English language, and may someday prove to be an able writer”—and by the mid-1960s she had already been proved right.157 Rather than express political opinions of her own, Gilpin chose to express public admiration of Blatchford’s leadership skills and his vocal advocacy of Diné cultural and political sovereignty. Indeed, throughout her book she was careful to frame her content and her presentation in both visual and verbal terms that foregrounded Navajo self-determination—a position that explains her reluctance to offer opinions, as an outsider, about specific political events, decisions, or actions in the Nation. At the same time, her support of Blatchford would have been coded differently for those aware of Navajo politics: unlike the other leaders she featured in The Enduring Navaho, Blatchford worked outside and beyond tribal government—and, as I discuss in the next chapter, he increasingly worked outside conventional institutional limits. Gilpin never overtly acknowledges this, although she surely expected her Diné readers to recognize him. Reading her reticence queerly, we might see it as simultaneously making and protecting space for Diné voices.

Blank Space / Queer Space

In the opening pages of The Enduring Navaho, Dinétah is a landscape created of/from the body of Changing Woman that has been marked by U.S. intervention and through which Gilpin also travels—and which the Creation Story leads her to explore. Gilpin’s version of the Creation Story introduces thematics of visibility and queerness: “Changing Woman,” in Diné, is Asdzáá Nádleehé—and the same word for changing, nádleehé, is used for third-gender people among the Diné. Hataałii have historically often been nádleehé; it was a nádleehé singer, Klah, who collaborated with Wheelwright to document the sacred schematic sand drawings that are some of the only maplike images in ancestral Navajo culture, in the service of cultural preservation and education. Used in healing ceremonies, schematic sand drawings are ephemeral: their efficacy comes in part from their erasure in a gesture that we might read as another queering of the blankness of Gilpin’s Cambridge globe. Whether or not she was conscious of the resonance between the blankness of the globe and the ceremonial erasure of sand drawings, the photographer’s story in the opening pages of The Enduring Navaho of the submersion—the erasure—of Changing Woman by the federal government is likewise a metaphor not simply for colonial cultural destructions and Navajo resilience but also for the political possibilities of queerness as a strategy for resistance. Using oral history, tradition, and myth as the basis for a discussion of technological change and the resulting strengthening of the Navajo as a people, Gilpin queerly politicized her text from the outset.

In Gilpin’s telling of the Creation Story, the People fly from the third world to the fourth, foreshadowing her own flight across the Navajo Nation. Once there, the People acquired their current form, created as First Man and First Woman by holy beings from eagle feathers and maize. “The first children born to First Man and First Woman were hermaphrodite twins,” Gilpin recounts—and according to her, these queer children go on to populate the world that was left so misleadingly blank on the globe that Gilpin confronted in 1922.158 Her primary source for the Creation Story is Washington Matthews’s 1897 text, Navaho Legends, which at times she quotes directly. Matthews explains in a note accompanying his recounting of the birth of the hermaphrodite twins that the “Navaho word nátli . . . is here translated hermaphrodite, because the context shows that reference is made to anomalous creatures. But the word is usually employed to designate that class of men, known perhaps in all wild Indian tribes, who dress as women, and perform the duties usually allotted to women in Indian camps.”159 Matthews explains that these “hermaphrodites” were “barren,” but Gilpin elides this detail, implying that all the children of First Man and First Woman “bore many children.”160 In The Enduring Navaho, we progress from these children to the landscape they inhabit, the aerial photographs of the four sacred mountains offering their own queer expanse. In between we have a brief glimpse of Changing Woman, a petroglyph erased by dam waters—but that, as the photograph of living maize that follows implies and as Gilpin allows herself to hope in her text, is still bringing fertility to the Navajo people. She proposes the flooding as a potentially generative erasure, just as the erasure of ceremonial dry paintings restores hózhó.

Similarly, her decision to avoid visual representations of alcoholism is a productive discursive shift: rather than condemn Diné behavior through uncomfortable images, she verbally and visually celebrates Blatchford’s acts of community care. Are her other erasures equally generative? Later in the Creation Story, a disagreement leads the men to separate from the women. In Matthews’s telling, First Man instructs the nádleehé to go with the men, bringing their unique resources with them. In Gilpin’s abbreviated version, they no longer appear—despite the fact that the outcome of the episode hinges on their contributions to the men’s sustenance. There is no apparent explanation for her removal of the nádleehé from this part of the Creation Story, and there is undoubtedly also some ambivalence in the photographer’s decision not to mention her own lesbian identity explicitly, despite repeatedly inviting us to see what she refuses to show. I have suggested that the latter is intentionally queer coding, but it is decorous rather than radical: a gentle nudge to audiences that she suspects, but cannot guarantee, will be sympathetic.

It is a strategy that she extended beyond The Enduring Navaho—for example, in her correspondence with Steinem and others at Ms. magazine. “I have never had any reason to be concerned about women’s lib,” Gilpin wrote to Harriet Lyons, one of the magazine’s founding editors and an art collector, early in 1974. “Somehow it just isn’t necessary in this part of the country.”161 Many historians—and perhaps Lyons too—have interpreted this declaration of blankness as a conservative rejection of second-wave feminism, but, read queerly and in light of Gilpin’s documented frustration with sexism in her professional life, it has more affinity with Bonnie Zimmerman’s explicitly radical statement: “Lesbians must get out of the straight women’s movement and form their own movement.” Gilpin and her peers saw the blank space of the Southwest as a place of opportunity for themselves as lesbian and queer women, out from under the patriarchal and heterosexist gaze that pervaded much of the United States. A place of queer solidarity and freedom, it was also a place for activism—but on behalf of and in collaboration with the Indigenous people who were likewise threatened by colonial demands for assimilation and, implicitly, extermination.

To Steinem herself the photographer enthused, “These Indian People of the Southwest have so many fine characteristics that many do not seem to understand. . . . Should you come this way again, I hope you will let me know. I should like you to see some of the charm of this ancient ‘City Different’ as it is often called. So many do not know how old it is.”162 Gilpin used this gentle reproach to introduce her anecdote of the Cambridge globe. In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin used her opening tour of the four sacred directional mountains to invite her readers, equally gently, to see the blank spaces engendered by the infrastructural failures of U.S. colonialism and the ideological lacunae of second-wave White feminism, and to fill them in with stories of Diné and lesbian self-determination.