New Ceremonies

Gay American Indians: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

From the 1950s through the 1980s, gay liberation movements in the United States prompted a proliferation of material about gay life—visual, literary, musical, and more. But where was Native American experience represented? The first organization for Indigenous queer people in North America was Gay American Indians (GAI), founded by Randy Burns and Barbara May Cameron in San Francisco in 1975. The Greater Vancouver Native Cultural Society was founded four years later, in 1979. Burns articulated the need for GAI in terms of intersectionality, noting that gay Indians were the targets of homophobia and racism—with the latter evident in the Bay Area gay community at every level, and the former present in the Native community. “In 1975,” Burns recalls, “the local American Indian center refused to post our flyers because they might ‘offend’ people. When we participated in an American Indian Day held at a local university, we were told to take down our booth: ‘We don’t want any trouble,’ they said.”23 In 1984, the group established a History Project that successfully “documented these alternative roles in over 135 North American tribes” and published a bibliography of sources on “alternative gender roles.”24 Burns invoked a phrase familiar to those involved with Native activism on behalf of gay Native people when he wrote, “Much has changed in American Indian life, but we are still here, a part of our communities.”25 He made that assertion in the preface to the 1988 volume of collected essays titled Living the Spirit, which was “not just about gay American Indians, it is by gay Indians.”26 A survey of the bibliography in Living the Spirit, however, reveals the extent to which “gay Indians” working after the devastating federal and religious mission policies of assimilation, termination, and relocation were dependent on the work of an earlier generation of non-Native anthropologists for information ranging from ceremonies to kinship structures.

Throughout the late twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, queer Native culture was largely presented as urban and pan-Indian: the origins and selective adoption of the term two-spirit reflect this. And yet many who identify as two-spirit also express a deep sense of their culturally specific identity (or identities), and choose to use the term because it connotes to a wide audience the speaker’s Indigenous rejection of White constructions of gender and sexuality. The artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole, Muskogee, and Diné) has observed that she does not identify as lesbian for several reasons. At lesbian gatherings in the 1990s, she “was an outsider whose community did not matter because . . . the focus was upon white lesbian issues.” In her own community, she felt people “would have a hard time dealing with the label [lesbian] even though it is quite apparent when one meets me that I do prefer an alternative lifestyle.”27 Instead, she describes herself as “Two Spirit” in recognition of “being of the Two Spirited Society. It means just as Aboriginal history differs from American history, so does Two Spirit history differ from the Gay and Lesbian History.”28

Tsinhnahjinnie’s assertion of her two-spirit identity goes beyond a statement about her sexuality; it is an exercise of her sovereignty. She has written powerfully about visual sovereignty as a responsibility to one’s community—but also an exploration of its limits. “The majority of the time when enacting visual sovereignty, you are connected to a community,” she observed in 2009, “a community you call home. It is inevitable that the community you represent will force you to dream beyond its own imagining.”29 Perhaps intentionally, “represent” has a double meaning here: as an artist, Tsinhnahjinnie literally creates representations of her community; but as a Native person and as a queer person, she has doubtless also experienced countless demands to serve as a representative example of those identities. In her case, as a queer Diné person, it seems inevitable that those communities might come into conflict. Her use of “community” in the singular is therefore misleading—our sense of belonging in multiple communities, or homes, can be precisely the force that leads us to dream “beyond [each one’s] own imagining.” Tsinhnahjinnie offers a path forward for that dreaming: “To realize the new direction,” she warns her reader, “you may have to step apart from that community, to stand confidently with your heart in hand.”30 Leaving one community may mean entering another—or creating a new one, as the founders of Gay American Indians did in 1975.

In 1988, Tsinhnahjinnie contributed eight illustrations to the GAI anthology Living the Spirit. Created over the course of the decade, her images span a surprising variety of styles and themes, but they repeatedly engage with the question of belonging. A 1982 photograph from the Metropolitan Indian Series is the first of Tsinhnahjinnie’s to appear in the volume, and it depicts a woman with braided hair and a dance shawl standing in front of a motorcycle. Row houses typical of San Francisco are in the background, lit by streetlights and the blurred lines created by the headlights of passing cars, which rhyme with the blurred fringe of the standing figure’s shawl. The motorcycle is a queer sign, although the woman in front of it has little in common with the stereotypical “diesel dyke,” and the city had significant queer cachet in the early 1980s. The anonymous woman exudes confidence, her chin raised and her profile calm. Partly because of the long exposure time necessitated by the night, her pose recalls the poise of earlier generations of Indigenous photographic subjects, calmly gazing into nineteenth-century cameras that were trying to excise, rather than exercise, sovereignty.

The woman in the foreground of a second photograph, Hin-mut-toe-ta-li-ka-tsut (Thunder Clouds Going Over Mountains) (1983), is more ambiguous. She sits on a horse, high on a hill above a curving highway that parodies a river. Her gaze is directed backward (we are inclined to read it as eastward), and the lowered head of her horse echoes the notorious sculpture by James Earle Fraser, The End of the Trail, which had been in a park in California’s San Joaquin Valley before it was moved to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City in 1968. In contrast to Fraser’s slumped Native man, Tsinhnahjinnie’s rider appears simultaneously alert and reflective, akin to the “deliberate reversal” of Fraser’s sculpture by the Sioux and Creek professor Lehman Brightman and his then student, the writer LaNada War Jack (Shoshone–Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation), in their 1969 logo design for United Native Americans (UNA). The Indigenous content of this image is self-evident, thanks to the regalia and the iconographical references, but as an illustration for Living the Spirit, Tsinhnahjinnie’s images bring her multiple communities together, inviting us to see the dilbaa—the Diné warrior woman, masculine woman, lesbian—in Hin-mut-toe-ta-li-ka-tsut.

Tsinhnahjinnie began her career as a painter, but turned to photography as a way to subvert the historical use of that medium as a colonial tool in the nineteenth century and as a vehicle for the Vanishing Indian trope in the early twentieth. As the art historian Gail Tremblay has argued, the artist’s turn to photography was encouraged by the critical hostility she encountered when creating representational paintings—a hostility ironically attributable to the Euramerican critical turn toward abstraction after the invention of photography and encounters with abstract Indigenous aesthetic traditions.31 In Tsinhnahjinnie’s hands, photography is embedded in an autobiographical project that not only refutes those earlier tropes but also introduces a level of intimacy and specificity to her work that confronts the viewer with the impossibility of stereotyping or looking for easy illustrations of Native or two-spirit experience. “No longer is the camera held by an outsider looking in,” she wrote in 1993. Instead, “the camera is held with brown hands opening familiar worlds.”32 The queer overtones of this statement—the pointedly lesbian/Indigenous image of “brown hands opening familiar worlds”—cannot be overlooked. Photography, and especially her preferred media of digital photography and photocollage, simultaneously claims and confounds ideas of truth, authenticity, and indexicality. As Tsinhnahjinnie inserts herself and her ancestors into playful, imaginary futures—as in Portraits Against Amnesia (2003) or the Native Programming series (1990)—she queers Indigenous history and re-Indigenizes American history. “We are visible, to those who can see and understand the complexities of existing as aboriginal people,” she concludes her artist statement.33

Finding the Archive

If someone had told me about the Creation Story, how there’s multiple genders in our own language? I have no idea what that would have done to me if I would have learned that when I was a kid. That’s what I wish for my kids, for kids a thousand years from now. I just don’t want those stories to be lost again.34

Yazzie was speaking to a group of my students at Oklahoma State University when they described their motivation for documenting woman-identifying queer people and families in the Navajo Nation and beyond. Navajo people are often characterized as the most studied in the world; how did their stories get lost? In chapter 2, I noted the rise of homophobia in southwestern Native communities in the 1960s, a history that explains some of the stories of Navajo queer youth who experience a generation gap in their families’ acceptance. Alray Nelson, an LGBT rights activist, founder of Diné Equality, and cofounder of Diné Pride, noted that “when I came out to my family, my mother of course took it the hardest. But my grandparents didn’t.” Nelson linked that acceptance directly to colonialism: “It really shifted our values as Navajo people,” he told National Public Radio. In contrast, “growing up in Navajo traditional families, . . . they said that we were sacred.”35 Others echo his experience: Michelle Sherman, for instance, was kicked out of the house by her parents when she came out, “but,” she reflected, “my grandma told them that this was a normal part of Navajo culture.”36

In an early twentieth-century telling of the Creation Story, the Diné narrator used the kinship terms “Granduncle,” “Grandfather,” “Grandmother,” and “Granduncle–Grandmother” to refer to the nádleehé.37 This introduces another consideration as we think about sexuality in Navajo culture. Very specific conventions surround appropriate sexual partners—and even appropriate interlocutors when the subject arises. “For instance,” observed the anthropologist Gary Witherspoon in 1975, “although a son may not joke about sexual matters with a sister or mother, he may do so casually with a grandmother.” Moreover, “the only kinship terms on the mother’s side which do not distinguish sex are those which grandparents use for grandchildren.” According to Witherspoon, this indicates “the lesser degree of importance of sexual differences among kinsmen separated by at least two generations.”38 Witherspoon goes on to observe that there is a further nuance to relationships between alternate generations: “The subordinate position of children requires them to respect their parents, and usually requires parents to support, care for, discipline, and instruct their children. This subordinate–superordinate relationship, however, does not hold true for grandparents and grandchildren. . . . The term for maternal grandfather is also used as the term for friend. Self-reciprocal terms exist between paternal grandparents and their grandchildren. . . . In my experience, grandparents seldom discipline; when they do, it is in a casual manner with regard to minor cases of misbehavior.”39 These kinship roles inform queer Diné experiences of the generation gap just as much as the historical processes of Christian conversion and American cultural assimilation do.

Like Nelson, Sherman used the word traditional to describe her grandmother’s values, but as the historian Jennifer Denetdale has observed, the idea of “traditional” values is easily colonized.40 Successive waves of European colonization of the Southwest brought Christianity and often forcible conversion not only to its religious precepts but also to the heteropatriarchy that was embedded in its practice to North America. Among the Navajo, the Catholicism brought by the Spanish was followed by Protestant and Mormon missions. The impact of these religious organizations on Navajo gender ideology was profound; moreover, they worked in conjunction with federal assimilation initiatives that imposed binary gender roles likewise informed by Anglo norms. When the Navajo Nation Council passed the Diné Marriage Act, which prohibited recognition of same-sex marriages, in 2005, the “traditional” values of Christianity were cited by council members in the act’s defense, while those opposed argued for the “traditional” values of the Navajo Creation Story, which includes third-gender people.41

In response to this ambiguity, which the Pueblo scholar Justine Teba has termed “toxic traditionalism,” Yazzie posits an alternative vocabulary: “ancestral is before colonialism,” they suggest, “and traditional is after.”42 Colonialism initiated a process of calcification: as ceremonies were documented and people were subjected to assimilation, the practices of culture were replaced by its forms and infiltrated by newer value systems imposed by outside religion. Singers—traditional healers—no longer always learned the stories behind the words, even though they still memorized the words to ceremonial songs. Most important for Yazzie, they lost touch with the process of devising ceremony. “Ancestors would have dreams about ceremonies and would be willing to change what they did based on those dreams,” they explained. This living tradition allowed singers to adapt to their community’s needs and respond to social change. In today’s version of “traditional” Navajo practice, several singers refused to participate in a wedding ceremony for Yazzie and their wife because “the ceremony talks very specifically about binary gender and procreation.”43

This anti-nádleehé shift was already evident in the first half of the twentieth century: in a footnote to his claim that “the outlook of Navaho society toward the nadlε is very favorable,” the anthropologist Willard W. Hill noted in 1935 that “Albert Sandoval, a Navaho of Lukachukai, who read this manuscript, says that the nadlε are not so much respected nowadays. The older attitude is giving way to one of ridicule. Any child showing a tendency to a transformation is discouraged.”44 This social shift was consolidated by the so-called Boomer generation—which had been subject to the assimilationist federal programs of relocation and termination on top of the long-standing influences of boarding schools and aggressive Christian and Mormon missionary activity—with the Diné Marriage Act, which echoed the White conservative politics of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act by denying same-sex couples the right to marry. Many activists have pointed out the irony of Native nations’ sovereignty being used to perpetuate discrimination long after the United States legalized same-sex marriage via the Supreme Court.45

In her 1981 essay, Allen noted that any historical study of sexuality has a corresponding historiographical problem of definition. Lesbian and gay are socially constructed categories dependent on specific ideas about kinship, sexuality, and gender that have not consistently applied—or ever been applicable—to Native cultures in North America (or to any culture before the European invention of hetero- and homosexuality in the nineteenth century, if we follow Michel Foucault).46 The anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood has noted that in addition to the erasure that comes from misapplying culturally specific notions of gender and sexuality to Native people, there is an invisibility produced by sexism: queer women are once again missing from the record.47 Her colleague Carolyn Epple has reminded us that “the presence of the same behavior (such as same-sex sex) in two different time periods or societies does not mean that the behavior is equivalent in meaning.”48 This misapprehension is on display in contemporary appropriations of a nineteenth-century photograph of two Navajo men in a familiar embrace. First used as an illustration of Navajo third-gender identity in the 2009 documentary Two Spirit, it was subsequently republished around the world as an image of a gay couple—prompting a thorough discussion of the image and its true origins, as well as the political context of its memeification, in a 2019 article by Hannah Abelbeck, Jennifer Denetdale, and Devorah Romanek.49 There is a long history of appropriation of Native American models of sexuality by non-Native queer people who sought alternatives to the homophobia and heterosexism of their own cultures.50 Unfortunately, this amateur anthropology has tended to obscure even further an already muddled archive. Across the board, misapprehensions and erasures caused by assumptions about binary gender roles, the spectrum of sexuality, and heteronormativity have been exacerbated by language barriers, as translators have historically offered a limited set of words as options for conveying the sense of Indigenous languages.51

When the anthropologist and Franciscan Father Berard Haile recorded Curly Tó Aheedlíinii, of Chinle, Arizona, telling the story of Emergence (as translated by Albert G. “Chic” Sandoval—the same translator who worked with Hill and many other anthropologists) in 1932, he left the word nádleehé untranslated, implying it was the word Curly actually used.52 In a note about translation, the anthropologist glosses nádleehé as “a man performing woman’s labor,” leaving out any mention of sexual behavior or explicit gender identification.53 In his preface to the story, the anthropologist commented that according to his informant, “the separation of the sexes [in the Creation Story] is responsible for sexual excesses which, in turn, account for the procreation of a large number of monstrous beings.”54 But these “excesses” were unrelated to the nádleehé—rather, they involved both men and women finding sexual gratification with animals, plants, and other inanimate objects while separated from one another. In contrast to the danger posed by such behaviors, a nádleehé that appears in Curly’s telling is treated with great respect:

There was a nádleeh, they say. He (knew how to) make pots, earthen bowls and ladles. He understood the making of metates, frying stones, water jugs and stirring sticks. And he also had his brooms. He was familiar to the last with every kind of woman’s work, they say. And so he was an authority. He was expert, you see, in everything, therefore he was considered to be a great chief. He called them all “my Children,” they say.55

Throughout the text, Haile offers glosses of Curly’s story that seek to align the Emergence with structural anthropology. In keeping with this bias, he wrote of the nádleehé in the story: “This nádleeh appears to be the mythological prototype of a complete male-female personage. He is brought into the picture to solve the problem of who would do the regular women’s tasks. The division of the life process into hunting (i.e., the wielding of death power) and nurture (i.e., the wielding of life power) was a natural one.”56 It is evident from this explanation that Haile is less interested in understanding Navajo experiences of gender than in aligning their history with Euro-Western knowledge categories and structures—including an allegedly “natural” gender binary.

Haile was the first to publish extensively on Diné bizaad (the Navajo language), and his work encouraged the engagement of anthropologists and linguists with the topic.57 His translator, Sandoval, “was a gifted interpreter” who “offered [his] knowledge and wisdom as the loom upon which a succession of linguists and ethnographers have woven the voluminous account of Navajo language and culture available today.”58 Among other projects, Sandoval was a significant contributor to the Young–Morgan dictionary of the Navajo language that has long been considered definitive. Robert W. Young was listed in the first edition of the dictionary, published in 1943, as “specialist in the Navaho language,” and William Morgan likewise as “Indian assistant in the Navaho language.”59 As its publication date suggests, the dictionary was produced partly “to aid native draftees in meeting the linguistic problems involved in their new environment”; the slightly patronizing tone adopted by the authors is typical of the U.S. government’s wartime publications.60 The dictionary opens with a discussion of grammar that includes a section titled “Grammatical Gender,” which explains:

In Navaho, gender is not expressed by special forms, even of the third person pronoun. Its expression is as unimportant for clarity in the Navaho pronoun as it is in the English noun. . . . The differentiation or distinction in sex as denoted by the variant forms of the English third person pronoun gives rise to considerable confusion among Navaho school children learning the new language. One often hears the pronoun “he” used in reference to a woman, “she” of a man, etc.61

Without drawing specific conclusions about the influence of linguistic structure on Navajo understandings of gender, it is easy to see from this example how situations might appear differently to Diné and bilagaana observers even before an act of translation is attempted. And when we discover, on further investigation, that the dictionary excludes words associated with homosexuality, cross-dressing, or any other examples of nonconformity to heterosexist and cisgendered expectations, including the ubiquitous term nádleehe or its most common translation, “transvestite,” we see clear evidence of ideological colonization.

The introduction to the substantially revised and expanded 1980 edition of that dictionary highlights the many challenges presented by creating a Navajo–English dictionary, including the domination of missionary churches over early efforts to do so. The dictionary defines nádleeh as “transvestite, homosexual (nádleeh, he repeatedly becomes = he changes.).” The contrast between the literal definition, “he changes,” and the medicalized terminology of “transvestite, homosexual,” hints at the limits being placed on this gender concept by the colonial mind—and is immediately followed by a second definition that unintentionally offers a poetics of decolonization: the same word also means “to revert, to return to a previous state or condition” as in “to return to a state of awareness.”62 This double meaning suggests that when the founders of Diné Pride chose the slogan “Diyingo ‘Adánitsiiskees” (“I am a sacred being”), they were exercising the decolonial power of language sovereignty and nádleehé to celebrate their return to an ancestral understanding of their identity. Fewer than half of (enrolled) Navajo people are native speakers of Diné bizaad, and that number is in decline, particularly among young people.63 The question of translation thus remains central for contemporary Navajo queer people who are invested in decolonizing their experience of gender by learning about historical genders in Navajo society.

In his 1935 essay “The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navaho Culture,” Hill took up this question of language directly: “The Navaho term for both hermaphrodite and transvestite is nadlε,” he wrote,

which I was told meant “weaver” but according to Dr Edward Sapir can be etymologized as “being transformed.” However they distinguish between the two and between male and female transvestites. The hermaphrodites were called “the real nadlε.” “You can tell them when they are born.” The transvestites were called “those who pretend to be nadlε.” “A boy may act like a girl until he is eighteen or twenty-five; then he may turn into a man or he may not. Girls do the same thing.” Male and female transvestites were about equal in number. Culturally the status of both hermaphrodite and transvestite is the same and the following description, except where the individual is discussed, applies to both.64

Hill’s observations suggest not only the significance of the notion of change to the gender identity of the nádleehé but also the reluctance of his informants to gloss the concept accurately for him. This may have been intentional resistance: in his later study on Navajo humor, Hill documented the amusement felt by many Navajo people who were responsible for, or witnessed a friend, confusing a White person with language.65 It is also possible that the Navajo person translating for him was thinking of a specific individual and describing the way in which they expressed their gender—male-presenting, but choosing women’s labor (echoing Haile’s gloss three years earlier). Finally, we might consider this linguistic resistance in the context of Wesley Thomas’s reminder that “the majority of Navajo families almost never speak the word nádleeh because of an appreciation for the power of speech and careful usage of the word in appropriate context and by appropriate individuals”—a guideline that was applicable “within the four sacred mountains. When nádleeh is used outside this defined space,” Thomas clarifies, “it is considered a label and similar to other Navajo or English words.”66

Ironically, in this case it is Hill’s readers who are confused by his use of English: when Hill chooses to use two words, transvestite and hermaphrodite, rather than the single untranslated word nádleeh, as Haile does, he introduces an interpretive narrowness that confounds our understanding of the stories he narrates. For example, the anthropologist recounts that “because of reciprocal work balance necessary between men and women in Navaho economy bachelors and old maids are extremely rare. Therefore when encountered in White society such individuals are looked upon as queer and usually jokingly referred to as probably transvestites.” If the jokers said “nádleehé,” how and why did Hill decide to use “transvestites” rather than “hermaphrodites,” particularly when he has made clear that some of the latter were “those who pretend”—in other words, what we might describe more accurately today as gender-nonconforming, nonbinary, or genderqueer? His choice to use “transvestites” makes more sense when the joke is about clothes, as in this observation: “During a ceremonial which was attended by an unusual number of tourists, one of the older men remarked, ‘There must be a great many more transvestites among the whites than among the Navaho because so many white women wear trousers.’”67 But even in this instance, the joke is funnier if the meaning of nádleehé is more complex than “transvestite,” because otherwise the man just pointed out somewhat redundantly that there must be a lot of cross-dressing White women, since a lot of White women are cross-dressing. Hill does, moreover, recount jokes in which there is a sexual component to the nádleehé’s actions; in one, they marry an old man at the instigation of a group of men seeking to punish him for selfishness. Key to the joke, as Hill tells it, is the nádleehé’s ability to “pass” as a woman: the old man’s comeuppance is at the hands—or rather, the unexpected penis—of his new wife.68 The humor is homophobic, perhaps reflecting Sandoval’s observation that nádleehé were no longer as respected as they once were—or perhaps reflecting insider knowledge of one old man’s sexual preferences. It is possible, after all, that the old man’s homophobia is intended to be seen as a negative trait in keeping with his selfishness, and something likewise to be punished. The success of the ruse, meanwhile, foreshadows the gender performance of contemporary drag shows.

Drag, Pride, and Intersectional Visual Politics

Despite the efforts of GAI, the archive of queer Indigenous experience was dominated by outside voices throughout the second half of the twentieth century: anthropologists who made claims about Native experience from the position of Euramerican gender norms—and often from an overtly homophobic position.69 As a result, as Midnight Sun observed in Living the Spirit, “the existence of different gender systems among native people has often been presented from a narrow perspective.”70 In our own century, this is changing: artists, journalists, performers, and writers have been contributing to an archive that is growing exponentially every year. In the queer Navajo visual archive, we see an emerging tension between the impulse to join a visual canon—through the adoption of mainstream Pride symbols like the rainbow flag, for example, or portraits of icons of the Navajo drag scene—and the desire to document the full range of queer experience among Diné people. Social media has facilitated the rise in visibility of Native sovereignty movements, including LGBTQ2S+ rights, taking the conversation out of the courts and into the public sphere of popular culture. Similarly, contemporary concerns about queer mental health have extended to the Native community; a recent study conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that 42 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native LGBTQ adults have been diagnosed with depression—and that they are disproportionately women.71

Outside the Navajo Nation, drag queens are the most visible icons of Diné gay culture in the twenty-first century. Brought to international attention by the non-Navajo photographer Jeremy Meek in a 2017 feature for Vice, drag shows are an increasingly dynamic presence on the Navajo Nation; starting in 2018, a drag show has been a signature event of Diné Pride. Although drag privileges a relatively narrow slice of queer Diné experience, it has historically been an important off-reservation venue for many alienated by family and community.72 Meek’s portraits focused on people at home, rather than onstage—but despite that apparent intimacy, all of his subjects but one, in the article, appear alone (if we ignore, of course, the photographer behind the camera). It is an aesthetic in keeping with the narrative of isolation taken up in the accompanying text, which uses the “sprawling,” “arid” landscape of the Navajo Nation as a somewhat overdetermined metaphor for the loneliness of the Navajo queer.73 One of Meek’s subjects, Lady Shug, acknowledged the media power of this trope in a 2020 interview with James Kleinman for The Queer Review; the accompanying portraits are by the queer Diné photographer and drag performer Nate Lemuel.74 Two of Meek’s photographs present Lady Shug as she prepares for a performance; the caption on the first tells us that she “performed nearly every weekend as part of her Miss New Mexico Pride duties.”75 Lady Shug began her drag career in Las Vegas, and is still a celebrated performer who appears in drag shows around the country—for example, in February 2021 she was a headliner at the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits’ Powwow, held online.

The contemporary celebration of drag queens like Lady Shug in both queer contexts and mainstream media presents a striking contrast to the brutal murder in 2001 of sixteen-year-old Diné trans student Fred “F.C.” Martinez Jr. by Shaun Murphy in a crime motivated by homophobia and racism.76 Martinez was the subject of a 2011 documentary film by PBS, Two Spirits, which offered “a revealing look at the largely unknown history of a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.”77 Despite the celebratory tone of this blurb, the story of the film is tragic, combining the dangers of border towns like Farmington with those of queer identity. Murphy’s early release in 2019, after serving less than half his sentence, revived concerns about queer safety in and around the Navajo Nation.78 That year, Lady Shug explained to the Advocate that “I’ve recently relocated to living on Diné—Navajo—territory and land, where I have been fighting for equal rights as an activist for LGBTQ2S indigenous relatives,” referring specifically to the lack of hate crimes laws as well as the 2005 Diné Marriage Act. She also works with healthcare providers to improve their treatment of trans clients, and in suicide prevention.79 Suicide rates among Navajo queer youth are devastating: according to the Diné Policy Institute, 70 percent of LGBTQ Navajo youth have attempted suicide.80

Since at least the 1990s, the Navajo gay community has drawn heavily from non-Navajo gay culture. “We tend to get our ideas for what it means to be gay from Western ideas, so you see [Navajo] gays calling themselves ‘queens,’ and doing a lot of the camp that you would see in the Western gay community,” recounted one of Epple’s informants.81 Drag culture is certainly an example of Western culture’s influence on the Navajo gay community—but as earlier ethnographic sources and the linguistic evidence seem to suggest, using dress to express gender has also historically been a core element of Diné culture. Lady Shug’s activist drag calls attention to the limits of rhetorics of community that refuse to be inclusive, both in Navajo government, which refuses to serve its queer citizens, and in the queer community, which consistently privileges urban space and exoticizes non-White bodies. In one of Meek’s photographs, Lady Shug looks up from her mirror to interrogate the photographer. Her gaze is interrogative, while her heavily made-up face is impenetrably stylized. She is at work, and seems to ask what work we who gaze at her, mesmerized by contour and sparkle, are going to do. Drag on the Navajo Nation thus serves intersecting functions: it affirms queer Diné participation in a broader, pan-queer community, and it reminds that broader community of their responsibility to Indigenous—and rural—queer people. It does so through a transformative affirmation of traditional—Yazzie would say “ancestral”—values. Lady Shug’s activism is inseparable from their drag performance, and although there is no direct line between their drag and the “transvestism” of early twentieth-century nádleehé, it is evident that for many in the Diné drag community, the conceptual connection to ancestral Navajo gender systems is a core element of how its members see themselves—and their responsibilities as members of the Navajo community.82

Each year at Diné Pride, the drag show layers Navajo tradition with queer performance in a celebration that affirms the power of intersectional community in a spectacular fashion. And while the drag show is a highlight of Diné Pride, it is not the only example of this multivalent signification on view each summer. The rainbow flag was designed as a symbol of gay pride by Gilbert Baker in 1978 and subsequently adapted by various groups to signal inclusion of trans people, non-White people, social justice concerns, and more. Baker’s original design itself transformed several times early in its life, but by 1979 had become codified as a six-color striped flag of red, orange, yellow, green, royal blue, and violet. This flag, or its colors, appear in almost every marketing image produced by Diné Pride. The rainbow is an icon of gay pride, but it is also an icon on the Navajo Seal designed by John Claw Jr., in 1952, and the Navajo flag. The Navajo rainbow is an image familiar from ceremonies, many of which involve the creation of a dry painting whose border is a rainbow-bodied yei, or holy person. When the organizers of Diné Pride fly the Pride and trans flags alongside the flag of the Navajo Nation, they make a direct connection between the sacredness of queer Diné people and the sovereignty of the Nation itself.

In various versions of the Navajo Nation Pride banner, the landscape of Dinétah from Window Rock to Ship Rock is silhouetted against a rainbow sky. “Navajo Nation Pride” is emblazoned across the sky, and rising like a translucent moon from behind Window Rock (seat of the Navajo Council) is the Navajo Nation Seal. Scrolling down the site, a second version of the banner appears, this time with the two words “Diné Pride” and the seal rising, bright white, between them. The use of the seal is politically strategic: Pride organizers have emphasized their legislative goals from the beginning, inviting representatives from both Navajo and United States government bodies to speak at and endorse Pride, and endorsing candidates for office at every level. Whereas few journalists from outside Indian Country seem to know what to do with the juxtaposition between spectacular and monumental natural beauty and over-the-top rainbow drag that presents itself in Window Rock each summer, the organizers themselves use its iconic features to highlight the connection between sovereignty and affirmations of selfhood.

Warrior Women

The first Diné Pride was in 2017, organized by Diné Equality in the space of just a few weeks.83 It included presentations on Diné gender identities, personal narratives, and HIV/AIDS prevention on the Navajo Nation, along with a candlelight vigil and a screening of the film Drunktown’s Finest (2014, dir. Sydney Freeland).84 Over the past few years the event organizers have adopted a variety of themes that reveal the fluidity of queerness as an advocacy position in contemporary culture and explicitly take up decolonizing goals. The theme for the first three years, “Diyingo ‘Adánitsiiskees”—I am a sacred being—was chosen to remind participants of their traditional value in Diné culture. “For too long,” said Pride executive director Andy Nez, “Western enculturation has distorted identity and the existence of our LGBTQ+ relatives amongst the Diné people.” Alray Nelson, then the Pride chief operating officer, agreed: “There is nothing more traditional than being Navajo and LGBTQ. For millennia, we were honored and respected for the roles we took in the community.”85

The 2021 theme, Indigenous Womxn (originally “women” in press releases), invites attendees to “focus on honoring all Indigenous Womxn who continue to uplift communities, lead our movements & are the changemakers for our Sovereign Nations. . . . our Indigenous Womxn have been at the forefront protecting sacred knowledge, passing forth our oral tradition, and raising resilient Tribal Nations. We will continue to honor the role of our matriarchs for generations to come.” Diné Pride academic director Nicole Johnny emphasized the theme’s connection to Diné tradition: “Our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters form one of the foundational aspects of Diné society, especially as we are a matrilineal one.”86 Despite this year’s focus on women, however, there is relatively little visibility in Diné Pride’s official programming for lesbian women—perhaps because, as Yazzie observed, “it’s mostly run by men, so the gay women community isn’t really there.” Despite being frustrated by the gender politics of Diné Pride, Yazzie acknowledges that “I always saw it a different way—kind of like a ceremony too.”87 It is a useful reminder that for many Diné, cultural acceptance means participation in the various ceremonies that mark one’s passage through life.

Such transitions are even more significant for queer people, whose lives and relationships do not always follow predictable paths or find comfortable models. As a journalist, Yazzie has called attention to trans people’s need for ceremonies that respond to their life paths. “When Rei Yazzie started his transition and his voice began to change, he knew it was time to prepare for a tá’cheeh—a traditional male puberty ceremony. To do so, . . . he would need to find a traditional healer willing to accept a transgender man.” Being included in ceremonies is an expression of cultural belonging; for Yazzie, the preservation of those ceremonies is likewise an act of cultural preservation that expresses Diné sovereignty. “Navajo ceremonies, including marriages, coming-of-age customs and even basic prayers, are essential to ensure the survival of the Diné people,” they write. “There are more than 350,000 enrolled Navajo people who still need their language and culture, and we cannot discriminate against relatives who identify as nádleeh, dilbaa, nádleeh asdzaa and nádleeh hastii.”88 Inclusion in Diné ceremonies represents a return to ancestral tradition—in contrast to the invented traditions of queer solidarity represented by Pride.

Both have their place. The journalist Josie Raphaelito wrote recently that “as a queer Diné woman, I find myself being welcomed into the inter-Tribal Two-Spirit community.” She moves quickly from the umbrella term two-spirit to the specific language of Diné bizaad:

Our Navajo people are fortunate to still have access to stories and teachings about various genders, including gender roles, rights, and responsibilities, and, if we revisit our traditional values and teachings, we are able to acknowledge and respect Nádleehi and Dilbah relatives in our families. Since time immemorial, the Navajo people have recognized more than five genders (including Nádleehi and Dilbah) and being LGBTQIA+ meant you were sacred.89

In this passage, Raphaelito uses a gender term that does not appear in twentieth-century anthropological literature: Dilbah. It is, according to the Diné scholar Wesley Thomas, a traditional term in Diné bizaad for a fourth gender. Thomas, who notes that “to my knowledge, before my efforts no Navajo had ever undertaken an empirical study of the nádleeh,” has done extensive research and identifies a far richer and more nuanced set of gender categories in Diné culture than had previously been documented.90 He points out that “the traditional social gender system, although based initially on biological sex, divides people into categories based on several criteria: sex-linked occupation, behaviors, and roles.”91 Citing the work of twentieth-century anthropologists, Thomas goes into detail about the female gender:

The female gender is primary in the Navajo origin stories, and it has been established as the most important gender. It is not only appropriate but also necessary for the feminine gender to be primary according to the Navajo cultural construction of woman/female/feminine gender and sex. Women are the heads of households and the primary decision-makers among traditional Navajo people. All life emerges from the Earth and Earth Woman, and the principal female deity is Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehí (Changing Woman).92

And similarly about the use of nádleeh for “female-bodied” Diné:

Moreover, nádleeh is the gender marker for male-bodied individuals, although it has been misapplied to those who are female-bodied. Nádleehbaa’ is the proper term for them; a given family name is inserted between the words. Another name for female-bodied nádleeh was dilbaa’ (warrior girl).

Although Thomas cites the Young and Morgan dictionary, their translation of dilbaa’ does not include a reference to gender or sexuality beyond the phrase “warrior woman.” In fact, the observation Paula Gunn Allen made forty years ago is still to a great extent true: lesbians are invisible in Native American visual culture—and Navajo culture specifically. Scholars such as Epple, who has sought to update the ethnography of the nádleeh from a Diné perspective (or as she says, “the particular Navajo worldview I am learning”93), have continued to focus on the experience of people who identify in some sense as male, even as they also identify with a variety of other sexual or gender identities. “My nádleehí teachers were between 20 and 40 years old, male, lived on or close to the reservation, retained varying degrees of Navajo traditional practices, spoke Navajo and English, and had extensive interaction with Euro-American cultures,” she specifies, pointing out that as a result, her observations may not have relevance for those in different circumstances, including “female nádleehí.”94 As Sabine Lang observed in her canonical monograph, Men as Women, Women as Men, “The information on female homosexuality is especially meager.”95 Or as the poet Janice Gould put it: “Because of the androcentric bias of many anthropologists, most of the research . . . has been focused on the male.”96

For all its flaws (and they are legion), Hill’s 1935 essay is therefore notable for its documentation of “female transvestites”—and for his assertion that they were equal in number to their male counterparts. Returning to the Young–Morgan Navajo dictionary, and going from English to Navajo, we find for lesbian nádleehé ‘asdzáán—the Diné bizaad equivalent of Epple’s phrase female nádleehí. In Diné bizaad, the second word simply modifies the first to refer to a woman, but together the phrase is strikingly similar to the name of the holy person, Changing Woman (Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehí).97 According to this dictionary, the “changing” in Changing Woman’s name refers to the changing seasons—but in a language renowned for its punning and symbolic complexity, the slippage between Changing Woman’s name and the primary term for third-gender identity is unmissable. In keeping with this allusion, Thomas refers to the ceremonial role historically served by masculine–female Diné:

Historically, female-bodied nádleeh/masculine females had specific Navajo ceremonial roles that have disappeared through time. A few of the Navajo elderly medicine people I talked with alluded to these functions but refused to elaborate on them. Knowledge of ceremonial roles is not to be divulged to persons who are not Navajo medicine people. The masculine-female gender, however, necessitates a separate, additional gender category within Navajo society and culture because they are defined differently in Navajo discourse.

Despite this observation, the language in the Young–Morgan dictionary does not include the additional gender term that, thanks in part to Thomas’s research, has become commonplace among contemporary Diné lesbians: dilbaa. The dictionary lists as a definition for baa’: “war, warrior (as a component of female war-names),” and in the appendix of “Feminine War Names,” lists both dlį́ and dllį́baa’ as “warrior-girl, amazon.”98

Yazzie and their partner, public health professional Hannabah Blue, have embraced the Diné gender term dilbaa or dilbaa náhleeh, which describes a woman with masculine roles and behaviors, as well as the term nádleeh asdzaa, which Yazzie defines as “lesbian.”99 For the couple, recognizing traditional Diné gender categories is part of the process of decolonization—an exercise of gender and sexual sovereignty.100 According to Yazzie’s sister, Janene, “She’s not trying to do something radical . . . It’s a way of showing our inner women strength and preserving our culture.”101 And yet, there is something radical about the way that Yazzie’s experience of queerness—from wanting to imitate their brothers as a child, to the sense of isolation that they share with other queer-identified Navajo people who have uneasy relationships with reservation culture and communities—informs their artmaking and their place within Navajo culture. Yazzie grew up on the Navajo Nation, in Lupton, Arizona, attended Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and later pursued a degree in photojournalism in Colorado—a process that they say helped them find their voice as an image-maker.102 When they married, Yazzie and Blue returned to the Navajo Nation.

As a young girl, their brothers’ influence led Yazzie to become a skateboarder and later to print an image of Ko Asdzáá (see Sisters of War, Plate 1) on skateboard decks that they sold through their own company, Asdzaan Skateboards. As the film historian Joanna Hearne has noted in her discussion of the Apache artist Dustinn Craig’s deployment of the “aesthetics of skateboarding” in the service of “an expressive politics of Apache resistance,” a number of skateboard companies have been founded in Indian Country over the past decade or more, and skateboarding culture has been explicitly connected to aspects of cultural sovereignty, from ceremonialism to warrior culture to freedom of movement.103 Yazzie is the only woman-identified person to have participated entrepreneurially in this aspect of skateboarding culture—and if, as Hearne suggests, skateboarding is a “physical as well as representational activity,” then the artist’s body, presented and perceived at the time as female, as well as their warrior boards, subverted the colonial imposition of gendered behavior (and gender categories) on the Navajo Nation.104 Moreover, whereas other Indigenous artists have used skateboards to tell history—Craig’s short skateboard film, 4wheelwarpony, for example, activates the history of White Mountain Apache chief Alchesay in the Apache Wars, and the skater Jim Murphy’s collaboration with the Lakota began as a way to acknowledge the history of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee—Yazzie’s imagery projects a vision of the future.105

In a 1998 essay, Tsinhnahjinnie describes photographic sovereignty as a strategy for engaging with historical photographs of Indigenous people. Reclaiming and transforming those images, Native photographers were performing acts “to resist amnesia.”106 But what happens when things have been forgotten—when the material traces of memory are no longer present? In 2019, Yazzie embarked on the Dilbaa Project, in which they create portraits of lesbian, woman-identified, and trans queer people throughout the Navajo Nation and its diaspora. For as many of the interviews as possible, Yazzie is accompanied by Blue, who has described the motivation for the project in terms of visibility:

Within our culture, within our traditions, we hear about two-spirit people, we hear about nádleeh and dilbaa, but no one really teaches about it. Growing up, we didn’t have people to look to: there was no one I knew growing up who was out, and open, and in a relationship, or families. And it was so hard to think about, how is it going to look when I grow up? So the whole purpose of the project is to start [showing] how people are exploring that within their lives and how they’re living it and how it’s real for us.107

Yazzie’s portraits are quiet and intimate—a stark contrast to the intentional spectacle of drag shows and powwow dances or the behind-the-scenes voyeurism of Meek’s backstage images.108 Yazzie’s process is as important as the photographs that might be perceived as its product: extensive interviews with each subject invite connection with the photographer, who takes candid photographs throughout rather than crafting posed portraits. Subjects thereby become collaborators, offering a model of portraiture that, in parallel with the people it depicts, blends Indigenous and queer ways of knowing and being in the world. Yazzie has traveled across the country building relationships, and the resulting images are intimate, funny, ordinary, and profound. In this sense, they refuse an anthropological or art-historical drive to identify a typology or iconography of the Navajo lesbian. In the artist’s words, “I want to give voice, I want to give face, I want to give stories.”109 Like many of their contemporaries, Yazzie uses the expansive structure of the archive—the proliferation of diverse images and information—to push back against the stereotypical expectations of outsider audiences.110 At the same time, the project has personal meaning, as Yazzie sought a community of their own. As both the Warrior Women and the Dilbaa Project demonstrate, Yazzie frequently works in series. In our early conversations about the latter, the aggregation of images of lesbian families was central to their desire to create this body of work—as was the question of visibility. To make Diné and other Indigenous lesbian or queer people visible is to render the community real, offering models of family for the photographer even as it legitimates the individual families that they photograph. It is, moreover, an opportunity to assert the authenticity of queer Diné identity: to make space within the Navajo Nation for the queerness that is already inside it.

The Dilbaa Project

The series includes two portraits of the family of Mayda Benally, who was forty-one years old at the time Yazzie photographed her. (I use first names for the members of Mayda’s family throughout this essay to avoid confusion.) The two connected thanks to a notice that Yazzie put out on social media about the project. Talking with Yazzie and Blue, Mayda described her reaction when her wife, Gwenn, suggested that they participate: “I was like, you want to put our family out there?” Blue expressed gratitude for their participation, acknowledging that “we’re finding that it can be hard for people here, you know, people are scared.” Mayda, however, is used to standing out. “For me, in the Shiprock area, I was the first one out,” she told Blue and Yazzie. “And when [marriage] first got legalized in Albuquerque, we went down there and did it. We got legally married before it hit statewide [in 2013].”111 Their wedding was prompted partly by their adoption of Logan, their son, when he was just four days old.

In an outdoor portrait, the family is together, standing beneath a tree whose trunk curves to the right, as though it were eager to enfold Mayda with the rest of the family, extending the embrace within which Gwenn enfolds Logan (Plate 14). The tree is encircled in turn by holiday lights that ladder erratically up its trunk; its canopy spreads to obscure most of the blue sky overhead. Mayda holds a football and wears a loose black T-shirt, shorts that fall below her knees, and a baseball cap. Sunglasses mask her eyes, echoing those worn by her son. Gwenn wears a tank top that reveals her extensive tattoos, and denim shorts that land at mid-thigh. Logan’s orange T-shirt picks up the color of Gwenn’s tank, but aligns more closely with the fit of Mayda’s, and his shorts, like hers, fall below his knee. All three wear sneakers; all three are smiling broadly at the camera. Behind them, at the top of the slightly wild lawn, is a gray and yellow bungalow, with a car parked outside.

In the second photograph, Mayda and Gwenn are inside, standing on the threshold between the kitchen and an interstitial space (Plate 15). Mayda’s left hand rests on the counter, while her right arm encircles Gwenn’s shoulder. Her fingers curl over the edge of Gwenn’s tattoo, almost as though she were intentionally pointing to the large character at its center: 女, or “female.” “When I got my first tattoos,” Gwenn recalled, “I got my two female signs, and then I got my woman sign, and then I got ‘dream’ on the back.” The two women’s bodies are facing, so that Gwenn has to look over the “female” sign on her right shoulder to see the photographer. She makes eye contact with the camera, her smile wide; Mayda’s eyes are closed, as though she were in the middle of a laugh, or a sentence. Without being cluttered, the space is full of all the things we might expect in a suburban home, from paper towels to kids’ toys. Although Logan is absent from this photograph, his toys serve as a proxy for his presence, and we can easily imagine that he is nearby. Although in both photographs the family appears to be posing for the camera, the photograph itself does not look posed—something that Yazzie connects with the ethics of photojournalism, as opposed to art photography. “I don’t want to manipulate anything when it comes to photography because journalism is like that, and I started to see the beauty in that. In all these photos of women I’m taking it’s so raw and real and I appreciate it so much. That was one thing I always wondered about, too, with my art and with the real stories now. I’m still trying to figure that out a little bit.”112

I should be clear that I chose these two photographs, without input from Yazzie, from the sixty-seven photographs that they shared with me. These two images are not representative of the series; in fact, one thing that is most striking about the Dilbaa Project is that similarity between one image and all the others in the group is nowhere to be found. This diversity is even evident in this single family: both Mayda and Gwenn express their gender identity in terms of performative elements of dress, jewelry, and tattoos. When Blue asked the couple how they identified, noting that they had both used the word lesbian but wondering about additional concepts of gender or sexuality they might use for themselves, Gwenn started to ask a clarifying question, but Mayda interrupted with one word: “Butch.” Gwenn laughed, and when she caught her breath, exclaimed, “She might look butch, but she’s such a girl!” Mayda acknowledged that she’d heard the term two-spirit, but she had never applied it to herself. “I’ve never been traditional,” she elaborated.

Gwenn described her own self-presentation in terms of her coming-out story: “The only honest lesbian I knew when I first came out—and this was the mid-’90s—was an old, old-school lesbian, just like, the mullet, the whole nine yards. Sides shaved, everything. And I was like, okay, I have this to look up to? No.” Instead, she married (“a white man”) and had children, trying to do what, as a “Spanish Catholic” person, “you’re supposed to do: get married, have kids, have a white picket fence.” But eventually she began expressing her dissatisfaction with her life through self-fashioning:

I went from really, really girly to taking my hair all the way off, spiking it, and then the tattoos and the piercings, and then it was like, yeah, the boy here is not for me anymore. . . . I moved away for five years to Phoenix and of course you don’t grow up. It’s a wholly different culture down there. You know, I worked in a gay club, and just had that whole literally coming-out experience. . . . But it was a good thing. I found out who I was.113

Like Gwenn, Yazzie’s first experience of a gay “scene,” or community, was in Phoenix: “It’s not a healthy way to do it” was their comment.114 Gwenn was ostracized from her family for years after coming out (“all hell broke loose; I got disowned” is how she described it), but Mayda’s family was entirely supportive. “[In] my family, I have a lot of gay people,” she explained. “My brother is just like, out there, and I grew up all around my brother, and I was the only girl around him, and I pretty much just had my hair short all the time. I played baseball when I was seven, played, hung out with the boys all the time. And it stayed that way.” Her mother and cousins came to their wedding, and Gwenn noted how significant it felt “to marry into a family where gay is very accepted.” Mayda emphasized this by referring to language: “I’m [just] starting to know my dad’s side [of the family],” she mentioned, “and they’re really accepting, because they always call [Gwenn], you know, ‘Hi shi yázhi!’” This Navajo term of endearment is also a kinship term, and thus the speakers are recognizing Gwenn as a member of the family.115

The couple also described the language they use for themselves with their son, who has been deaf since birth. As Gwenn interpreted the American Sign Language vocabulary he used for their names, she explained: “How he differentiates between the two of us is, I’m mom [signing “mom”], because I’m his mom—I’m the girl-mom [laughter]—and then, her nickname is Rabbit, so it’s Rabbit-mom [signing “Rabbit-mom,” laughter].” Sign language gives the couple a special bond with their son: when they were working through the adoption process, their social worker pointed out the work they had done to connect Logan to the deaf school he attends, and as Gwenn noted, this was bringing him closer to the rest of his family. “We were giving family members a way to learn sign language so that they were able to communicate with him,” she explained to Blue and Yazzie. “That’s his language.” The parallels with the ongoing effort to recover and create accurate language for queer people in the Navajo community are striking, and in both situations translation poses challenges. Mayda makes the connection between Navajo and ASL explicit: “Navajo language is backwards, when you talk it,” she explained. “ASL is the same, when you translate it. He says, ‘with me play!’” As their conversation progresses, it becomes clear that language access sometimes impedes their son’s ability to participate in social life—but also that it has brought them closer as a family.

This experience flies in the face of the institutional opposition they encountered while trying to adopt Logan: despite their having been asked by his biological mother to take him, the judge deciding their case created a series of delays. Mayda phrased it less diplomatically: “My god, the Navajo Nation gave us crap, giving him up to two lesbians,” she recalled. “Termination of parental rights, that was the biggest thing the judge was being bitchy about.” But, as Gwenn observed gratefully, “then our social worker stepped in, and she was amazing.” The Navajo Nation’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage affects families as well as individuals—in this instance, compelling them to live in uncertainty for three years.116 Kath Weston observed in her landmark 1991 study of gay families that “little or no legal status exists for the relationships gay people create and may consider kin, relationships that include but are not limited to couples.”117 While Mayda and Gwenn could get legal recognition for their partnership outside the Navajo Nation via marriage, inside it their family status remains frighteningly vulnerable.118

New Ceremonies

Yazzie’s portraits of Mayda Benally and her family represent Indigenous queerness as family-centered, focused on love and acceptance rather than alienation and rejection. They are images that pointedly fly in the face of current Navajo law—there are no protections from anti-LGBTQ2S+ discrimination in the Navajo Nation. And yet, as people have pointed out time and again, there is overwhelming evidence for more expansive understandings of gender and sexuality in ancestral Diné teachings and practice. As Yazzie asked, after they sought a traditional healer to marry them in 2019: “Why are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit people being denied access to ceremony?” “At one point,” they recalled, “I found a medicine woman who supported same-sex marriages, but only if they were performed in a church or other non-Diné venue. She said that according to Navajo tradition, we couldn’t be blessed in the same way as a man and a woman, and she declined to perform the ceremony.”119 But Diné ceremonies have always changed over time—and in this instance, Yazzie believes, there is even precedent in ancestral ceremony. “I’ve heard a traditional healer say that there was [ceremony for weddings between nonbinary gender couples],” they explain, “but no one remembers it anymore. But those ceremonies came from somewhere, so I’m pretty sure we could get them back, too.” For Yazzie, though, the value of ceremony is reduced if it isn’t responsive to contemporary life. “We do have all the resources for traditional healers to realize what’s going on in today’s society,” they noted.

They would object that the language around gender—like “cisgender”—is colonial language, but we have it already in the Navajo language, and their job is to be healers. I don’t understand why they aren’t trying. It shouldn’t matter, based on gender—because that’s how the Navajo used to be, a long time ago, it wasn’t about gender, it was about being human, being five-fingered, realizing that there can be a relationship like that. A lot of the traditional healers are unwilling to create ceremony and I don’t understand why. Why don’t we have new ceremonies?120

Yazzie’s sentiments were prefigured by the Shoshone-Métis/Cree writer Owlfeather in Living the Spirit: “Traditions need to be researched and revived. If traditions have been lost, then new ones should be borrowed from other tribes to create groups or societies for gay Indians that would function in the present,” he wrote.121 In contrast to Owlfeather’s proposal of a pan-Indian tradition, however, Yazzie is specifically invested in a Navajo ceremony: both history and cultural survival, they argue, demand it.

Despite the intensity of Yazzie’s advocacy for queer rights and other aspects of Diné social justice, they say “I never thought of myself as an activist.” Instead, they frame their work in terms of community. The Dilbaa Project

really reminds me of the kind of community I would want, the kind that I would want to build. When we moved back home . . . it’s been really hard for us to have a sense of community, just being who we are. I mean, there’s always our family, but building one outside of that . . . I would like this project to remain [visible] so that couples can come together to support each other in that way, sharing stories and just normalizing it. I remember when we moved back [to the Navajo Nation], my wife was like, let’s go hang out with Mayda and Gwenn—just to have that community. I think it’s really important to have a safe space like that, because we’ve never had that. . . . I just wish I had that community.122

In her portraits of Mayda, Gwenn, and Logan, Yazzie offers an alternative to those emotions, replacing them with love, connection, and safety. The photographer shows us a family—and we recognize it as a queer one. It caught my attention because family was where our conversation—mine and Yazzie’s—started, several years ago. I had sought Yazzie out because of my interest in their warrior women, and in the course of conversation over ice cream, they mentioned that they had been contemplating a series of portraits of people with whom they identified, and who were hard to descry in the cultural landscape. We talked about visibility and identity, and language; they—and Blue—introduced me to the word dilbaa.123 I want to see people like me, Yazzie summarized. People within our culture. One day, we want to have children, and I want to see that it’s possible. I want them to have a community.

I asked them if they had seen Catherine Opie’s portraits of lesbian families. Opie is more famous for her portraits of queer people in the BDSM community, but in the 1990s she created a series of portraits of parents and children, intentionally domesticating her vision of queerness. Often, when photographers conceive community-based portrait projects, we hear words like celebrate, or document, privileging the photographer as witness rather than participant. Opie’s artistic perspective, for example, has been described as “consistently watchful and disarmingly nonjudgmental.”124 But Yazzie was describing something else in our conversation: recognition. And I do not mean in the sense of “gaydar,” the mystical phenomenon by which queer people recognize other queers. Indeed, it was precisely the opposite: in the shock, gratification, and sheer delight of seeing others, Yazzie more emphatically recognized themselves. Asked about their audience, the artist replies, “I’m thinking of little me, on the inside—years from now, questioning themselves but seeing these different photos of women, two women, raising a family. That’s what I’ve always wanted to see, since I was a kid.”125 No matter one’s age when it first happens, this sense of recognition is a fundamental part of the queer emotional landscape—and it informed the visual politics of Laura Gilpin’s work just as it informs The Dilbaa Project.