A Navaho Family

Love and Theft: Mary Ann Nakai

“Among the many Navaho people of the Red Rock area with whom Betsy worked,” wrote Gilpin in The Enduring Navaho,

one family, near neighbors, were special friends. Francis Nakai and his wife (we never have known what her name is, so we have always called her “Mrs. Francis”) lived in a small frame house directly south of Betsy’s quarters. . . . Mrs. Francis was one of Betsy’s frequent visitors. She would come, sit for a while, drink a cup of coffee, but, as she spoke no English, conversation was very limited. She had great charm, however, and whenever I paid Betsy a visit I saw her frequently.9

In countless letters and throughout The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin and Forster point to the intimacy of Navajo naming conventions in which nicknames convey individual history and family relations. Early in the book, Gilpin makes clear to her readers that any Navajo individual has several names: a ceremonial name known by very few; a name known to other Diné; a descriptive nickname received as a child; and a school name. Despite all these names, “Navaho custom does not permit the direct addressing of a person,” Gilpin tells us. “He is spoken of indirectly as ‘my sister’s son,’ or ‘my nephew’s wife.’”10 Later critics have periodically pointed to the lack of “real” names in The Enduring Navaho as evidence of Gilpin’s distance and stereotypical attitude toward the people she photographed, but as her decades-long relationship with the Nakais reveals, such criticisms are at best misinformed.

Gilpin made many portraits of the Nakais, first in the 1930s and then when she resumed serious work on The Enduring Navaho after World War II. Several appear throughout her book, each contributing individually to her account of Navajo modernization and sovereignty. Together, the portraits offer quiet evidence of the longevity of Gilpin and Forster’s connection to the Nakai family, and of the friendship’s contribution to the couple’s changing understanding of Navajo politics over the course of the twentieth century. As Larry McSwain, a reporter for the Gallup Independent, argued in 1955, when Gilpin took photographs of the same people, decades apart, and juxtaposed the early portraits with the later ones, viewers were presented with “a unique contrast to stereotyped Indian photographs.”11 According to McSwain, stand-alone images such as those created by Curtis or Jackson presented impressions of a “timeless” Indian; in contrast, Gilpin’s sequence of portraits of the Nakais, taken over thirty years, highlights them as individuals looking out at viewers from the present as well as from various points in the recent past.

Gilpin and Forster communicated with Mary Ann Nakai via hand signs and, if someone was available, interpreters.12 Despite this apparent obstacle, they were fast friends, spending time together in Red Rock and occasionally traveling together to ceremonies and other destinations. One such trip, in 1932, was to Santa Fe: Gilpin, Forster, Nakai, and Forster’s translator, Kellywood, went to visit the Indian Arts Fund collection of Navajo blankets at the Laboratory of Anthropology. “Following the experience we stopped to say ‘hello’ to friends of ours who lived in one of the loveliest of Southwestern homes.” Recounting the story in The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin seems poised to reiterate tropes familiar from the travelogue and ethnographic genres of cross-cultural encounter:

We were all invited to return that evening for dinner, when there was to be a birthday party for the son of the house. Mrs. Francis’ acceptance of that evening was something I shall always remember. She had never been away from Red Rock, and her only contact with any white man’s home had been the very simple apartment Betsy had in the old hospital building, where for the first time Mrs. Francis sat at a table to eat. At our friends’ house that evening, we sat down to a formal dinner for twelve people at a table exquisitely set with shining silver, sparkling glass, lighted candles, and all the trimmings for a birthday party. Mrs. Francis quietly watched what others did, and, with the utmost dignity, followed suit as though she were accustomed to such elaborateness. . . . As we took our departure [Kellywood] spoke to our hostess, saying, “My relative thanks you very much for everything and she wishes that she understood English so she could have known all that has been talked about.” As we returned to our motel, I wondered if I could have conducted myself with such perfect poise and dignity if I had found myself in completely foreign surroundings with such different customs, and listening to a language I did not understand.13

Gilpin’s narrative is redolent of bourgeois values, but it also flips the touristic script in an unexpected way. Instead of presenting Mary Ann Nakai as a curiosity, displayed to their hosts and to the Enduring Navaho reader as an Other whose reactions to an unfamiliar but normalized environment must be pitched to entertain, Gilpin’s narrative privileges Nakai’s perspective and refuses to spectacularize her responses. The Santa Fe home is an alien environment that Nakai negotiates in a matter-of-fact manner; the challenges posed by the table setting are met with the same acceptance as the language barrier. In her quotation of Kellywood’s translation of Nakai’s thanks, Gilpin even hints at the impropriety of the Anglo hosts, who have apparently not taken the time to include Nakai in their conversation—despite Kellywood’s presence and profession as a translator. The photographer’s final observation, meanwhile, about how she might react were the circumstances reversed, is a quietly witty commentary on the project of The Enduring Navaho that invites readers to judge Gilpin’s success for themselves.

The primary purpose of the trip to Santa Fe was to give Mary Ann Nakai an opportunity to study Navajo blankets at the newly established Laboratory of Anthropology (now part of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture). As the market for Navajo weaving expanded, Forster and Gilpin became nodes in personal and professional networks that connected museums, associations, collectors, and weavers. The couple’s association with the Laboratory reached back before its founding; they had known its director, Jesse Nusbaum, since his tenure as superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, where Gilpin had been commissioned to take photographs in 1925. Their visit to the Laboratory almost a decade later was unlike the typical tourist stop, in which “large buses, two or three, filled to capacity, would drive up.”14 In contrast to these massed visitors, preoccupied with market values and museum spectacle, the little group from Red Rock was intensely focused on a small slice of the Laboratory’s collection that had personal meaning for Kellywood and Nakai. The Laboratory holds some of the earliest extant Navajo textiles, dating from the eighteenth century, as well as a large collection of nineteenth-century weavings.

Between approximately 1820 and the Hwéeldi period, Navajo weaving was characterized by formal simplicity.15 So-called first-phase blankets include only horizontal stripes woven in red, blue, black, and white.16 Although there is no documentary evidence of the specific weavings Nakai and Kellywood looked at, several examples of this style of blanket are at the Laboratory: for example, a Ute-style first-phase blanket from 1850, originally owned by Ouray, a leader of the Uncompaghre Ute, and his wife, Chepita, has six alternating dark red-brown and white stripes on either side of a central block of alternating blue and brown stripes (Plate 11). An 1860 blanket incorporates a brighter red into a similar palette of dark blue, dark brown, and white (Plate 12).17 Both were donated to the Laboratory by Frances Stewart, wife of the well-known Colorado statesman Philip Stewart and a prominent collector of historic Native American art. The Stewarts lived in Colorado Springs from 1900 onward—where it seems likely, given their shared interests and social class, that they were in the same social network as Gilpin and Forster.18 The Stewarts’ collection was one of several systematically acquired by John D. Rockefeller when he established the Laboratory in 1927. Rockefeller worked with collectors and anthropologists as well as directly with weavers and other creators to build the collection, giving us some insight into the impact of colonization on the material history of Diné Bikéyah.19

The group from Red Rock spent the day looking at weavings. “Mr. Nusbaum and Dr. [Harry] Mera spent several generous hours showing us beautiful specimens of blankets from the vaults,” wrote Forster to her sister, Emily. The nurse lauded the earlier, less elaborate style of Navajo weaving, explaining to Emily that “Navajo designs have so deteriorated with the demands of our American market that I long to . . . renew old ideals and simplify the elaborations which our Trading Posts display.” She described the visitors’ reactions to the Laboratory collection in glowing terms:

Mrs. Francis and Timothy were entranced. Timothy repeated again and again in awed wonder, “We’ve heard about the old blankets but we sure didn’t know that they were as beautiful as this,” and Mrs. Francis touched them all with careful fingers, very evidently making a quiet study of texture and weave, color and design. I am anxious to see the result of such inspiration in her weaving hereafter.20

Forster’s desire to show Nakai classic designs was motivated by an investment in Navajo cultural sovereignty—albeit a romanticized and patronizing one. In keeping with this claim, Charles Amsden observed in his 1934 connoisseurial text, Navajo Weaving: Its Technic and Its History, that “the American . . . is beginning to demand that the Indian be himself again. Specifically, he wants a larger Navajo ingredient in Navajo weaving and is encouraging a revival of the once-despised native styles.”21 Ironically, appreciation for “classic” Navajo styles was promoted in and invigorated by precisely the market that many—including Forster—blamed for their decline. Forster’s goal aligned with a broader trend of “museum anthropologists utiliz[ing] their collections to teach young weavers the ‘old ways,’” supported by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, a U.S. government entity “directed . . . toward improving marketing strategies” for Native American craft products.22 As the anthropologist Laurie D. Webster notes, “Revival weavings produced between 1920 and 1950 were largely influenced and promoted by art patrons, museum anthropologists, traders, and government officials, bound together by loose networks of associations, boards, and committees.”23 The Laboratory of Anthropology continued actively to acquire early Navajo weaving and “explicitly maintained its collections for the benefit of Indian artists as well as the non-native public.” “Benefit,” however, was defined in Anglo market-driven terms that privileged a specific notion of cultural authenticity over the needs or interests (beyond short-term economic ones) of contemporary weavers: in 1933, for example, the Laboratory “sponsored a conference for Navajo weavers to ‘awaken an interest in the old styles and methods, as exemplified in the Laboratory’s collections.’”24

Other luminaries of the Santa Fe museum world also sponsored the revival of traditional weaving practices throughout the first half of the twentieth century: for example, in 1930, Mary Wheelwright began offering a prize at the annual Gallup Ceremonial for “the best blanket of vegetal dye and native pattern.”25 Wheelwright, like Gilpin and Forster, was a member of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which promoted old-style blankets throughout the 1930s by “distribut[ing] photographs and sketches of older blankets to schools, traders, and weavers through a lending system.”26 There is no doubt that a sense of pride was felt by those who facilitated such exchanges—including Gilpin. As she wrote to Herbert Putnam, Brenda’s father and the Librarian of Congress, in 1934, “To see a group of Indian potters come in from a distant Pueblo to study the marvelous collections in the Laboratory, and to see their thrills over the work of their own ancestors is more than an interesting spectacle.”27 At this early date, the photographer does not seem to have considered the possibility that the Laboratory’s collections might more appropriately have remained at the “distant” Pueblos—or with the Diné families—from which they had been collected, often in dubious ethical circumstances.28

While Forster, Gilpin, and the Laboratory staff celebrated the roles they were playing in cultural preservation, Kellywood spoke directly to their responsibility for loss. He told those assembled “again and again” that he and Nakai “didn’t know that [the old weavings] were as beautiful as this.” His repeated protest calls attention to the destruction of cultural memory enacted by Anglo collectors who took material away from Diné and other Indigenous communities, reproaching the Laboratory for practices that, counter to its mission of increasing Indigenous access to collections, had significantly impoverished Native communities. Amplifying Kellywood’s words, Nakai’s sensory interactions with the weavings—“touch[ing] them all with careful fingers”—were caresses that spoke to the emotion of reunion and reconnection. The irony of Nakai’s institutionally regulated touch being facilitated by two women who had been drawn to Dinétah for the physical freedom it offered them need hardly be pointed out—except that Forster interpreted Kellywood’s response only as “wonder,” and Nakai’s physical attention to each weaving simply as “study.” As we look and listen more closely, however, their actions and words register as profound expressions of mourning in the face of cultural loss—or, more specifically, a history of theft that had intensified with the United States’ colonization of Dinétah in the nineteenth century.

“It is probable,” wrote the art critic W. J. Hoffman in 1895, “that more really good examples [of Navajo weaving] can now be seen in New York than in New Mexico.” In Navajo life weavings were primarily items to be worn, sat upon, or sold. Looms were a standard piece of home furniture, and in many of Gilpin’s photographs the loom, with its partially woven contents, is an eye-catching feature. As wall coverings, however, finished weavings appear only occasionally—as in Gilpin’s 1953 photograph of Mrs. John Harvey and Paulina Barton sewing (Figure 4.5). Wall space was needed for storage, so decorative elements of any kind tended to be small in scale; and because weaving was a vital trade item, finished textiles tended most often to leave the home. By the turn of the twentieth century, the enthusiasm among collectors for Navajo weavings—which Hoffman and others encouraged them to see as “admirable covers for divans, portières, or wall-hangings”—was matched by that among anthropologists and museum curators, with predictable results.29 In their history of the Navajo Tribal Museum, former directors Russell P. Hartman and David E. Doyel gave witness to the cultural trauma of ethnographic collecting: “A growing worldwide interest in America’s native cultures since the late 1800s had resulted in the removal of unknown quantities of paleontological, archaeological, and ethnographic material from Navajoland through the first half of [the twentieth] century.”30 The historian Eric Lott has compellingly documented the ways in which this type of cultural theft, framed in terms of admiration and even love, is at the structural heart of American colonial appropriation.31 The paradox of this structure is clear in Forster’s narratives: her affection for Nakai, as well as her love of Navajo weaving, is evident throughout her letters, and yet in the 1930s both she and Gilpin embraced an institutionalization of Navajo history that was framed by Anglo expertise and authority and expedited by large-scale material appropriation. At the Laboratory of Anthropology, Mary Ann Nakai was an active witness to, and resister of, this process.

Lost Income, Erased Agency

In Navajo society throughout the first half of the twentieth century, weaving represented family relationships, economic power, and sovereignty. Sheep, and the products produced from their wool, were historically at the heart of Navajo economics, but the pastoral economy was severely disrupted by the 1930s stock reduction program. Interviewed by a reporter for the Denver Post in 1954, Gilpin blamed the “deplorable” living conditions in Navajo communities on John Collier’s disastrous stock reduction program of the 1930s: “Their whole economic system was upset with the sheep reduction program,” she asserted, implicating that policy, and U.S. government mismanagement generally, in the ongoing paucity of healthcare and education on the Navajo Nation—as well as in the destruction of “a way of life that had its own perfections.”32 In the 1920s and ’30s, the debate over sheep—and, by direct extension, over weaving—was a key component of discourses around Navajo sovereignty, intersecting with gender politics, domestic assimilation and education, the emergence of wage labor, stock reduction and breeding programs, and more.33

Art historians have only recently begun attending to the economic, cultural, and political significance of Navajo weaving, rather than investigating its formal qualities in the service of connoisseurship. Formalist approaches to the study of Navajo weaving were in keeping with the preoccupation with authenticity that motivated dealers—and Forster—in their attempts to revive nineteenth-century textile designs among twentieth-century weavers. “Empirical description tends to dominate Southwest textile studies,” noted Kathy M’Closkey in 1993, as preface to her revolutionary feminist analysis of the economic impact of weaving on the Navajo Nation.34 It also disguised an exploitative history that M’Closkey characterizes as having “enslaved the Navajo weaver to her spindle to protect the [Harvey] Company’s interests.”35 At the same time, within their own families Navajo women “retained complete control of” their textiles rather than ceding economic power to Navajo men as White traders had initially anticipated. Women traded their own weavings and held their own accounts, using their income to provide vital contributions to their households.36 “Decade after decade,” M’Closkey emphasizes, “the survival of the Navajo rested primarily on women’s textile production and the wool from their sheep.”37 The historian suggests that the economic significance of Navajo weaving has been downplayed because it was controlled by women, a form of discrimination familiar to both Forster and Gilpin as they built their own careers. It is not surprising, then, that when Forster wrote to her sister describing the 1932 visit to Santa Fe, she not only acknowledged but foregrounded the role played by weaving’s economic power in its aesthetic development.

In that letter, Forster’s use of the second-person plural possessive (“our American markets”) in her condemnation of contemporary Navajo weaving implicitly included Navajo weavers alongside the proprietors of trading posts and their tourist customers. In other words, Forster’s grammar interpellated the weavers as “American” via their participation in market capitalism—even though for Kellywood and Nakai, the visit to the Laboratory of Anthropology may well have underscored their oppositional relationship to Americanness and to the colonial history that destroyed, appropriated, and then belatedly claimed to preserve Navajo culture. That preservation occurred in the context of salvage anthropology: museological and anthropological practices that privileged the products of a culture defined as past—and not a historical past, with all of the acknowledgment of continual development and change entailed therein, but one that was characterized as traditional and timeless despite the market’s dependence upon the weavers’ ongoing presence and production.38 Whether she intended it or not, Forster’s grammar recognizes the centrality of the weavers themselves to the development of the market for their products—something that few commentators in the 1930s admitted.

The economic value of weaving is visible in a series of portraits that Gilpin made of Nakai and her sons Luis and Juan in 1932, just before the women set off on their trip to Santa Fe.39 In all the photographs, the young mother is wrapped in a blanket—but not one that she wove herself. Instead, it is a Pendleton blanket, in all likelihood purchased with proceeds from Nakai’s own weaving, hinting that the weaver gained more economic and social value from selling her work than from retaining it for use in her own home.40 This was true for many, if not all, Navajo weavers by this time; similar commercial blankets were worn by people across the Navajo Nation in this period—as we see in Gilpin’s photograph of the meeting at Counselor and many other images included in The Enduring Navaho. In Gilpin’s work, as in others’ photographs from this period, such commercial blankets are ubiquitous. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Pendleton blankets became indelibly associated with Native American culture and aesthetics; as Hartman and Doyel note, “The Navajo have become so closely identified with [Pendleton blankets and other non-Navajo items in the museum collection] that they might be considered part of the native material culture.”41 In some sense, then, Gilpin was simply recording everyday fact when she photographed her friend. She was also aware, however, of the iconic quality—and corresponding market value—of a photograph of a beautiful Navajo woman wrapped in a blanket. This calculation is evident in the photographs Gilpin took that day: although one shot of Mary Ann and Juan is intimately candid and informal (Figure 4.6), most of the portraits of Mary Ann are framed closely around her head and shoulders, her expression stereotypically serious. In some, Gilpin used raking light to call attention equally to the young woman’s silver jewelry and the contours of her face. The photographer sold one of these more formal portraits as a postcard, titled simply Navaho Indian Woman, throughout the rest of her career (Figure 4.7).

Navaho Indian Woman depicts Nakai in profile, her hair pulled back in traditional style and held in place with two bobby pins. An earring hangs from her exposed ear, and other items of jewelry are visible at her neck between the closely held folds of the blanket. Her face is expressionless, and the portrait has all the atmosphere of a mug shot or a phrenological study—contexts that are troublingly relevant frames for the image in its public role as a representative depiction of a Navajo woman, rather than a portrait of an individual. Gilpin’s decision to photograph Nakai in profile presents the young woman as an ethnographic type in keeping with several other portraits in her set of postcards of Navajo subjects. This formal device reduces Nakai to an object of a touristic (implicitly White) gaze, without any possibility of returning that gaze. Wrapped in a commercial blanket rather than one that she wove herself—unlike the potters, weavers, and silversmiths in other postcards created by Gilpin, who are depicted in the process and presence of their creative labor—and equally unusually presented in passive profile rather than at work, Nakai is denied any creative potential by the composition. Collaboratively and independently, Gilpin and Nakai both sold the products of their creative labor in a market that aggressively shaped the aesthetics of those products. But as the trip to Santa Fe—and the portraits Gilpin made of Nakai on the eve of that trip—reminds us, those market demands affected each woman in markedly different ways. Did Gilpin understand the dangerous politics of Navaho Indian Woman? Surely the answer in 1932 was negative—but over time, her understanding deepened.

The anthropologist M. Jill Ahlberg-Yohe has noted that despite extensive scholarship on the market for Navajo weaving, “far less attention has been paid to local conceptualizations of the exchange systems within which these transactions take place or to Navajo weavers’ perspectives on the exchange of their weavings.”42 Forster did not record whether she asked Nakai directly about her experience at the Laboratory of Anthropology, and despite my suggestion that we read the weaver’s reaction differently than Forster did, it is impossible to deduce her opinions about any aspect of her weaving from extant records. And yet Ahlberg-Yohe’s interviews with weavers working seventy years after Nakai’s visit to the Laboratory of Anthropology suggest a possible scope within which the latter understood her interactions with the weavings in the collection. “My mother told me these things,” one of Ahlberg-Yohe’s informants told her. “Always take care of the sheep. Never forget the sheep. Dibé, dibé, they will feed you. They clothe you. They bring you things. Weaving is like that. It brings you things.” Later, the same woman underscored her comment: “Remember what I told you about that one time? It is naalyéhé. Weaving brings things, the naalyéhé, it brings things like the sheep, the jewelry, the food. You get things from weaving.”43 This exchange is not simply economic or transactional, however: rather, Ahlberg-Yohe learns from the women she spoke with that it “involves notions and acts of reciprocity, respect, and exchange beyond the marketplace. . . . Weaving is tied to a way of viewing the world. . . . Selling a weaving is not only a viable source of income, it is also part of a cosmological exchange among Navajo weavers and the Holy People, or the Diyin Dine’é, and the world around them.”44 By 1950, Gilpin was beginning to understand the significance of weaving to her friend, and to the Navajo people more broadly—and by the time she planned the final version of The Enduring Navaho a decade or so later, she chose to include a different portrait of Mary Ann Nakai from that 1932 session: the candid shot of her with her son, Juan.

If Navaho Indian Woman encapsulated the settler colonial gaze, then the double portrait of Mary Ann and Juan Nakai reveals the intimate gazes of friends and family. Unlike the stereotypical stoicism of the postcard photograph, both mother and child in this image appear distracted by something—or someone—entertaining them beyond the frame. Nakai’s mouth is turning up in the beginning of a smile, and Juan’s more skeptical curiosity suggests that perhaps his older brother, Luis, is the one whose off-camera antics are more compelling than the black box and lens of Gilpin’s large-format camera. As in the more stereotypical portraits of Mary Ann, the white wall behind Nakai and her son is utterly blank—almost as though this were a studio portrait, even though Gilpin’s description makes it clear that they are at home, in the “small frame house directly south of Betsy’s quarters, perhaps a quarter of a mile away,” that the Nakais had lent to Kellywood when he first started working as Forster’s translator.45 Unlike the profile portrait that Gilpin had used for her postcard, here we can easily imagine all present dissolving into laughter seconds after the shutter was released, shattering the grim institutionality of the blank wall behind them. Other portraits Gilpin made of two of the Nakai boys together (Juan and Luis) capture similarly casual moments. Returning to her studio in Colorado Springs in 1933, Gilpin sent prints of their portraits to the boys—in keeping with her standard practice of paying sitters in kind, but also as a gesture of friendship. Francis wrote back, closing his chatty letter with a note that they “were very glad to get [their] pictures.”46

A Navaho Family

In the 1950s, the Navajo Tribal Council took on the task of resisting the wholesale expropriation of Diné material culture from an institutional vantage point. “The possibility of establishing a tribal museum to control the loss of these materials, and to preserve them instead in Navajoland for all Navajo people, was discussed as early as 1950,” Hartman and Doyel record, “but not until 1961 was the Navajo Tribal Museum actually established.”47 After decades spent working in and for colonial institutions, Gilpin enthusiastically supported the Navajo Tribal Museum, working with its first director, Martin Link, to donate a set of fifty of her photographs that she specified must be kept and exhibited on the Navajo Nation.48 Although neither Forster nor Gilpin had initially perceived their 1932 visit to Santa Fe in terms of colonial theft, by 1968 Gilpin would offer her readers Nakai’s experience as witness to U.S. imperialism—and her authority as a Diné woman and family matriarch in the face of its effects on the Navajo Nation—as the powerful culminating portrait of The Enduring Navaho.

Forster was forced to resign her position as a field nurse in Red Rock when the Association on American Indian Affairs ran out of funds in 1933. “When the final farewells were said,” Forster noted in a letter to her friend Marion, “I saw Mrs. Francis’s weeping head descend to Laura’s shoulder . . . My heart is truly hurt by the parting.”49 The couple returned to Colorado, pursuing other projects until the onset of World War II. The war years brought further disruption: Forster fell ill with a vicious case of polioencephalitis, and Gilpin found war work as a photographer for Boeing, in Wichita, Kansas. Between Forster’s illness and Gilpin’s move to Wichita, it was unsurprising that the couple spent years apart from their friends in Red Rock. That changed when the couple moved to Santa Fe after the war. It had been seventeen years since they had last seen each other, Gilpin recalled alongside her portraits of the Nakais in the epilogue of The Enduring Navaho,

and we found many changes. Still living in the same little house, they then had two daughters, much younger than the boys we had first known. The oldest son had been killed in the European theatre of World War II, and almost the only object in the room in which we were sitting was the flag that had been over the boy’s coffin at the time of his burial in France. Both Francis and his wife seemed dejected and we were distressed by the change.50

The group portrait that later became known as A Navaho Family takes up a full page in the epilogue, facing text and two smaller, earlier photographs: the 1932 candid image of Mary Ann and Juan, and a formal portrait of Francis taken the same year.51 Each family member wears a slightly different expression, but they all look at us—at the photographer—unsmilingly. Gilpin characterizes Francis and Mary Ann as “dejected,” whereas the three children’s gazes have an uncompromising quality about them. They interrogate us (or Gilpin) demanding that we (or she) answer for—and to—the image’s disquietude. The photograph is deceptively simple: the group variously sits and stands in a shallow space against the white wall. Gilpin’s composition is firmly centered on Mary Ann, seated in a rocking chair. She is flanked by two young girls whose hands cradle her chair and knee protectively. Uncanny doubles of the Nakais’ absent sons, they remind us (along with Gilpin’s text) of all that Mary Ann Nakai has lost—but they also represent her future. To her left, standing, are her husband, Francis, and to her right, three more children stand or sit. One is cropped out of the frame, underscoring Gilpin’s insistent centering of Mary Ann and hinting at the incompleteness of the family group. Another child leans against the back of the rocking chair, visually balancing the younger girl at Mary Ann’s lap. Their bodies spiral around the photograph, trailing from the lower left up, across the flag, down Francis’s body, back up through the younger girl, to the seated woman at its center.

Behind and beneath them, the photograph is divided into three tiers: bare floorboards, white wall, and the lower half of the American flag. The flag is immense: wider than the family group, it extends beyond three sides of the frame, filling more than a third of the composition. Gilpin has placed herself at a slightly oblique angle, transforming the stripes of the flag into perspective lines that hint at a space beyond and exacerbate the claustrophobia of the space we can see. The blank white wall—a blankness that is a stark sign of architectural assimilationism and the colonial gaze of tourist-driven studio photography—is now largely covered by the flag. The oppressive materiality of walls that represented patriarchal, institutional, and colonial subjugation was described by the poet Adrienne Rich in “Origins and History of Consciousness,” published in 1978, just after she came out as a lesbian. “No one lives in this room / without confronting the whiteness of the wall.” Rich’s words invite us to consider the possibility and limits of connection—“the dream of a common language,” as she styled it in her collection’s title—in oblique stanzas that could equally be about queerness or cross-cultural identification, witnessing the trauma that adheres to both.52 In A Navaho Family, the white wall is covered by the funerary flag, a symbol of violence that Gilpin amputates arbitrarily in order to keep Mary Ann at the center of her frame.

All we see of the flag is its lower seven stripes and a fragment of the bottom row of stars. Spread across the wall, its effect differs from the draped flag visible in Gilpin’s photograph of the Tribal Council chamber even though that flag, too, is only partially visible. Opened out and cropped so that we see only its lower register, the flag bears striking formal similarity to the horizontal stripes of nineteenth-century Navajo weavings, recalling Nakai’s experience of cultural loss at the Laboratory of Anthropology and also aligning her son’s service with Diné categories of honor. Early weavings are commonly known as “chief’s blankets” because they were prized as status symbols among Navajo people and those with whom they traded. Seen through this lens, the U.S. flag hanging behind and above Mary Ann becomes an appropriate metaphor for the high regard in which military service was (and is) held among many Navajo people. At the same time, it remains a poignant reminder of the family’s personal loss. Gilpin’s photograph holds these paradoxical meanings in tension, allowing for slippage between institutional and individual meanings as well as between past and present.

Gilpin’s epilogue tells the whole family history, including Francis’s recent death and Forster’s nostalgia as she contemplates the loss of her friend alongside changes in the Red Rock landscape. It is a poignant moment in the book’s narrative, made more somber by the drawn faces in A Navaho Family and the contrast between that portrait and those facing it, taken almost two decades earlier. Seen side by side, the stripes of Mary Ann Nakai’s blanket in 1932 very obviously echo those of the American flag in 1950, reminding readers that the passage of time revealed in her face has likewise been marked by significant cultural and historical change. These juxtapositions invite us to scrutinize the two images—and particularly Mary Ann, who from one photograph to the other turns her attention from her children to the camera and the woman standing behind it. Gilpin’s pairing foregrounds her own changing perspective on her subjects as well as the physical changes they have undergone. Intimate as it is, the personal story of their friendship has a political edge, brought into focus by the flag’s horizontal stripes.

The Flag on the Navajo Nation

Two years after she photographed the Nakai family with the American flag, Gilpin returned to the subject of the U.S. flag and the Navajo with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s visit to the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial in August 1952. Eisenhower was in Gallup on August 10 after having made numerous appearances in Denver, Colorado, over the course of the preceding month. He was speaking in support of Republican congressional candidates and the expansion of Social Security and against prejudice and bigotry.53 Gilpin’s images show a variety of Native people in regalia and street clothes, as well as military and marching band uniforms, waiting in the shade for the war hero to appear. In one photograph, a crowd of people that features several feather bonnets and a U.S. flag greets the Continental Airlines plane from which Eisenhower descends; in another, the general walks through the crowd beneath a Fort Wingate American Legion flag that is flanked by the state flags of Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the U.S. flag. But the U.S. flag upon which Gilpin focused her camera repeatedly was one that was carried, horizontally, by eight Navajo women who joined the crowd behind Eisenhower as he walked from the plane to the airport terminal (Figure 4.8). Their horizontal flag recalls the flags held over veterans’ caskets in a military funeral—one of the few times that a flag appearing horizontally is officially permitted.54 No written record survives to tell us why these women were carrying the U.S. flag in this manner—or whether it was a coincidence that a woman carrying a child in a cradleboard seems to accompany them, as seen in the negative (unfortunately blurred) that I reproduce here—but the apparent juxtaposition of symbols of military sacrifice and maternal love is a powerful statement. It is made all the more so when we consider the contrast between the symbols of Diné matriliny and those of U.S. patriarchy in the crowd—the latter of which included a flag from one of the two forts built by Kit Carson to support his genocide of the Navajo people in 1864.

The clearest view of the women and flag that Gilpin captured appears to have been taken before Eisenhower’s plane landed, suggesting an innocuous reason for the emblem’s horizontality: it maximized its visibility from the air.55 The women holding the flag are dressed in long skirts and velvet blouses that are typical for the period, with silver and turquoise jewelry, and scarves or shawls that drape around their shoulders and hang down their backs. Surrounded by markers of Diné wealth and economic autonomy, the flag’s identity as a woven textile is suddenly foregrounded, making explicit the political participation and authority of Diné women. As the Navajo people negotiated their relationship to the United States, they increasingly had to reconcile the high status of women in Diné culture with American misogyny. Recall that of all her photographs of the tribal officer elections in 1955, Gilpin chose to publish the one depicting two women in the act of voting. It likewise comes as no surprise that Gilpin’s photographs of Eisenhower’s visit to Gallup focus on the exercise of visual sovereignty by Navajo women, rather than on the body of the presidential candidate. When Eisenhower visited the Gallup Intertribal, the Navajo women who carried a U.S. flag to meet the presidential candidate were asserting their political relevance—and power—in the face of Eisenhower’s masculinist, military framing of Native American history, American politics, and U.S.–Navajo relations.

Eisenhower was campaigning for the U.S. presidency partly on the strength of his service in World War II, during which he served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe—in other words, he had been the oldest Nakai son’s ultimate commanding officer. The future president recognized that the 1952 election would be the first in which Navajo people could vote in both national and state elections. His strategy for campaigning in Native American—and specifically Navajo—communities was directly tied to his own military record, as well as to the recent history of Navajo service in the war. Newly enfranchised, and deeply proud of their role in the war, Navajo people were a valuable audience for Eisenhower, who articulated his knowledge of, and appreciation for, Native American cultures in militarized terms. In his speech at the Intertribal, he addressed some ten thousand people, representing at least thirty-five tribes. He

paid the highest tribute to the performance of Indian soldiers in battle, and told them they must now exercise their newly granted right to vote to the fullest as a final demonstration of good citizenship. . . . Eisenhower recalled that his boyhood heroes . . . had been Indian warriors and not army officers, and he listed them: “Red Cloud, Chief Dog, Rain in the Face, Young Man Afraid of his Horse, Crazy Horse, [and] Geronimo.”56

Such rhetoric belied Eisenhower’s actual politics regarding Indian Country, which were firmly in support of assimilation and termination.

Under Eisenhower, the U.S. government reversed its course on tribal sovereignty, passing legislation that introduced termination of Native tribes.57 As Gilpin wrote to a publisher at Viking Press who had expressed interest in her manuscript of The Enduring Navaho, “we hear out here in New Mexico of the effort to do away with the Indian service completely.”58 Termination initially targeted tribes that were considered self-sustaining, largely assimilated, or otherwise allegedly no longer in need of recognition by the United States—and the sovereignty that came with it. Many tribal members felt that termination was another attempt on the part of the federal government to eliminate Native people—or at least, Native cultures—by removing the support systems and resources upon which they had become dependent thanks to the damaging policies and practices of the previous century. In the face of more than half a million self-identified Native people, the U.S. government’s argument that Native people had already largely assimilated was yet another version of the Vanishing Indian trope.

In reality, even when Navajo people left the Nation, they did not necessarily assimilate into Anglo culture. In 1982, the anthropologist Ann Metcalf discovered that successful adjustment to life outside Dinétah, defined as financial security and lack of pathology (alcoholism, depression, etc.), did not correlate with cultural assimilation. Indeed, she cites a 1964 study that noted a negative correlation between adjustment and assimilation among Navajo people in Dallas. Multiple studies noted that even though urban Navajo communities were not geographically compact, people would travel fifty miles or more to see other Diné, rather than building ties with their neighbors.59 In 1968, John A. Price noted that urban Navajo were “more involved in activities on the reservation (i.e., they tend to vote in tribal elections and visit home frequently) than people from other tribes, and they were more likely to retain the use of their native language.”60 These studies led Metcalf to the conclusion, first presented in a 1968 study, that “concepts such as traditionalism and acculturation do not belong at opposite ends of the same continuum but are, in fact, distinct entities which are capable of independent variation.”61 Navajo people who relocated to cities were able to function within urban structures and communities more effectively, overall, than members of other tribes—and they retained their cultural identity and maintained their community participation despite geographic barriers. More recently, the scholar Myla Vicenti Carpio has characterized this extension of Indigenous community into urban centers—sometimes, but not always, adjacent to reservation lands—as “dual landscapes.”62 In A Navaho Family, the flag becomes an analogously dual signifier.

Government and Voting Rights

Eisenhower’s unprecedented campaign stop was driven by the new fact of Navajo enfranchisement in U.S. politics—a fact that had been decades in the making. In November 1932, nine months after their trip to Santa Fe, Gilpin, Forster, Mary Ann Nakai, and Kellywood found themselves on another road trip—crammed into the car along with four others from Red Rock plus camping equipment and food. Their destination was a Fire Dance, “the culmination of the nine-day Mountain Chant”—“literally, chant towards (a place) within the mountains”—and the only part of the ceremony open to the public.63 A healing ceremony, the Mountain Chant would have been commissioned by a patient—or, according to the early ethnographer Washington Matthews, to invoke “the unseen powers in behalf of the people at large for various purposes, particularly for good crops and abundant rains.”64 The songs of the Mountain Chant include a narrative of cultural belonging: in a 1969 essay on the Navajo, the Diné historian Alice Bathke and her husband, Jerry, transcribe part of one of the songs as follows:

The songs—containers of Diné history and cultural knowledge—are the basis of a collective identity modeled on kinship structures rather than legal status or an abstract political concept of citizenship. Forster understood this: when she moved to Red Rock, she connected with her neighbors on a variety of cultural levels in order to establish trust and belonging. As Martha Sandweiss has noted, “Forster was eager to learn from her new neighbors, in part because she was curious and in part because she thought it would make them more willing to learn from her. She studied weaving with the women and watched the medicine men practice their craft.”66 And she did not limit her involvement to nursing and weaving: “She coached a basketball team, assisted with funerals, dispensed personal and legal advice, organized Christmas parties, and presided over a small home that was periodically a community social center, a soup kitchen, and a food distribution point.”67 While she never literally “learned their songs,” Forster understood how Navajo community worked, and she was embraced by the people she served, who used kinship terms to address her and described her as a medicine man. This acceptance was particularly meaningful to the nurse because she realized that “the Navahos hereabouts expected to find me antagonistic to their religious customs and were slow to consult me about illness until the medicine man had failed to help. . . . Sometimes I am invited to practice medicine with the medicine man, sometimes [I] am asked to await the conclusion of the sing so as to be on hand to take the patient to the hospital.”68 Notably, she respected such preferences on the part of her patients; personally and professionally, she demonstrated a respect for Diné ways of knowing and being.

Neither Forster nor Gilpin recorded the purpose of the 1932 Mountain Chant. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the ongoing threat of Indian Bureau intervention into Navajo lives, they and their Navajo companions must have felt like the nation (or the Nation) itself needed healing. “We were too late to see the final sand painting,” Forster wrote to her sister,

but preparation and practice for Thursday night were in full swing. . . . As night came on a strong wind, with an uncomfortable accompaniment of sand, sprang up and the Navahos took refuge in a brush corral where a comfortable fire was burning. There, during practice, one of their leaders stepped to the middle of the setting, clapped for silence, and delivered a long harangue which to us was unintelligible. The interest was evident and we were curious. Out of the midst of Navaho suddenly sounded a name which thrilled us: “Roosevelt.” “Washington” and “Hoover” followed. Thus at midnight beneath the stars, in the depths of the Navaho desert, we received the election returns. After that the dances for the following night were rehearsed over and over again.69

According to Forster’s great-nephew, she and Gilpin were both “Roosevelt Democrats”—and their elation at the election outcome was justified, in their view, by history.70 Gilpin wrote to Putnam after the inauguration, asking how she had voted. “No, I didn’t vote for Roosevelt,” Putnam replied, “nor Hoover either. I voted socialist . . . I think the U.S.A. is in one grand mess, + I don’t see any hope for any of us.”71 In her letter to her sister, meanwhile, Forster did not report on the Navajo reaction to the news. In person, would she and Gilpin have asked their companions how they had voted?

It is a question with a double meaning: the couple could have asked their companions for whom they voted, but they could also justifiably have wondered by what mechanism they did so. In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court had determined that Native Americans must be naturalized and assimilated in order to become voting citizens:

They may without a doubt, like the subjects of any foreign government, be naturalized by the authority of Congress and become citizens of a state and of the United States, and if an individual should leave his nation or tribe, and take up his abode among the white population, he would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people.72

That ruling was effectively overturned by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which rejected the earlier decision’s acknowledgment of Native tribes and reservations as sovereign, foreign nations in favor of interpreting tribal rights as individual property rights. Claiming the United States’ territorial primacy over Indigenous land claims, the act thus declared: “That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States. Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”73 In theory, all Native Americans born within its borders received the right to vote in U.S. elections as a result of this act, but in practice Navajo people did not have universal legal voting rights until after the publication of The Enduring Navaho in 1968.74 Their status was complicated by the different state jurisdictions within the Navajo Nation.75 In New Mexico, for example, the constitution specified that “Indians not taxed may not vote,” a loophole that was successfully challenged in the courts in 1948, but that was not fully closed until the state changed its laws in 1962.76 Arizona defined reservation residents as “under guardianship” of the federal government, and they were thereby likewise disqualified from voting by the state constitution until 1948. Utah defined reservation residents as nonresidents and denied them the right to vote until 1957. In Colorado, Native people living on reservations could not vote until 1970.77 Although there were, of course, Navajo people who lived elsewhere than on reservation land, discrimination was strong, and “it is unclear whether Native Americans could have registered to vote if they lived outside reservations.”78 When we ask how the people around Gilpin and Forster at the Mountain Chant voted, in other words, the answer is likely that they could not have voted at all.79

The 1932 election was only the fourth presidential election in which American women could vote, having theoretically been granted universal suffrage by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—when Gilpin was twenty-nine years old. In Colorado, women won the right to vote by public referendum in 1893, and in Arizona women’s suffrage passed the same year as statehood, in 1912. It is possible that Gilpin’s emphatic self-identification as a westerner was inspired not only by her love of the landscape but by her appreciation of her fuller citizenship status in the West. As with the Indian Citizenship Act, however, the real-world effects of the Nineteenth Amendment and earlier women’s suffrage acts were undermined by a wide variety of state-level laws that discriminated against potential voters based on race, class, and other factors—including homosexuality. For example, the law that prohibited “Indians not taxed” from voting in New Mexico also included “idiots, insane persons, [and] persons convicted of felonious or infamous crime unless restored to political rights.”80 In 1932, both the “insane” and criminal categories could have included those identified as homosexual; despite their celebratory mood at the Mountain Chant, and their relative privilege in relation to the Navajo by whom they were surrounded, Forster’s and Gilpin’s citizenship was also insecure.

Although the Diné were denied the franchise in the United States, the federal government had no reservations about imposing government systems—modeled on their own—on Indigenous people throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite the imposition of this foreign form of government on the Navajo, when Forster and Gilpin first arrived in Red Rock, most Diné still governed themselves through traditional community relationships. According to the Diné historian Clyde Benally:

Most Navajos thought the council was a puppet of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other whites. Because of these fears, the Navajos did not use the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This act called for tribal constitutions and elections so that tribes could make a start toward self-government. Each tribe could vote to accept or reject the act. The Navajos, for their part, chose to try their own plan of government. . . . The tribe wanted to allow for the opinions of the small groups on the outskirts of the reservation. So they divided the area into chapters. Each chapter would elect members to a central tribal council. Local government would take place at the chapter level. The plan was a compromise, and it worked well. The first chapters were formed at Leupp, near Flagstaff. Others were soon set up all over the reservation.81

The Department of the Interior called a constitutional assembly in 1936, but rejected the Diné-authored document that resulted, and it was not until 1938 that Interior enforced its own constitutional rules and organized elections. As with much federal Indian policy throughout the twentieth century, there were obvious contradictions between the imposition of a system of government modeled on that of the United States within the Navajo Nation, and the disenfranchisement of Navajo people as citizens of the United States.

Activism and Autonomy

Eisenhower does not appear in The Enduring Navaho—indeed, as we have seen, Gilpin even excised his portrait from her book when she closely cropped her portrait of Ahkeah. A variety of Navajo leaders appear in The Enduring Navaho: along with Tribal Council leaders like Ahkeah, Wauneka, and Jones, for instance, she includes figures like Herb Blatchford and Ned Hatathli, whom she photographed in 1954 just a few years after he became the first Navajo head of the Arts and Crafts Guild. The guild had become a tribal organization rather than a Department of the Interior initiative in 1951; Hatathli and the others thus represented the ongoing efforts to transition vital Navajo institutions and services to Navajo control. To some of Gilpin’s readers, they would have represented the real possibility of Navajo self-determination and sovereignty. To others, however, they may appear to offer a story of assimilation: Blatchford’s “thoroughly acculturated” suit and tie is matched by the Anglo clothing of the tribal chairmen, for example. Gilpin’s careful prose throughout her text likewise gently avoids the more emphatic language that both she and Blatchford were willing to use with the press. But as we look more closely at her photographs, we consider their visual politics differently. In her portraits of Blatchford, Gilpin emphasizes communitarian values, egalitarianism, and trust; in A Navaho Family, she underscores Diné matriliny, women’s economic and political power, the contradictions of military service, and the manifold disruptions that U.S. imperialism brought to the Navajo Nation. Throughout her work, Gilpin’s strategies of representation are informed by her relationship to the emergent lesbian politics of the twentieth century—a politics with which she had an uneasy relationship. Like her own relationship to Forster and to the lesbian community of Santa Fe (and beyond), her representation of Diné self-determination in The Enduring Navaho was predicated on a semivisibility that would have been differently legible to insiders and outsiders.

For the most part, the Diné leaders Gilpin photographed were working within or in cooperation with colonial systems in order to enhance Navajo economic sovereignty. As Blatchford’s participation in Navajo cultural politics increased, however, he began to see the need to address issues of cultural sovereignty from a perspective beyond that of tribal or federal government systems. Between 1955, when Gilpin first met Blatchford, and 1963, when she photographed him in his office (see chapter 3), the young man had become a seasoned political activist. He had been inspired by his military experience, his work at the Gallup Indian Community Center, and his involvement in academic organizing. The 1955 New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (NMAIA) youth conference at which Blatchford had spoken as a student was cosponsored by the University of New Mexico’s Kiva Club. It was the first of a series of regional youth conferences around the Southwest that Blatchford attended, along with many other engaged youth. For the NMAIA, which sponsored and supported these conferences, they were an opportunity to “promote higher education among Indian youth and prepare the next generation of future tribal leadership.” Charles Minton, executive secretary of the newly renamed Southwest Association on Indian Affairs, summarized the benefits for participants in 1961: “The emphasis is always on responsibility for helping one’s people. . . . There has been [a] marked increase in college enrollment . . . , a renewed respect for one’s own cultural heritage, a better comprehension of the Indian’s contribution to the American way of life, a sense of the need for Indian unity, an increasing awareness of his responsibilities as an American citizen, a realistic approach to common problems and a better understanding of what they are,” and more.82

Over time, the conferences took on a radical tone, inspired in part by the civil rights movement’s embrace of student organizing with groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Perhaps most famously, at the 1961 Regional Indian Youth Council meeting in Norman, Oklahoma, Ponca member Clyde Warrior won the organization’s presidential election with a campaign speech that consisted entirely of the assertion, “I am a full-blood Ponca Indian. This is all I have to offer. The sewage of Europe does not run through these veins.”83 This radicalism was at odds with the fundamentally accommodationist stance of the Association on American Indian Affairs, as well as with its White leadership. In the same year, Warrior, Blatchford, and others attended the American Indian Chicago Conference, organized by the anthropologist Sol Tax of the University of Chicago and sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Although the conference was a landmark event in Native politics, producing among other things the Declaration of Indian Purpose, the young people who attended were disappointed by the distance they perceived between the private conversations among Native leaders at the conference and their public accolades for the BIA and its programs. Ultimately, Blatchford suggested to the others that they meet at the Gallup Ceremonial later that year to form a separate organization of their own.84 It was a move that ran counter to the preferences of the Association on American Indian Affairs: as Minton assured his readers, they had “not thought of establishing a National Indian Youth Council.”85

At Gallup, the students nonetheless formed the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), which “backed the principles of treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, and cultural preservation.”86 It was the first youth organization to have no ties to non-Native leadership or organizations, and one of only a very few Indian organizations that could make that claim at all. Warrior nominated Blatchford to become the group’s executive director, and when Minton threatened to restructure the funding of the regional conferences on which the NIYC’s members relied to connect with one another, it was Blatchford who guided area leaders’ response. His familiarity with the NMAIA leadership and organization gave him useful insight into how the more radical independent group could respond to Minton’s position. By the early 1960s, youth activists in particular were recognizing the distinct needs of urban Indians; they began to organize the pan-Indian movements that led to Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz Island, in 1969, and the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Those movements were supported in part by the community centers that President Richard Nixon had established in response to the findings of Blatchford’s task force (see chap. 3), which had recommended establishing urban community centers as a way to reconnect the “50 percent of the country’s Indians” who “now live in cities and towns” with one another.87

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the civil rights movement empowered a wide variety of marginalized communities, who transformed and appropriated rhetorics of conformity and American patriotism in the service of more localized nationalisms. When the Bathkes mounted their defense of Navajo sovereignty in a 1969 interview with the University of Chicago, it was reproduced in the Mohawk newspaper, Akwesasne Notes. The Bathkes described traditional Navajo governance—an informal process rooted in consensus—as “one of the purer examples of participatory democracy.”88 As the historian Clyde Benally put it, “the People did not trust a representative government to speak for the whole group on an issue. Who would speak for the minority? they asked. Such an idea had real dangers.”89 Benally’s question echoes the title of Blatchford’s 1955 talk at the NMAIA-sponsored youth conference—“How is the passive minority to get along with the aggressive majority?”—as well as the politics behind the formation of the NIYC. The concept of participatory democracy had been introduced to public political discourse by Students for a Democratic Society in their 1962 Port Huron Statement: it was a synonym for nonviolent civil disobedience, which the SDS argued was a vital component of the democratic process.90

In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin notes that Blatchford returned to the University of New Mexico to study law for a year. She explains that he “needed some knowledge of the law,” although she makes no suggestion about why an attendance counselor or community center director would feel such a need. The rhetoric of the NIYC was fully in support of legal education, however, arguing that it would provide a way to protect tradition and the elders who preserved it. As Blatchford observed, “The youth, when they get together now, always meet on Indian land, always with the old tribal people,” and having the legal knowledge to protect cultural traditions in the courts in terms of sovereignty would become a core aspect of Diné activism.91 By 1964, the year after Gilpin took her photographs of Blatchford in his office, the NIYC was at the center of a fish-in action on the Puyallup River in Washington State that the young activist described as “the first full-scale intertribal action since the Indians defeated General Custer on the Little Big Horn.”92 Fish-ins challenged the violation of Native treaty rights, and the one held on March 2, 1964, guaranteed White media attention by including the Hollywood actor Marlon Brando as one of its central participants. Often compared to the SNCC-sponsored sit-ins across the segregated South, fish-ins called nonviolent attention to the violence that continued to be done to Native communities in the Northwest.

Despite his increasing radicalism and his advocacy of cultural preservation, Blatchford’s self-fashioning was carefully conformist: like all the other men whose individual portraits Gilpin included in “The Coming Way” (the third section of The Enduring Navaho), Blatchford chose to cut his hair short and wear suits to work.93 This was surely strategic, as Diné leaders fought to be taken seriously by U.S. officials—and it had parallels in the development of lesbian liberation politics. The sovereignty politics that coalesced in response to federal relocation programs coincided with the emergence of a new, communitarian movement among lesbians in the United States. The historian Simon Hall has documented the postwar, pre-Stonewall rise of gay and lesbian organizations and networks: “Emerging from the new, urban gay subculture that had been forged during the war against fascism, the homophile movement of the 1950s and early 1960s helped to lay the basis for future advances.”94 Organizations including the Mattachine Society (founded 1950), the Daughters of Bilitis (founded 1955), and the Society for Individual Rights (founded 1964) began to build intentional communities of queer people, and to advocate for gay and lesbian rights in the public sphere. They maintained a balance between secrecy and openness that was reflected even in the names of the organizations: the Daughters of Bilitis were named after patriotic groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and a fictional lesbian contemporary of Sappho invented by the French poet Pierre Louÿs in 1894. Intentionally obscure, it matched the anonymity offered to members, who were welcomed into meetings with the reminder that they did not have to use their real name and would not be asked for a surname. Like the name of the organization itself, that of their newsletter—The Ladder, first published in 1956—was carefully discreet.

Discretion was seen by many to be vital to these organizations’ survival, but by 1960, The Ladder, and by extension the Daughters of Bilitis, were being criticized by more radical members for their emphasis on conformity and “decorum.”95 Gilpin and Forster would have recognized and, likely, empathized with the editors’ opinion that lesbians “are women first and a butch or femme secondly, so their attire should be that which society will accept. Contrary to belief, we have shown them that there is a place for them in society, but only if they wish to make it so.”96 A few months later, the editors underscored the respectability of their membership in response to a letter asking what sort of person would have the freedom to join such an organization: “We have college students, saleswomen, dental technicians, photographers, stenographers, teachers, traffic management people, etc.”97 Although there is no documentary evidence that Gilpin or Forster subscribed to The Ladder, the historian Marcia M. Gallo has observed that “circulation numbers for The Ladder are difficult to quantify; the magazine’s reach far exceeded that of the organization. In the early 1960s, in addition to subscriptions, the magazine was sold on newsstands and in bookstores in select cities throughout the U.S. . . . Further, nearly every former DOB member or Ladder reader remembers ‘handing around’ the magazine to lovers, friends, roommates and co-workers.”98

In her opening address, printed in the first issue of The Ladder, President Del Martin asked her readers simply, “Why not ‘belong’?” She followed that question with an assertion of women’s citizenship: “It has been only in this [twentieth] century, through the courageous crusade of the Suffragettes and the influx of women into the business world, that woman has become an independent entity, an individual with the right to vote and the right to a job and economic security.”99 Those rights did not extend, however, to lesbian women—and much of the correspondence with The Ladder concerned itself with precisely these issues. As the Daughters and other organizations gained strength, they began to organize direct actions that also made use of nationalist and patriotic rhetoric. “On 4 July, for example, about 40 activists demonstrated outside Independence Hall, carrying placards that declared ‘Homosexual Citizens Want: Equality Before the Law,’ and ‘We Want: Equal Treatment By Our Fellow Citizens.’ Known as the annual ‘Reminder,’ Independence Day demonstrations were held in Philadelphia until 1969.”100 Nationalist rhetoric remained at the heart of the struggle for gay rights throughout the 1960s and ’70s. “In her report of the demonstration in the Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder, Kay Lahusan declared that ‘this dignified protest, which startled many a citizen into fresh thought about the meaning of Independence Day, might well have been applauded by our Founding Fathers.’”101 Similar protests used the Statue of Liberty and the American flag to augment their assertion of rights associated with American citizenship.102 Such gestures echo Gilpin’s patriotic desire to be of service in the world wars, as well as her frustration with the discrimination she encountered. Queer patriotism was not just about asserting Americanness—it challenged the terms of national identity. As the historian Marc Stein has pointed out, such gestures, aimed at condemning the discriminatory policies and laws of the federal government as well as individual prejudice, were being deployed “against the state” that they ostensibly symbolized.103 In that context, the imagined community facilitated by the Daughters of Bilitis and especially The Ladder was beginning to constitute an alternative nation—so that by 1979, the theorist Monique Wittig could declare confidently that lesbianism was “an international culture . . . unlimited by national frontiers (the lesbian nation is everywhere).”104 In contrast to the localized networks of the 1920s and ’30s, or the rural retreat of individual lesbians to spaces and lives that were safe by virtue of their isolation, by the 1950s urban lesbians were creating a public culture and demanding citizenship as a collective—paralleling similar moves by Diné activists.

War and Citizenship

The extraordinary status of Native Americans in the history of U.S. citizenship is paradoxically revealed by their absence from most histories of immigration, naturalization, and citizenship.105 Although they could not reliably vote, the Nationality Act of 1940 paved the way for Native Americans to register for the draft, and 10 percent of the Native population served in World War II—a higher proportion than any other demographic.106 Indeed, a 1942 survey found that 40 percent more Native servicemen had enlisted than had been drafted—although they were sometimes led to do so under false pretenses.107 “[My grandfather] was told if he served, the family would get some of their land back and a house,” the Navajo airman Philip Rock told interviewer Brye Stevens in 2018. “None of that happened.”108 Although its promises were often empty, the federal government’s offer of houses was a pointed attempt to assimilate Navajo communities; as we have seen, such programs intervened in social structures and kinship models. As with much postwar Indian policy, these programs had precedents in the previous century: the historian Mark Rifkin has called attention to the “coordinated assault on native kinship in U.S. policy in the late nineteenth century” as part of an “organized effort to make heterosexuality compulsory as a key part of breaking up indigenous landholdings and ‘detribalizing’ native peoples”—making clear the intersectionality of queer and Indigenous oppression in conversations about citizenship that centered nuclear families and private property.109

Promises like those made to Rock’s grandfather meant that as servicemen returned from the war, their expectations were high—and their disappointment was compounded by a new sense of alienation. The Bathkes wrote of the war’s aftermath that “in their training and in their travels [Navajo servicemen] acquired a considerable familiarity with the non-Navajo world and acquired habits of the outside culture. When they returned to the reservation they were confused and had serious questions about their identity. Among their families they were looked upon as having lost part of the Navajo way. Sometimes the very worst that can possibly be said of anyone was said to describe their condition: ‘He acts as if he has no family.’”110 The Nakai family lost a son on a battlefield in Europe; many returning men discovered that even though they had lived through the war, their families had lost them nonetheless.

Thirty-five hundred Navajo men joined the army, navy, and marines in World War II; three hundred lost their lives.111 Four hundred of them became “Codetalkers” in the high-profile marine program that used the Navajo language as the basis for an unbreakable communications code throughout the Pacific theater, saving thousands of lives. It was by far the most famous contribution of Native people to a U.S. war effort, and one that overshadowed other Navajo service in the popular press (and collective memory), even as it brought Native patriotism into the spotlight. In a 1954 interview, Gilpin discussed Navajo military service in terms of the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the United States and the obligations of each toward the other. “The whole Indian record in the war is superb,” she told the Denver Post’s Ellen O’Connor. “Many of the young men volunteered, some were drafted. They sent home money to aid their families, which was a big help. And they played an important part in winning. Navajos talking Navajo—the Japanese were stuck. Here was a code they couldn’t figure out.”112 But, Gilpin noted, the Navajo servicemen’s contributions to the war effort and to their families were in stark contrast to the United States’ ongoing failure to meet its treaty obligations with the Navajo Nation.

Two decades earlier, Forster had been prompted by the “bitter wind” of a harsh winter to “unhappy wonder” about the “hardship and want, discomfort and suffering” that surrounded her in Red Rock. “The Navaho,” she pointed out, “are wards of our Government. Does that not mean that our Government is responsible for their welfare? . . . Must they die each winter from cold and hunger?”113 In addition to the persistent shortcomings of health and welfare programs across the reservation, which Gilpin and Forster had experienced firsthand, Gilpin reminded O’Connor that “we promised the Navajos by treaty to furnish one teacher for every 30 children, yet today there are 21,000 children who want to go to school and can’t.” Contrasting Navajo service with U.S. neglect, the photographer chastised the Post’s readers for the arrogance of American imperialism. “In all our efforts to bring civilization to the Navajos,” she concluded, “there is something which they lose, that we can never give.”114 As the Bathkes put it, “The People feel that their development must be completed in the Navajo way . . . they strongly desire the opportunity to determine the course of their own future.”115 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Navajo leaders repeatedly fought federal policies that promoted assimilation, and pushed back against programs that infringed upon Navajo ways of life.

And yet, “Navajos have always been deeply patriotic,” wrote Roseann Sandoval Willink and Paul G. Zobrod in their 1996 catalog, Weaving a World.116 Like most generalizations, it is an oversimplification that erases much of the history of Navajo–U.S. relations—but the absoluteness of their statement distills the spirit of many post–World War II Navajo leaders’ rhetoric around citizenship. The year after The Enduring Navaho was published, Navajo Tribal Council chairman Raymond Nakai was presented with a medallion and plaque in honor of the Navajo Codetalkers. Nakai addressed the question head-on: “Many people have asked why we fight the white man’s wars. Our answer is always that we are proud to be American, and we are proud to be American Indians.” But he did not stop there. As the Vietnam War dragged on, provoking increasing protest across the United States and beyond, Nakai asserted that Navajo people were more patriotic than White Americans. “With so many white men burning their draft cards,” he proclaimed, “or leading such dissipated lives that they fail their physical exams, the American Indian always stands ready when his country needs him.” Finally, the chairman linked that readiness to Indigenous land: “His clean, rigorous life on his reservation keeps him physically fit.”117 In a different context, the dance historian Theresa Jill Buckland has described “embodied practices” that confer authenticity on their participants; Nakai’s emphasis on the physicality of military service, and its connection to the ideal American body, invokes precisely such a structure.118 Navajo participation in the U.S. military—particularly as the much-lauded Codetalkers—prompted Chairman Nakai and others to draw direct lines from Navajo honor to U.S. nationalism, as well as from Navajo patriotism to U.S. military honor.

They were still denied American citizenship. As the historian C. G. Galloway has documented, “Many expected to return home to a better life and greater equality. Instead, they found continuing hardship from the effects of stock reduction and continued denial of voting rights that had supposedly been secured by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (‘We do not understand what kind of citizenship you would call that,’ Pvt. Ralph Anderson had written on behalf of ‘the Navajo soldier boys’ in 1943).”119 The ambivalence of the United States and its Anglo citizens to Navajo Americanness is evident in the celebrity of the Codetalkers: in the same historical moment, the Navajo language was both an American strategic triumph and a language that had been banned in most government-funded schools. The admiration expressed nationwide for the Navajo Codetalkers was given the lie by that same nation’s ongoing policies of genocide and assimilation of Diné people.

As the Diné historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale has warned, rhetoric that equates Navajo military service with Diné patriotism threatens to “streamline Native pasts into the dominant American narrative about itself as a multicultural nation founded on moral and ethical principles.” By equating Navajo national pride with that of U.S. citizens more broadly, Raymond Nakai was in danger of retroactively excusing (and even offering moral justification for) the horrors of, for example, Kit Carson’s U.S. military campaign against the Navajo, which culminated in their exile to Hwéeldi. Such atrocities, moreover, are not restricted to the past: “Violently dispossessed of most of their lands,” Denetdale points out, Native people have seen “their sovereign statuses as nations continually undermined by U.S. federal Indian policies and the Supreme Court.”120 Challenges to sovereignty at the national level parallel Navajo disenfranchisement at the individual level, as they are part and parcel of the same colonial structure.

The contrast between Navajo men’s willingness to serve in the U.S. military and their ongoing disenfranchisement is similarly thematized in A Navaho Family. Gilpin’s framing emphasizes the semiotic slippage between the flag, the body of the dead boy, and a woven blanket. Arrayed as the others are along the blank white wall of the “small frame house” in which the Nakais had lived—seasonally—for over two decades, the flag in Gilpin’s photograph is one more member of the family. Using the flag, moreover, to separate the only adult male in the photograph, Francis Nakai, from his wife and the children seated below it, Gilpin’s composition aligns Navajo masculinity with U.S. nationalism. The rest of the family—the central unit of Navajo political, as well as personal, life—is trapped beneath the flag’s stripes. Gilpin complicates that opposition, however, because in this situation, the flag itself stands for both colonial nation and Navajo son—and thanks to its rhyming with Navajo weaving, the flag also figures the widespread loss of women’s economic power and cultural authority. Starkly confrontational, the Nakai family’s unsettling gazes disrupt the complacency of settler colonialism. The flag becomes the material evidence of the theft of Mary Ann Nakai’s oldest son by a nation that refused fully to acknowledge him as one of its own, even as it demanded his service.

Irrigation

There is one more photograph of the Nakai family in The Enduring Navaho. It appears out of chronological order: taken in 1962, it is part of Gilpin’s chapter “Habitation.” Three people stand or sit on the bank of a river, gazing out away from the camera (Figure 4.9). None of them are clearly identifiable, although Gilpin’s caption tells us that it is “the Nakai family with a crop of melons on the bank of the San Juan River.”121 In the accompanying text she goes into more detail about the photograph’s relation to the theme of habitation. “About 65 percent of land under irrigation on the reservation at the moment is concentrated in the San Juan Valley,” she wrote.

The new irrigation project, planned long ago but not put into effect until 1962, will bring water from the San Juan River, stored in the new Navajo Reservoir, to irrigate 110,000 acres of land. . . . Although Indians in this part of the Southwest have practiced irrigation since the twelfth century or before, the modern refinements in head gates, and water storage have so increased production that they have brought about a decided change in Navaho life.122

That is Gilpin’s last word on the cultural history and impact of irrigation on Diné agriculture—but in the epilogue, she returns briefly to the story of the riverbank on a personal level. About a year after the worrying visit during which she photographed the Nakais with the flag, Gilpin and Forster learned that the family had moved to Shiprock, where

Francis had some sort of job with the Indian Agency. We found that alcohol was the problem. After that we saw them every few years and always matters seemed to be a little worse. Then in 1962 we were at the Shiprock Fair and found them down by the river, where Francis was selling a large crop of melons he had raised. They both looked and seemed much more like their old selves, and we felt hopeful that the problem was well in hand.

Even though the photograph of the Nakais along the river appears in the earlier section of her book rather than alongside this story, an attentive reader is likely to make the connection between the two thanks to Gilpin’s earlier caption. Looking at the photograph as a portrait of the Nakai family rather than as an illustration of the generic benefits of irrigation, we deduce that the standing man is Francis, and the seated woman is Mary Ann. But who is the third person? His raised hand obscures his face. Significantly older than the children in the 1950 portrait, we might speculate that if he is a member of the family, he may be the son that Gilpin photographed in 1932: Juan.123

Thanks to the overbearing symbolic weight of the American flag in A Navaho Family, Juan and Luis Nakai’s absence from the portrait seems less resonant than that of their older brother—and yet, framed in terms of Navajo loss and visual memory, their absence has just as much semiotic power. Juan was a landscape painter whose images of Shiprock, the Superstition Mountains, and other Navajo places were collected by tourists as well as locals. As a young man, he moved from his family’s home in Red Rock to Shiprock, where according to his niece, he built his own home and worked as a carpenter as well as a painter. In 1973, he passed away—drowning, in circumstances that seem possibly to have involved alcohol, racist border-town violence, or both, in an irrigation ditch that was drawn from the San Juan River in Farmington, New Mexico.124

Nakai’s paintings, like Gilpin’s photographs, confront stereotypical notions of Navajo identity and aesthetics. They fit comfortably into a genre of self-taught and itinerant commercial landscape painting that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s, apparently based on template and stock motifs that Nakai combined at will to create picturesque images with more or less relation to the actual landscape. His paintings of Shiprock and Monument Valley represent iconic landforms in every kind of atmospheric moment, from the pastel palette of sunrise to a bleak, gray palette reminiscent of a winter storm (Plate 13). Nakai’s paintings are striking because they do not conform to the expectations of Indian painting that had taken hold throughout the American Southwest—including those highlighted by Gilpin in The Enduring Navaho. During the New Deal, the authors of New Mexico: A Guide to the Colorful State—a volume to which Gilpin contributed twelve photographs, including of Navajo subjects—described those expectations, and some of the well-known artists, to their readers.125 “The age-old precision with which . . . the Navaho make their intricate sand paintings, has influenced the fine draughtsmanship and sense of decoration that characterizes Indian pictures,” they enthused.126 Southwestern Indian painters were “indifferent to European laws of perspective,” claimed the tourist guide, but they “evolved” so rapidly that “today a very strong and individual American Indian school of painting has taken root.”127 This “individual” style was in fact precisely the opposite, sponsored and enforced by the Santa Fe Indian School as well as collectors, for, as “a United States Congressman” allegedly asked, “Who wants to go West to buy a picture painted by an Indian of three apples on a plate?”128

Gilpin documents this history in The Enduring Navaho, pointing to the influence of Dorothy Dunn and Olive Rush at the Santa Fe Indian School, and citing Gerald Nailor, Andrew Tsihnajinnie, Ha-So-De, Quincy Tahoma, and Harrison Begay as among the first generation of artists working in this mode.129 Despite this comprehensiveness, Gilpin’s overview is extraordinarily brief—perhaps because, as she explains, “the art of painting is a comparatively new venture for the Navaho.”130 Notably, her editor at the University of Texas Press refused to allow Gilpin to include a photograph of a painting by Begay, citing copyright concerns—perhaps offering another explanation for the brevity of her discussion.131 She concludes her three-paragraph history of Navajo painting with a repeated assertion about the “amazing amount of talent” emerging from the new Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Founded in 1962, IAIA explicitly rejected the paternalistic and prescriptive model of earlier Indian art programs. Under the leadership of the Cherokee designer Lloyd Kiva New, the school’s faculty encouraged students to explore truly individualized aesthetic choices in the context of their cultural knowledge and political awareness. Nakai was an adult and an active painter by the time IAIA was founded; his rejection of stereotypical “Indian painting” aesthetics would doubtless have had an impact on his access to arts education had he sought it in an earlier moment.

What are we to make of Nakai’s landscapes, which are, after all, not so different from some of Gilpin’s own? The insistent repetition of Nakai’s oeuvre—always the immutable silhouette of Shiprock, with only the palette of earth and sky changing from canvas to canvas—witnesses the artist’s ongoing presence in the landscape. It is its own kind of authenticity: not the performed authenticity of anthropology, whose essentializing claims about the “Oriental” character of Navajo painting countless Anglos, including Gilpin, insisted on repeatedly discovering anew in sand paintings and pottery designs, but that of Nakai’s lived experience as an underemployed Navajo man in a border town, built on sacred land that has been transformed into a tourist destination and an oil field. His landscapes are rarely populated. In an undated painting in a private collection, we find an exception: a hogan and sheep corral nestle in the shelter of a mesa on the right-hand side of the composition, while on the left, a wagon sits by a lone tree, to which a woman has attached her loom. She sits beneath it, back to us, weaving a blanket.

The scene recalls a letter from Forster to Gilpin, as she visited the Nakais’ summer home in 1932: “I have promised to bring you to their mountain farm and I know you will love it. . . . Mrs. Francis has her loom set up in the shade of a tree and weaves industriously when the spirit moves.”132 It is impossible to know whether Juan Nakai painted his scene of the weaver outside a hogan as a personal gesture amid the hundreds of landscapes he created for tourists—and in any case, the summer shelter of his childhood would have been an entirely different structure from the winter hogan in the painting. Moreover, the Nakais lived in a frame house in the winter, making Juan’s painting doubly nostalgic. Most simply, the image of a Navajo woman weaving on an outdoor loom was one that Nakai knew would easily attract tourists visiting the trading posts where he sold his work. Like his mother, the weaver, and Gilpin, the photographer, Nakai worked in a market where the primary consumers of Navajo creative work and imagery were non-Navajo tourists and collectors—and his choices of subject matter reflected that reality, even as he resisted painting stereotypical representations of Navajo people, or in a stereotypical style.

In the early 1960s, Nakai was successful enough as a painter to advertise in the Farmington Daily Times: his advertisement at the bottom of the paper’s front page on August 23, 1964, for example, read “Navajo Artist Juan Nakai Is Now at the Kiva Kurio Entrance to the Aztec Ruins, Aztec, N.M.”133 As we read his story, and consider the geography, we realize that he moved to Shiprock as his parents moved to Shiprock; he struggled with alcoholism but was successful in the early 1960s, just as Gilpin and Forster learned that his parents’ struggle had eased. It is possible that Mary Ann and Francis Nakai moved to Shiprock to help Juan—and that their support led, at least temporarily, to his recovery. If it weren’t for his paintings, it is possible that Nakai would have been lost to the historical record, becoming one more anonymous Diné victim of the colonial trauma—military service, economic pressure, cultural alienation, and alcoholism—that was exacerbated by Eisenhower’s Indian policy and which led young Navajo men away from the reservation, into border towns, and into the path of violence.

New Contexts

The Enduring Navaho was finally published in 1968, after more than three decades of development. It had transformed in Gilpin’s mind from a collection of portraits and landscapes to accompany Forster’s letters into a work of political advocacy. It emerged into an unprecedented political landscape: not least, as Gilpin noted, it was the centennial year of the Long Walk. “The Museum of New Mexico will have a special Navaho Centenial [sic] issue” of their magazine El Palacio, Gilpin wrote to her editor in July 1968. “They want to have a short pre-review of our book . . . All sorts of things are going on about the Centennial, including a re-enactment of the Long Walk (mostly by automobile!) . . . All this brings the Navaho into the news and in people’s minds.” The Centennial encouraged national pride among the Navajo, and the Tribal Council made symbolic nationalist statements of sovereignty alongside concrete resource developments: in 1968 it adopted its official flag, and in 1969 it changed its name from the Navajo Indian Reservation to the Navajo Nation. In 1976, the attorney Daniel H. Israel defined tribal nationalism as “a sense of Native American consciousness placing membership in one’s tribe above all other identities and placing primary emphasis on the enhancement of Indian culture. Thus,” he concluded, “tribal nationalism involves the promotion of both tribal governmental sovereignty and Indian culture.”134 Activists like Blatchford took their work beyond tribal government, which they feared was irrevocably intertwined with federal policy and institutions—but joined in the turn toward local concerns through newly formed organizations such as Dineh for Justice, Indians Against Exploitation, the Coalition for Navajo Liberation, and more.

In the early 1970s, lesbians likewise took a step away from mainstream American culture. Empowered by the community building that began with the Daughters of Bilitis, separatist movements began to emerge. “One of the most powerful political visions produced by the lesbian (or even feminist) movement,” wrote Bonnie Zimmerman in 1984, “separatism asserts in the most literal sense that every personal act is the creation and expression of political ideology, that either of the patriarchy or of lesbian feminism.”135 A Washington, D.C.–based collective, The Furies, for example, proclaimed in a 1972 issue of their eponymous newsletter that “lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice . . . Lesbians must get out of the straight women’s movement and form their own movement in order to be taken seriously, to stop straight women from oppressing us, and to force straight women to deal with their own Lesbianism.”136 Later in the same issue, Rita Mae Brown noted the pragmatic benefits of lesbian separatism: lesbians who have chosen to live with other lesbians, she observed, “have doubled their work output; they are also happier. They are free from having their energies drained by struggles with individual men or with men in groups. Now they pool their energies with other women and have that much more time for political work.”137 It is not a coincidence that lesbian separatism and tribal nationalism share this historical moment: many of the same structures were being revealed as oppressing both queer and Native people. The theater historian Hilary Harris has described lesbians as “subject[s] colonized within the dominant cultural discourse of heterosexuality. The colonized subject, in Homi Bhabha’s words, is the ‘subject of difference’ from the universal subject, a subject who is ‘almost the same, but not quite.’”138 In Bhabha’s framework, colonial structures of power are sustained by the impossibility of assimilation that is built into that subjective relationship—but it is also a potential space of resistance, if the colonized subject transforms failure into parodic or otherwise critical mimicry.139

Some lesbian critics were wary of colonizing metaphors and models: Zimmerman cautioned that the drive toward “country retreats, immersion in lesbian-feminist culture, and matriarchal religions” might be “an ahistorical, apolitical, and ultimately nostalgic vision of what may never have existed and certainly can exist no longer.” “Tempting as this dream of free lesbian tribes may be,” she emphasized, pointing her reader to an intersectional awareness of contemporary anticolonial movements, “we must consider that tribal cultures have fared poorly under the onslaught of advanced capitalism and imperialism.”140 It was precisely this onslaught that Blatchford was determined to fight in Gallup. From the late 1960s onward, Blatchford turned away from pan-Indian organizing in order to focus on Navajo people and politics. In some ways this was a natural outgrowth of his work at the Gallup Indian Community Center, which had become precisely the focal point for a new generation of Diné youth that the by-now-veteran leader had hoped it would. These new activists were exemplified by Larry Casuse, who in 1973 was president of the Kiva Club at the University of New Mexico and of Indians Against Exploitation (IAE), an activist group founded to work against the exploitation of Diné land and people.141 They did so in a variety of ways, including educational programs, lawsuits, and street protests.

Casuse had taken on the liquor industry in Gallup as a high school student, and when he joined IAE, he brought his commitment to that cause with him. He found an empathetic ear in Blatchford, who had been directly targeted by Emmet Garcia, mayor of Gallup and the owner of the Navajo Inn and many other liquor stores in the small city. Casuse became involved with the Community Center, and used it as a meeting place for IAE. Blatchford supported their work, and although his indirect involvement kept him out of the national eye, local officials began to target him—and the center. In 1969, ABC (Americans Before Columbus), the newsletter of the NIYC, reported:

On October 31st the McKinley United Fund Board halted the 1969 funding of the Gallup Community Center. Herb Blatchford, director of the Center said that he felt the cut-off of funds was an effort to make the Center a “scape-goat” because the Center had permitted critics of the Gallup Inter-tribal Ceremonial to use the Center’s facilities. . . . Three Navajo students [members of the Navajo activist group Indians Against Exploitation] were ejected from the ceremonial grounds last August while distributing a leaflet criticizing white control of the ceremonial. . . . Many Indians have expressed the fear that the action of the United Fund is a white reaction to increased Indian demands for greater political and economic power in Gallup.142

Blatchford responded to the board’s action by going out and raising money from across the country for the Community Center, enabling it to remain open—and demonstrating the widespread community support behind him and IAE. Controversy over Gallup politics came to a head in 1973, when Casuse and fellow IAE member Robert Nakaidinae kidnapped Garcia, the city mayor. The tragic episode ended with Casuse shot dead and Nakaidinae arrested and held on the enormous sum of twenty-five thousand dollars bail; the resulting uproar from the community led to street protests and legal action. Diné activists and community members were galvanized by the episode and garnered support from other civil rights groups around the world. In the words of one newspaper, “Larry’s sacrifice has brought strength and unity to his people. Three groups, Indians Against Exploitation, the Kiva Club of U.N.M., and the Gallup Community Center, together with the community, are working towards achieving human dignity for their people.”143

Dignity was at the heart of Gilpin’s project in The Enduring Navaho, and is exemplified by her portraits, both visual and verbal, of the Nakais. The photographer had first met the family in 1931. She made portraits of them in 1932, created A Navaho Family in 1950, and photographed them by the river more than a decade later. The portraits came together when they were published in 1968, and they were separated again as A Navaho Family continued to be reproduced and exhibited throughout the 1970s—particularly in conjunction with the United States’ bicentennial. As its context changed, so did its reception. Seen as an independent image rather than in the context of The Enduring Navaho, the photograph became a synecdochic marker of Gilpin’s decades of work on the Navajo Nation. It also prompted critical recognition of the affinities between Gilpin’s image and the emerging style of social documentary and street photography that had been epitomized by Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans.144 Like Gilpin before him, Frank used fragmented American flags to elicit a critical gaze from his viewers without committing himself to a didactic or prescriptive mode.145 The opening image of Frank’s book, Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, famously directs our gaze toward two people watching the parade from their apartment windows—and then cuts off our view of them with a fragmented American flag. Evocative of Gilpin’s earlier image, Frank’s photograph is nonetheless strikingly different in the relationship it sets up between its subjects and viewers: for him, the flag is a curtain rather than a backdrop. As such, it reveals Frank’s real subject to be the ambivalence of the photographer’s gaze, coolly skeptical of American patriotism. In Gilpin’s image, meanwhile, the flag pushes forward the Nakai family’s confrontational stares. We may think both Gilpin and the Nakais have reason to be skeptical of patriotism—but instead of cynicism, their forthright gazes demand accountability for the flag’s implications directly from us.

The formal affinity between these two artists should not distract us from Gilpin’s genuine personal and political interest in her subjects. It distinguishes her from the midcentury-cool affect of The Americans, which insists on an ironic distance between the photographer and his subject. Indeed, several of Frank’s photographs in New Mexico make this point, like the ones Van Deren Coke reproduced in his book of New Mexican photography: the low, secretive angle of Frank’s shot of men in a bar at Gallup, for example, formally codifies the photographer’s outsider and even interloper status, while a desolate gas station titled Santa Fe, New Mexico replaces any sign of human habitation with the vague anthropomorphism of the gas pumps, suggesting that the only reason to stop in this place is to enable one to move on again as quickly as possible. It is a hostile and uncomprehending view of the landscape, and it effectively erases its Indigenous people and their history. Frank’s project, placed side by side with The Enduring Navaho, reminds us that photography has a long and troubled relationship with notions of reality and authenticity; as an immigrant to the United States, his distanced stance in relation to the social politics of the Southwest is understandably less nuanced than the perspective produced by Gilpin’s intimate and collaborative relationship with her subjects.146 Although Gilpin’s work is rarely associated with postwar street photography, images such as A Navaho Family were prescient, skillfully composed revelations of precisely the sorts of cultural tensions that would preoccupy younger photographers including Frank, William Eggleston, and others throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Repeatedly selected for reproduction by magazine and newspaper editors because it was in tune with this Cold War zeitgeist, the subjects of A Navaho Family nonetheless continued to provoke stereotypical responses from critics.

The year after the publication of The Enduring Navaho, a 1969 Village Voice article reviewed two exhibitions in New York: the Riverside Museum’s “Communication from the Reservation,” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Harlem on My Mind.”147 The young critic A. D. Coleman characterized the latter (more well-known) exhibition as a “sentimentalized fiasco” that reluctantly revealed the historical truth that “a beautiful, vibrant, complex culture has been created here, not only despite but because of our oppression.” Coleman saw the former show, meanwhile, as an “indictment” that revealed “an equally important subculture which we . . . are systematically destroying.”148 As we might expect from a writer in the Village Voice, Coleman presented a standard late-1960s progressive perspective on Native American culture, passionately outlining the legacy of colonialism for “the only true Americans” and admiring their “survival”—all the while implicitly assuming, through his use of “we” and “our,” that all his readers are White. That assumption makes it less surprising that despite celebrating Indigenous survival, Coleman nonetheless concurred with innumerable nineteenth-century observers who believed that “it’s going to be a long, slow death for the Indians”—and, moreover, suggested that it was “by their own choice.” In Coleman’s view, the Indians are (still) vanishing—in full and paradoxical view. He is intrigued by their presence in front of Gilpin’s camera. “Of particular interest” in “Communication from the Reservation,” he writes, “is the room devoted to the photographs of Laura Gilpin.” Coleman notes that they were taken over a span of more than thirty years, and enthuses: “All are excellent . . . and several are classic. The quiet power of her vision is apparent in the group portrait.”149 Coleman’s admiration for Gilpin is rooted not only in her “artistry” but also in her alleged ability to “overcome that omnipresent and intuitively profound Indian ‘superstition’—the fear of having one’s soul stolen by the camera.” There is ample evidence, in fact, that Navajo people generally did not hold the stereotypical belief that Coleman attributes to “Indians” that photography would steal one’s soul—one might point, for example, to Gilpin’s many photographs of itinerant photobooths at fairs held in Gallup and Window Rock, patronized by Navajo clientele—as well as her own experience of her sitters happily accepting copies of the photographs she took of them, when she offered. The contradictions and stereotypes of Coleman’s review indicate the ideological distance that Gilpin had to traverse if she wanted to convince her Anglo viewers that Navajo people were contemporary participants in conversations about American identity.

A Navaho Family was featured again in 1976, as the publicity image for a retrospective held at the Dayton Art Institute150; the show traveled to the Nelson Gallery (now the Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art) in Kansas City, Missouri, later that year; and Gilpin’s photograph once again featured in a newspaper article with the caption “Indians at Home.” It was the year of the U.S. Bicentennial, and thus an opportunity for public reflections about national character and identity. “The forgotten Americans haven’t been entirely forgotten in this year of our national celebrations,” wrote a Kansas City Star critic, Donald Hoffmann, in his exhibition review. “What happened to the American Indian is hardly within anyone’s power to redress, but at least we can attempt to understand what the Indians were about.”151 Gilpin’s goal, of course, was to convey something of what Navajo life and politics were “about” in the present moment, rather than in the past—but Hoffmann’s grammar once again locates Native culture firmly in the realm of the bygone.

The critic also noted that Gilpin’s retrospective at the Nelson coincided with the opening of a major exhibition of Native American art curated by the gallery’s assistant director, Ralph T. Coe—but mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London, England. “‘Sacred Circles’ is specifically a Bicentennial tribute to the first Americans and a way of introducing that aspect of America’s history to Great Britain,” explained Hoffmann. “The exhibition will be the largest of its kind ever mounted in Europe, drawing on a vast array of museum collections and private collections and even the treasury of Chartres Cathedral.”152 “Sacred Circles” prompted a variety of criticisms from contemporary Native audiences; Artists for Democracy organized a counterexhibition in protest of its “patronizing” view of Native American culture.153 One of the most famous images from that protest exhibition was the Swedish graphic designer Christer Themptander’s We will never forget Wounded Knee—a poster that appropriated the American flag, transforming it into prison bars that trap the Lakota warrior Low Dog (Figure 4.10).154

The Luiseño/Euramerican artist Fritz Scholder also combined nineteenth-century Native archetypes with the American flag in paintings and prints completed around the 1976 Bicentennial. The art historian Leslie Wasserberger has written about these images in terms that echo the themes taken up by Gilpin’s portrait of the Nakais:

Scholder’s representations of Native Americans wrapped in the American flag—The American Indian, Indians with Flag, American Portrait with Flag, and the lithograph American Indian No. 4—are appropriations of a dominant icon and also indicate the highly charged associations the flag assumed during this period. Scholder may have conceived the flag as a surrogate for the striped chief’s blanket to make an ironic statement about the situation of Native Americans in American society in the context of Native American activism as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement and civil rights struggle.155

Although many of Scholder’s Indians wear regalia that viewers are likely to associate with the previous century, he exploited the ambiguity of the painted image to blur the line between past and present—aligning his subjects with the overtly political self-fashioning of contemporaneous Native activists as well as the warriors of the past.156 Gilpin’s photograph is less overtly propagandistic than Themptander’s poster or Scholder’s paintings, but its contemporaneity nonetheless confounded critics who were convinced that the Indians indexed on the gallery walls could not possibly still be here.

From 1964 through 1969, Scholder was an instructor of painting and of art history at the Institute for American Indian Arts. He maintained a studio in Galisteo, thirty-five miles southeast of Santa Fe, for the rest of his life, where Gilpin visited him more than once, and even made his portrait.157 Gilpin had also supported the IAIA from the beginning, seeing it as an Indigenous-led alternative to the tradition fostered by the Studio School. In 1962, she gave a lecture to students in Publication Arts about photography; in 1967 she provided photographs for an exhibition catalog of San Ildefonso pottery; in 1969, after the publication of The Enduring Navaho, she gave a slide lecture to students before they went out to the Navajo and Hopi reservations. In 1971, a student at the IAIA curated an exhibition of Gilpin’s work. “The remarkable installment by this young Indian girl has just delighted me beyond words,” exclaimed Gilpin to another photographer, David Vestal. “No Anglo would ever have thought of the things which she has done. I have photographed it quite thoroughly.”158 Her tantalizingly candid acknowledgment of the IAIA student’s unique perspective offers a vital context for her claims elsewhere to have been attempting to share a Navajo point of view in The Enduring Navaho. It also offers a model for ongoing inquiry; in the final chapter of the present volume, I turn to the question of queer experience in Navajo culture with a return to the work of IAIA graduate Bean Yazzie.