Queer Translation

The week I sit down to write this conclusion, I stumble across the latest issue of Poetry magazine in a gallery bookshop. Guest edited by the Diné poet Esther Belin, it is called “Land Acknowledgements.” Manny Loley’s poem is near the beginning, and I am pleased that I recognize the shape of the Diné bizaad words and some of their meanings.1 As I read—and, later, listen to Loley reciting the poems aloud on the Poetry Foundation website—I hear echoes in “butterfly man tells a story” of the themes that run through this book: the tagline for Diné Pride (“I am a sacred being”), the mountain as a site of emergence, the significance of naming and stories, and the importance of intergenerational relations. Loley’s second poem in the same issue, titled “Hasísná” and in English “Emergence,” adapts ceremonial uses of repetition and parallelism to a personal story of coming out—as a human, as a writer, as a gay man. Using form rather than narrative to connect the dots between the two poems, Loley and Belin gently encourage us to notice that butterfly man is a hataałi and that among those who emerged into this world were queer people—nádleeh nahalinigii.

The speaker in Loley’s poem, butterfly man, is implicitly queer, although the poet does not quite say so. Knowing that Loley identifies as gay and as nádleeh nahalinigii, we recognize a certain slippage between the writer and his protagonist. In English, Loley’s poetic structure reinforces that overlap in its rejection of quotation marks, the ambiguity of the multiple indentations as markers of voice, and the belated “he told me” in the fifth line. It reminds me of Yazzie’s desire in the Dilbaa Project to find queer families who can extend their own, and of the importance of chosen families to queer survival throughout history (in this context, Mayda and Gwenn’s adoption of Logan also resonates queerly). Constructed kinship has particular significance for queer Diné women: “The Navajo remain matrilineal,” notes Denetdale, “and LGBTQ people assert k’e as the foundation by which they belong to their people and the land. K’e is the traditional Navajo concept of how we relate to each other based on kinship. We are all related to each other and those relationships require us as Diné to treat each other with respect.”2 Both Yazzie and Loley extend concepts of k’e to encompass the full extent of their chosen families, as well as acknowledging the ancestral knowledge contained in matrilineal kinship relations. Revisiting interpretations of The Enduring Navaho as a family album in the context of k’e and chosen family, moreover, we might think differently about why Gilpin and Forster emphasized their long-term personal relationships with the people in their book—and particularly why the photographer’s story ends with the Nakai family.

Writing in both Navajo and English, Loley takes up the twin complexities of translation and bilinguality as a core concern of his work. “It is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible,” asserts the philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler, thinking about the possibilities of performative speech.3 But which language, and for what audience? Loley’s bilingual poetry is structurally queer, destabilizing its own social existence even as it asserts that of the author by operating in—to borrow a phrase from the photographer Martha Rosler—two inadequate descriptive systems.4 In the Poetry podcast, Belin asks Loley how his simultaneous use of English and Diné bizaad, in his home life, informs his access to language around queerness. “The whole spectrum of storytelling,” he replies,

has really allowed me to think critically about what it means to be gay or queer or lesbian on the Navajo Nation. . . . Being of these different kinds of expression, gender expressions, and identities for Navajo people is very much different than a mainstream Western kind of, like, LGBT+ kind of identity, because there are different leadership roles, there are different expectations of supporting community that are involved with it.5

Loley’s answer reaches back to an earlier moment in the interview, when he suggested that “in Diné storytelling, you could have one story that has multiple versions” dictated by place, age, and experience. Like his poems, in other words, Diné stories are their own intertexts, each new version speaking to those that came before. While this may be inevitable in an oral tradition, it is also an intentional practice of ceremony in which the story is keyed to specific speakers, listeners, and circumstances. “Writing,” the poet concludes, “at least from a Diné perspective, is never a solitary act, and it is never something that is done lightly.” As I reflect on the enormous number of collaborations, exchanges, revisions, and borrowings that contributed to its careful development over three and a half decades, I realize we could say the same of The Enduring Navaho. Gilpin and Forster felt the responsibility of telling a story to and about a community; like Loley, Yazzie, and others I have cited throughout this book—including myself—that responsibility, and the resulting ethos of respectful collaboration, is rooted in their queerness.

I began this book in Laura Gilpin’s archive, seeking a richer understanding of her relationship to Elizabeth Forster’s Diné neighbor, Lilly Benally, and its afterlife in the object biography of a 1932 portrait of Benally with her infant son. It is a story, or group of stories, marked by absence, not least of Gilpin and Benally, and I anticipated the kind of work that the historian Marisa Fuentes has described powerfully as writing into archival silences.6 Instead, I was confronted by a stunningly rich archive that had been betrayed by intentional erasures. The first was the by-now-familiar historiographical silence that has rigorously ignored, dismissed, and downplayed lesbian history even when its subjects are emphatically making and marking space for themselves. The second was that afforded Gilpin’s subjects: despite her documentation of names, places, relationships, and occupations, the Diné people with whom Gilpin collaborated have largely been reduced to ethnographic types by art historians. This disciplinary failure is an embarrassing legacy of centuries of unthinking replication of the colonial gaze, which sees Indigenous people as synecdochic symbols of culture rather than as individuals. I eagerly became Gilpin’s advocate and ally in calling attention to the lesbian community that she gave to posterity when she donated her papers, uncensored, to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, as well as to the nuance and political urgency of her work with specific Navajo people, which informed her overarching vision of The Enduring Navaho.

As I spoke into the void left by these scholarly silences, I was forced to confront Gilpin’s own pointed omission of queer Diné experience. Although there is no clear explanation for her choice, I am reluctant to characterize it as a failure—or perhaps more accurately, I want to see it as a generative failure. As Jack Halberstam wrote in 2011, “Failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior,” and if Gilpin failed overtly to celebrate the queerness inside Diné culture, then at least her simultaneous failure to pursue fame as a modernist art photographer let her escape expectations ranging from abstraction to ethnography—thereby freeing her to become an advocate for Diné sovereignty.7 Her failure was also generative in the sense that it marked a shift in my own authorial perspective: rather than seeing myself solely as Gilpin’s collaborator and ally, I had to build new relationships so that I could begin to fill in her gaps. This project came together when I understood that The Enduring Navaho was a starting point for the conversation I wanted to have about allyship and intersectional visual politics, rather than a perfect execution thereof. In retrospect, Halberstam’s truism about failure freeing us from conventional expectations applies equally to Bean Yazzie, whose career could be described in parallel with Gilpin’s: although Yazzie has a degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts and some of the peers with whom they exhibited in the early 2000s have since pursued meteoric art careers, Yazzie’s queerness led them to pursue a second degree, in photojournalism, and a career that incorporates advocacy and social justice, generating dialogue among community audiences. As Loley—also an IAIA graduate—observed, in Diné culture, queerness comes with community responsibility.

In 1968, Lloyd H. New, director of IAIA, proposed a mandate for artists that foreshadowed Yazzie’s question, “Why can’t we have new ceremonies?” “The Institute,” he declared, “believe[s] it to be the business of the artist, especially, to create new and worthy actions leading to new traditions.”8 New’s language reminds us that like Yazzie’s series of portraits, Loley’s poems occasionally adopt ceremonial forms; Loley himself asserts that he writes poetry in part to share stories in an explicitly ceremonial tradition. New, who was an innovative modernist designer in his own right, wanted to give students at the IAIA the freedom to explore how their cultural heritage might inform individual self-expression without dictating style or subject matter. It was a clear break from the tourist-market-driven policy of the Studio School and other programs of previous generations, and the resulting range of work was predictably diverse. Gilpin celebrated the “amazing” talent being developed at IAIA; like Loley, New, and Yazzie, she believed that the future of Native American people—Diné people, specifically—would depend on rooting new ceremonies in ancestral ways of being.

Attentive readers will have noticed that although this project began with Gilpin’s portrait of Lilly Benally and her son, there is no discussion of that photograph in this volume. It is one of innumerable conversations that hit the proverbial cutting-room floor as the project came together. The inevitability of such editorial decisions does not make them proof against regret, but I take comfort in the fact that Gilpin, too, had regrets as she sent her book to press. She had hoped, for example, to include the Navajo Seal in her chapter on tribal government, but the portrait of Raymond Nakai in which it would have appeared was never made. John Claw Jr.’s design for the seal recalls the structure of a ceremonial drawing, many of which surround directional symbols with the rainbow-striped body of a yei whose head and feet leave an opening on the eastern edge of the design. In Claw’s seal, a tricolored rainbow encircles the four sacred directional mountains, which in turn surround three livestock animals—horse, cow, and sheep. Two stalks of corn anchor the design (corn pollen is a central component of Diné ceremony), and the whole is surrounded by fifty arrowheads, symbolic of the fifty United States surrounding the sovereign Navajo Nation. The rainbow, open at the top (east) of the seal, represents Navajo sovereignty.

At some point in her writing process, Gilpin reversed the order of the last two sections of the book, ending with “The Enduring Way” (an overview of ceremonial practice) rather than “The Coming Way,” on tribal governance. A color plate is tipped into “The Enduring Way”: slotted in between photographs of the nine-day Nightway ceremony is a photograph of a rainbow, rising up out of a field of bright yellow sunflowers (Plate 16). On the facing page, Gilpin quotes part of a Nightway song. “In Beauty (happily) I walk / With Beauty before me I walk / With Beauty behind me I walk / With Beauty above me I walk / With Beauty all around me I walk / It is finished in Beauty” [repeated four times]. It is by far the most familiar element of Diné ceremony among non-Navajo audiences, repeated incessantly in books aimed at popular audiences throughout the twentieth century and serving as a core plot component in the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Rather than leaving her readers with this intercultural cliché, however, Gilpin comments about its failure to translate into English. “This oft-quoted poem, impressive as it is, is far from an adequate translation,” she asserts, deflating any sentimentalism that it may have inspired in her reader. “There seems to be no English word,” she explains, “to convey the idea of the Navaho concept of ‘in harmony with.’ Navaho words of course fit into the song, while an English translation is difficult to adapt.”9 The challenges of translation are a recurrent theme throughout The Enduring Navaho; what is more, failures of translation often appear as generative moments of connection, identification, and exchange. As in Loley’s poetry, translation introduces and celebrates a certain level of queerness throughout Gilpin’s text.

Gilpin uses the rainbow—a shaft of color carefully placed between black-and-white photographs of thunderstorms, rain, and a sand painting, before, and the nighttime scenes of the final ceremonial night, after—as a generative moment of translation. It pulls us out of the sequence of the Nightway and recalls the opening lines of The Enduring Navaho, in which Gilpin writes, “To understand the Navaho People, even in small measure, it is essential to know at least some part of their symbolic ritual. . . . The Creation Story, as its title indicates, contains the roots of this symbolism, and signifies Navaho relation to all of Nature. Like our Old Testament, the Navaho story contains a flood, expulsion from one world to another, and, throughout, a strong suggestion of evolution.”10 Gilpin uses the Judeo-Christian story to help translate the Diné one for her readers; as I suggested in chapter 3, she then goes on to use the Creation Story as a vehicle for an argument about Navajo sovereignty. Appearing at the end of her book, the rainbow reintroduces the Old Testament story of the flood: in that context, it symbolizes forgiveness, renewal, and hope after devastating destruction. Opposite the song of the Nightway, at the end of a section on ceremony that concludes The Enduring Navaho, it reinscribes that symbolic significance in Diné terms. After the Long Walk, the devastations of livestock reduction, the depredations of religious missions, and the many failures of U.S. government policy, Gilpin’s rainbow suggests that Diné sovereignty may restore the Nation’s hózhó—that concept for which, as her facing text points out, there is no English equivalent.