Notes — Continued (2 of 2)

1. Women also participated in labor-based urban relocation programs, although to a lesser extent than men. For more on the gendered experience of relocation and its representation in visual media, see Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, “Shifting the Gaze: Gender and Resilience in ‘The Exiles,’” American Quarterly 67, no. 1 (March 2015): 1–24.

2. Nancy Marie Mithlo, “‘A Real Feminine Journey’: Locating Indigenous Feminisms in the Arts,” Meridians 9, no. 2 (2009): 26.

3. Typescript letter from Forster to Gilpin dated January 16, 1932, prepared for “Denizens of the Desert,” box 57, Gilpin Papers.

4. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 164.

5. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 164.

6. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 166.

7. Gilpin to Wardlaw, May 31, 1967, box 50, folder 12, Gilpin Papers.

8. The Nakai family of Red Rock were no direct relation to Raymond Nakai.

9. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 247.

10. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 30.

11. Larry McSwain, “Noted Photographer Compiles Navajo Book,” Gallup Independent, January 26, 1955.

12. Nakai appears to have found “Mrs. Francis” to be an apt and functional relational reference name to be used by Forster and Gilpin. Over time, conventions and circumstances changed; in 1970 Gilpin referred to her as “Mary Nakai” in a letter, and by 2009, when the Nakais’ great-granddaughter, Marguerite Sheehan, was celebrated as her high school salutatorian in the Navajo Times, “Mrs. Francis” was listed as “Mary Ann Benally” ( “Education Briefs,” Navajo Times, August 13, 2009).

13. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 65.

14. Betty Toulouse, “The Laboratory’s Early Years: 1927–1947,” El Palacio 87, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 10.

15. After their return from exile, Diné weavers increasingly collaborated with traders and collectors to create distinctive and complex woven designs. For more on the history of Navajo weaving, see Rosann Sandoval Willink and Paul G. Zolbrod, Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

16. Laurie D. Webster, “Reproducing the Past: Revival and Revision in Navajo Weaving,” in “Southwestern Indian Art Markets,” special issue, Journal of the Southwest 38, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 428.

17. Shelby J. Tisdale, ed., Spider Woman’s Gift: Nineteenth-Century Diné Textiles at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2011), 26–27.

18. Louise I. Stiver, “The Stewart Family,” in Keystone of the Arch: The Stewart Collection (online exhibition), Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 2000, http://www.miaclab.org/exhibits/stewart/family.html.

19. The Navajo Nation was officially so designated only in 1969. In the 1930s, many people used “Navajoland” to describe the Navajo Indian Reservation; Diné Bikéyah is the equivalent of “Navajoland” in Diné bizaad. It is distinct from Dinétah, which is the historic Navajo homeland designated by the four sacred directional mountains.

20. February 20, 1932, letter reproduced as from Forster to Emily, in Forster, Denizens, 70–72 (box 57, Gilpin Papers).

21. Quoted in Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 423.

22. Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 423. Gilpin would later become directly involved with the Board.

23. Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 415–16.

24. Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 427.

25. Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 424.

26. Webster, “Reproducing the Past,” 425.

27. Gilpin to Herbert Putnam, April 3, 1934, box 3, folder 6, Gilpin Papers.

28. For more on the ethics of archaeology and collecting, see Stephen W. Silliman, ed., Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008); and Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

29. W. J. Hoffman, “Native American Blanket-Making,” Monthly Illustrator 4, no. 12 (April 1895): 119.

30. Russell P. Hartman and David E. Doyel, “Preserving a Native People’s Heritage: A History of the Navajo Tribal Museum,” Kiva 47, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 241.

31. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

32. Ellen O’Connor, “Laura Gilpin Top Photographer and Writer on S.W. Indian Life,” Denver Post, March 15, 1954.

33. For an extensive and insightful discussion of the impact of stock reduction on Navajo culture and economics, see Marsha Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

34. Kathy M’Closkey, “Marketing Multiple Myths: The Hidden History of Navajo Weaving,” Journal of the Southwest 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 185.

35. M’Closkey, “Marketing Multiple Myths,” 213.

36. M’Closkey, “Marketing Multiple Myths,” 215.

37. M’Closkey, “Marketing Multiple Myths,” 216.

38. There is an extensive literature on salvage anthropology and its mindset. The phrase was first used in the 1960s to describe literal salvage before landscapes were irrevocably altered or destroyed; see, e.g., James J. Hester, “Pioneer Methods in Salvage Anthropology,” in “Dam Anthropology: River Basin Research,” special issue, Anthropological Quarterly 41, no. 3 (July 1968): 132–46. Today it is most often used to describe the anthropological attitude that cultures are disappearing and must be documented before they do.

39. One of the few potential archival records of Luis Nakai is an entry in the Social Security Death Index for Louis Nakai, 1918–1972, last residence Shiprock, New Mexico.

40. Webster notes that Navajo weaving has always served both domestic and trade purposes (“Reproducing the Past”).

41. Hartman and Doyel, “Preserving a Native People’s Heritage,” 252. In fact, we might say the same about the American flag, which had been taken up as an iconographic element by Native American artists from its earliest moment: see Toby Herbst and Joel Kopp, The Flag in American Indian Art (Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1993); see also Douglas A. Schmittou and Michael H. Logan, “Fluidity of Meaning: Flag Imagery in Plains Indian Art,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 559–604. Throughout the twentieth century, Navajo weavers wove U.S. flags of various sizes for the tourist trade.

42. M. Jill Ahlberg-Yohe, “What Weavings Bring: The Social Value of Weaving-Related Objects in Contemporary Navajo Life” Kiva 73, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 368.

43. Quoting “Nelly Mae” (a pseudonym), Ahlberg-Yohe, “What Weavings Bring,” 370. Dibé is Diné for “sheep,” and naalyéhé is Diné for material goods.

44. Ahlberg-Yohe, “What Weavings Bring,” 370.

45. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 247.

46. Francis Nakai to Gilpin, August 26, 1933, box 3, folder 5, Gilpin Papers.

47. Hartman and Doyel, “Preserving a Native People’s Heritage,” 241–42.

48. Drafts of this agreement are in the Gilpin Papers at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (box 10, folder 24, and box 11, folder 8, Gilpin Papers). Link was also a founder, during his time at the museum, of the Navajo Code Talker Association (“Little Promoted Code Talker Museum,” Navajo Times, January 5, 2012, http://www.navajotimes.com/news/2012/0112/010512little.php).

49. Forster, Denizens, 138.

50. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 247.

51. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 248–49. In the first edition of the published book and some (but not all) later editions, a color plate with two photographs of a young couple—up close and in the distance—is tipped in between these two pages.

52. Adrienne Rich, “Origins and History of Consciousness,” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 7.

53. Research Division, Republican National Committee, “Eisenhower Campaign Chronology,” November 1952, 1, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kan., https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED469559.pdf.

54. U.S. Public Law 94–344, known as the Flag Code, expressly prohibits carrying the flag horizontally.

55. Less innocuous, perhaps, when we recall the military connotations of aerial photography at midcentury; see chap. 3.

56. Cyril Clemens, “Mark Twain and Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Mark Twain Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Winter 1953): 1.

57. Fixico, Termination and Relocation.

58. Gilpin to Bryan Holme, January 30, 1956, box 6, folder 10, Gilpin Papers.

59. Ann Metcalf, “Navajo Women in the City: Lessons from a Quarter-Century of Relocation,” American Indian Quarterly 6, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1982): 77, citing Harry Martin, “Correlates of Adjustment among American Indians in an Urban Environment,” Human Organization 23, no. 4 (Winter 1964): 290–95.

60. Metcalf, “Navajo Women in the City,” 77, citing John A. Price, “The Migration and Adaptation of American Indians to Los Angeles,” Human Organization 27, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 168–75.

61. Metcalf, “Navajo Women in the City,” 79, citing Malcolm McFee, “The 150% Man, A Product of Blackfeet Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 303–11.

62. Myla Vicenti Carpio, Indigenous Albuquerque (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).

63. Washington Matthews, The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony, Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883–84 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 385.

64. Matthews, Mountain Chant, 386.

65. Quoted in Jerry and Alice Bathke, “They Call Themselves ‘The People,’” reprinted in Akwesasne Notes 1, no. 9 (October 1969): 28. In Matthews’s documentation of the Mountain Chant, he has this to say in a note after the first six lines of this excerpt: “Although not told with the rest of the myth, it was subsequently related to the writer that Tsilkè-¢igìni [the holy young man] said to the prophet, ‘Whoever learns our songs will thenceforth be our child.’ The above song, it is said, has some reference to this promise; but a fuller explanation, no doubt, remains to be discovered” (Matthews, Mountain Chant, 459–60).

66. Forster, Denizens, 10–11.

67. Forster, Denizens, 11.

68. Quoting Forster, Forster, Denizens, 11.

69. Forster to Emily, November 13, 1932, as recorded in Forster, Denizens, 110–11. In The Enduring Navaho Gilpin tells a different and more elaborate version of this story.

70. Jerry (Gerald) Richardson, private comm. by phone, October 9, 2017.

71. Putnam to Gilpin, February 26, 1933, box 3, folder 5, Gilpin Papers.

72. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

73. See House Report No. 222, Certificates of Citizenship to Indians, 68th Cong., 1st Sess. (February 22, 1924). Note: this statute has been codified in the United States Code at Title 8, Sec. 1401(b).

74. Steve Pavlik, “Should Trees Have Legal Standing in Indian Country?,” Wicazo Sa Review 30, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 9.

75. Act of June 2, 1924, Public Law 68–175, 43 STAT 253, which authorized the secretary of the interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Indians, June 2, 1924; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789–1996; General Records of the U.S. Government, Record Group 11, National Archives. The assimilationist 1887 Dawes Act had extended citizenship to any Native person who had “voluntarily taken up . . . his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians . . . and has adopted the habits of civilized life,” but this did not apply to most Navajo people.

76. Note that voter suppression remains a problem throughout Indian Country, including on the Navajo Nation. See, e.g., Miacel Spotted Elk, “Voter Suppression Is a Constant in Navajo Nation,” American Prospect, November 1, 2020, https://prospect.org/politics/voter-suppression-is-a-constant-in-navajo-nation/.

77. American Civil Liberties Union, “Voting Rights in Indian Country: A Special Report of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union” (Atlanta: ACLU Voting Rights Project, September 2009), 7.

78. Andrew Oxford, “It’s Been 70 Years since Court Ruled Native Americans Could Vote in New Mexico,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 2, 2018, https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/it-s-been-70-years-since-court-ruled-native-americans-could-vote-in-new-mexico/article_d0544a48-ef37-56ef-958f-eb81dcf01344.html.

79. Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” Indian Law Review 16, no. 1 (1991): 167–202.

80. Wolfley, “Jim Crow.”

81. Clyde Benally, A Utah Navajo History (Monticello, Utah: San Juan School District, 1982), 167. A school project directed by Benally, produced by students.

82. Charles E. Minton, “The Place of the Indian Youth Council in Higher Education,” Journal of American Indian Education 1, no. 1 (June 1961): 32.

83. Paul R. McKenzie-Jones, Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 46.

84. McKenzie-Jones, Clyde Warrior, 51.

85. Minton, “Place of the Indian Youth Council in Higher Education,” 30.

86. Bradley G. Shreve, “We Are Born at a Time,” La Crónica de Nuevo México 86 (January 2011): 4. For a period discussion of Native American activism in this moment, see Stan Steiner, The New Indians (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1968).

87. James M. Naughton, “Nixon Proposes Indian Control of Programs,” Akwesasne Notes 2, no. 5 (September 1970): 4.

88. Bathke and Bathke, in Akwesasne Notes, 31.

89. Benally, Utah Navajo History, 167.

90. Simon Hall, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 4 (October 2008): 669.

91. Herbert Blatchford Oral History, American Indian Oral History Collection, University of New Mexico Library Special Collections. This new interest in litigation as a proactive assertion of sovereignty had ramifications for both Gilpin and Blatchford: seven years after the former’s death in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum, which holds her estate, was sued by the family of Norman Benally, son of Lilly Benally, for invasion of privacy; and Blatchford’s adult son was a defendant in a case that took up the question of sovereignty and jurisdiction in the Navajo Nation.

92. Quoted in McKenzie-Jones, Clyde Warrior, 78.

93. This self-fashioning is markedly gendered: in contrast to the men, Annie Wauneka wears traditional clothing and jewelry in both her portraits; the silver jewelry worn by an anonymous waitress in Gallup is the only other example of a professional woman depicted with a distinctively Diné element of clothing in this section.

94. Hall, “Protest Movements,” 656.

95. “Police Chief Replies,” The Ladder 5, no. 1 (October 1960): 5.

96. D. Griffin, “The President’s Message,” The Ladder 1, no. 2 (November 1956): 3.

97. D. Griffin, “President’s Message,” The Ladder 1, no. 4 (January 1957): 9.

98. Marcia M. Gallo, introduction to The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, 1956–1972: An Interpretation and Document Archive (Ann Arbor: Alexander Street/ProQuest, September 2010), https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1003268047.

99. Del Martin, “President’s Message,” The Ladder 1, no. 1 (October 1956): 7.

100. Hall, “Protest Movements,” 659–60.

101. Hall, “Protest Movements,” 665–66.

102. Simon Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement and Patriotic Protest,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (September 2010): 552.

103. Hall, “American Gay Rights Movement,” 561, quoting Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 295–97.

104. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Wittig’s essay “Paradigm” was translated by George Stambolian for Stambolian and Elaine Marks, eds., Homosexualities and French Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 114–21, and is quoted in Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, and B. Ruby Rich, “Lesbians and Film,” Jump Cut 24–25 (March 1981): 17.

105. For a midcentury overview of the history of Native American citizenship, see Senate report 1455, “Constitutional Rights,” Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, made by its Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights pursuant to S. Res. 53, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. as extended, together with Individual Views (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962).

106. Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, “The History of Indian Voting Rights in Arizona: Overcoming Decades of Voter Suppression,” Arizona State Law Journal 47 (2016): 1109.

107. Thomas D. Morgan, “Native Americans in World War II,” Army History 35 (Fall 1995): 22.

108. Brye Stevens, “Navajo Airman Continues Family’s Military Legacy at Whiteman,” December 11, 2018, https://www.usafe.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1710269/navajo-airman-continues-familys-military-legacy-at-whiteman/.

109. Mark Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (New York: Routledge, 2013), 334.

110. Jerry and Alice Bathke, “They Call Themselves ‘The People,’” University of Chicago Magazine 61, no. 5 (March–April 1969): 16.

111. “Navajos—Past, Present and Future,” Navajo Times, September 5, 1962.

112. O’Connor, “Laura Gilpin Top Photographer.”

113. Forster, Denizens, 92.

114. O’Connor, “Laura Gilpin Top Photographer.”

115. Bathke and Bathke, “They Call Themselves ‘The People,’” 17.

116. Roseann Sandoval Willink and Paul G. Zolbrod, Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996), 86.

117. “Tribal Fair One of Best,” Navajo Times, September 4, 1969.

118. Theresa Jill Buckland, “Dance, Authenticity, and Cultural Memory: The Politics of Embodiment,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001): 1–16. Buckland notes that controlled access to disciplined spaces of embodiment are key to this perception of authenticity (13).

119. C. G. Galloway, “Endurance and Photography in Navajo History,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (February 2004): 128–29. Anderson is quoted in Peter Iverson and Monty Roessel, eds., For Our Navajo People: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 144–45.

120. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Securing Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” in “Native Feminism,” special issue, Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 131.

121. In an unpublished photograph of the same group (Amon Carter Museum accession number P1979.128.536), you can see everyone’s faces clearly.

122. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 99, 106.

123. Various sources list Juan Nakai’s birthdate as 1926, so he would have been about six years old in Gilpin’s 1932 photograph and about thirty-six in 1962.

124. Askart.com record for Juan Nakai has a biography by his niece, who says, “From what I heard from family members, he was gravely injured and thrown into the San Juan River in Farmington, New Mexico,” as well as extensive discussion among online users (https://www.askart.com/artist/Juan_Nakai/11160987/Juan_Nakai.aspx, accessed April 12, 2021); see also Navajo Times, “Letters to the Editor,” October 10, 1974, from J. Oliver Stock Sr., Waterflow, N.M.

125. The photographs by Gilpin in the guide were Navaho Silversmith; Acoma Pueblo woman, wearing typical dress . . . ; Navaho Madonna; Navaho Woman Spinning; Navaho Family; Navaho Girl; Shepherds of the Desert; Acoma; Sky City; Mission, Ranchos de Taos; Santuario, Chimayó, Our Lady of Guadalupe—Wood-carving by New Mexico Santo Maker; and New Mexican Santo de Bulto.

126. Writers Program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of New Mexico, New Mexico: A Guide to the Colorful State (Albuquerque, 1940), 161.

127. Writers Program, New Mexico, 161–62.

128. Writers Program, New Mexico, 162.

129. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 155.

130. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 155.

131. Gilpin to Spielman, January 31, 1968, box 50, folder 13, Gilpin Papers.

132. Forster to Gilpin, August 1, 1932, as reprinted in Forster, Denizens, 103.

133. “Navajo Artist Juan Nakai Is Now at the Kiva Kurio Entrance to the Aztec Ruins, Aztec, N.M.,” Farmington Daily Times, August 23, 1964.

134. Daniel H. Israel, “The Reemergence of Tribal Nationalism and Its Impact on Reservation Resource Development,” University of Colorado Law Review 47, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 617n1.

135. Bonnie Zimmerman, “The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives,” in “The Lesbian Issue,” special issue, Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 666.

136. Ginny Berson, “The Furies,” The Furies 1 (January 1972): 1.

137. Rita Mae Brown, “Roxanne Dunbar: How a Female Heterosexual Serves the Interests of Male Supremacy,” The Furies 1 (January 1972): 5.

138. Hilary Harris, “Failing ‘White Woman’: Interrogating the Performance of Respectability,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 2 (May 2000): 205–6.

139. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33.

140. Zimmerman, “Politics of Transliteration,” 674.

141. Needham, Power Lines, 218.

142. “United Fund Drops Indian Center,” Americans Before Columbus (ABC), November 1969; reprinted in Akwesasne Notes 2, no. 1 (April 1970): 19.

143. “Gallup Indian to Go on Trial for Kidnapping of Garcia,” El Grito del Norte 6, no. 4 (May 1973): [4].

144. Jonathan Goldberg observes that The Enduring Navaho has escaped much of the criticism levied at Gilpin’s earlier photographic projects because it “tallies . . . with current senses of politically progressive or artistically sophisticated, supposedly realistic documentary work” (Willa Cather and Others, 154).

145. Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Aperture, 1958). Native Americans seem to be entirely absent from this project; in 1956, Frank published photographs he had taken in Peru and Bolivia in Georges Arnaud’s book, Indiens pas morts (literally, “Indians not dead”) with all that such a title implies (Nancy Watson Barr, “Truth, Memory, and the American Working-Class City: Robert Frank in Detroit and at the Rouge,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 76, nos. 1–2 [2002]: 73n7).

146. In photography, the ideological slippage is often between the indexical and the real; see Walter Benjamin, Camera Lucida, and others.

147. According to the curator Oriole Feshbach, the Riverside Museum actually hosted a separate exhibition of “The Enduring Navaho” alongside “Communication from the Reservation” in 1968–69.

148. A. D. Coleman, “From the Reservation: Latent Image,” Village Voice, March 6, 1969.

149. Coleman, “From the Reservation.” The article misspells their name “Nikai” and misdates the photograph to 1951.

150. Scrapbook, box 65, Gilpin Papers.

151. Donald Hoffmann, “Now’s the Time for the Indians,” Kansas City Star, undated clipping in scrapbook, box 65, Gilpin Papers.

152. Hoffmann, “Now’s the Time.”

153. Richard Cork, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 343.

154. For more on this poster, see Louise Siddons, “Red Power in the Black Panther: Radical Imagination and Intersectional Resistance at Wounded Knee,” American Art 25, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 2–31.

155. Leslie Wasserberger, “An American Expressionist,” 37–75, in Lowery Stokes-Sims, ed., Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian (Washington, D.C.: NMAI, 2008), 50.

156. Siddons, “Red Power in the Black Panther.”

157. Brush, Working, 183.

158. Gilpin to Vestal, February 20, 1971, box 9, folder 4, Gilpin Papers.

1. Sophie Hackett, “Queer Looking,” Aperture 218 (Spring 2015): 40.

2. GALAS Guidebook, unpaginated. GALAS Archive, Lesbian Herstory Archives of the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Inc, Brooklyn, New York; quoted in Thompson, “DIY Identity Kit,” 262.

3. Mary Savig, “What Is Feminist Art?,” Archives of American Art Journal 60, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 64. Similarly, Lillian Faderman has documented the failures of White lesbian politics for lesbians of color (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991]).

4. Ginny Berson, untitled editorial introduction, The Furies 1 (January 1972): 1.

5. Sharon Deevey, “Such a Nice Girl . . . ,” The Furies 1 (January 1972): 2.

6. Mignon R. Moore, “Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities,” Signs 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 115, 116n6.

7. The Combahee River Collective Statement appeared as a movement document in April 1977. The final, definitive version was published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362–72.

8. Gabrielle Daniels, “First Black Lesbian Conference,” off our backs 10, no. 11 (December 1980): 4.

9. Jihan Gearon, “Indigenous Feminism Is Our Culture,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2021, https://doi.org/10.48558/WBFS-NM87.

10. Brian Joseph Gilley, Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 27.

11. Paula Gunn Allen, “Lesbians in American Indian Cultures,” Conditions 7 (1981): 67.

12. Doc, “First National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference,” off our backs 9, no. 10 (November 1979): 14.

13. Beth Brant, “Giveaway: Native Lesbian Writers,” in “Theorizing Lesbian Experience,” special issue, Signs 18, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 945.

14. Smokii Sumac, “Two Spirit and Queer Indigenous Resurgence through Sci-Fi Futurisms, Doubleweaving, and Historical Re-Imaginings: A Review Essay,” Transmotion 3, no. 2 (2017): 172.

15. Aileen O’Bryan, The Dîné: Origin Myths of the Navaho Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 163, 1956), vii. O’Bryan divorced Jesse Nusbaum in 1939 and reverted to her maiden name.

16. O’Bryan, Dîné, 5.

17. O’Bryan, Dîné, 5n21.

18. O’Bryan, Dîné, 7n30.

19. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5. She continues, “The terms that facilitate recognition are themselves conventional, the effects and instruments of a social ritual that decide, often through exclusion and violence, the linguistic conditions of survivable subjects.”

20. Carolyn Epple, “Two Spirit People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men [review],” Great Plains Research 9, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 171–72.

21. According to the Ojibwe journalist Mary Annette Pember, the Ho-Chunk composer Kristopher Kohl Miner has identified the Diné scholar Wesley Thomas as one of the originators of the term (Pember, “‘Two Spirit’ Tradition Far from Ubiquitous among Tribes,” rewire news group, October 13, 2016, https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2016/10/13/two-spirit-tradition-far-ubiquitous-among-tribes).

22. Jolene Yazzie, interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

23. Randy Burns, preface to Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, edited by Will Roscoe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 3.

24. Burns, preface, 1, 4.

25. Burns, preface, 2. Emphasis added.

26. Burns, preface, 5.

27. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, artist’s statement, 1999, quoted in Hammond, Lesbian Art in America, 64.

28. Tsinhnahjinnie, artist’s statement.

29. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “Dragonfly’s Home,” in Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native Photography, edited by Henrietta Lidchi and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2009), 10.

30. Tsinhnahjinnie, “Dragonfly’s Home.”

31. Gail Tremblay, “Reflections on ‘Mattie Looks for Steve Biko’: A Photograph by Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie,” in Partial Recall, edited by Lucy Lippard (New York: New Press, 1992), 113–19.

32. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “Compensating Imbalances,” Exposure 29, no. 1 (1993): 30.

33. Tsinhnahjinnie, quoted in Hammond, Lesbian Art in America, 64.

34. Jolene Nenibah Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

35. Laurel Morales, “LGBT Navajos Discover Unexpected Champions: Their Grandparents,” National Public Radio, January 26, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/26/687957536/lgbt-navajos-discover-unexpected-champions-their-grandparents.

36. Jeremy Meek, “Photos of Queer Life on a Sprawling Native American Reservation,” Vice, November 14, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article/43np4q/photos-queer-native-american-life-navajo-nation.

37. Berard Haile, Women versus Men: A Conflict of Navajo Emergence, the Curly Tó Aheedlíinii Version (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 20, 21.

38. Gary Witherspoon, Navajo Kinship and Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 51.

39. Witherspoon, Navajo Kinship, 52.

40. Denetdale, “Securing Navajo National Boundaries.”

41. Souksavanh Tom Keovorabouth, “Reaching Back to Traditional Teachings: Diné Knowledge and Gender Politics,” Genealogy 5, no. 95 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5040095.

42. Teba used this term at the 2019 American Indian Studies Association conference, during the panel “Mapping a Pueblo Feminist Movement” (Albuquerque, February 8, 2019; Jennifer Marley, moderator).

43. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

44. W. W. Hill, “The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navaho Culture,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 37, no. 2, pt. 1 (April–June 1935), 274n3.

45. Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015; Saba Hamedy, “Navajo Nation Struggles with Gay Marriage,” Santa Fe New Mexican, January 1, 2014, https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/navajo-nation-struggles-with-gay-marriage/article_b50b754c-3c12-5de2-858a-3d31d02cbbd4.html.

46. Foucault, History of Sexuality.

47. Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” Signs 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 27–42.

48. Epple, “Coming to Terms,” 269.

49. Hannah Abelbeck, Jennifer Denetdale, and Devorah Romanek, “Double Take,” El Palacio (June 2019): https://www.elpalacio.org/2019/06/double-take/.

50. See Scott Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

51. The trans and queer theory scholar Levi C. Hord has suggested that there is power in “staying with the discomfort” of these fragmented and distorted gender histories (“Between Naming and Knowing Someone: Language, Gender, and Colonial History,” Modern Art Oxford Studio Blog, February 17, 2021, https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/blog/between-naming-and-knowing-someone-language-gender-and-colonial-history-by-levi-c-r-hord).

52. Haile italicizes Tó Aheedlíinii, presumably because it is a clan identification (the Water Flows Together clan) rather than a name. Throughout the text, Haile refers to his informant as “Curly,” and for lack of an alternative, I do the same.

53. Haile, Women versus Men, 11n6.

54. Haile, Women versus Men, 4.

55. Haile, Women versus Men, 11.

56. Haile, Women versus Men, 18.

57. Robert W. Young and William Morgan, The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), iv.

58. Dedication, in Young and Morgan, The Navajo Language (1980), unpaginated.

59. Robert W. Young and William Morgan, The Navaho Language (Phoenix, Ariz.: Phoenix Indian School for the United States Indian Service, 1943). They cite Edward Sapir, Harry Hoijer, and Berard Haile (although they call him “Father Haile Berard”) as important precursors in the creation of a Navajo–English dictionary.

60. Young and Morgan, Navaho Language (1943), pt. 1 (Navaho–English), i.

61. Young and Morgan, Navaho Language (1943), 1–2.

62. Young and Morgan, Navajo Language (1980), 525.

63. Pauly Denetclaw, “Data Shows Huge Reduction in Diné Speakers,” Navajo Times, November 16, 2017, https://navajotimes.com/reznews/data-shows-huge-reduction-in-dine-speakers/.

64. Hill, “Status of the Hermaphrodite,” 273.

65. W. W. Hill, Navaho Humor, General Series in Anthropology, no. 9 (Menasha, Wisc.: George Banta, 1943).

66. Thomas, “Navajo Cultural Constructions,” 159.

67. Hill, Navaho Humor, 12.

68. Hill, Navaho Humor, 15. In recounting the joke, the translator used no pronouns for the nádleeh, so I have elected to use nonbinary pronouns.

69. Kath Weston, “Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 339–67.

70. Midnight Sun, “Sex/Gender Systems in Native North America,” in Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, edited by Will Roscoe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 32.

71. Dan Avery, “LGBTQ American Indians Report High Levels of Depression and Abuse, Study Finds,” nbcnews.com, November 9, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-community-voices/lgbtq-american-indians-report-high-levels-depression-abuse-study-finds-rcna4925. The article quotes Somáh Haaland, child of Deb Haaland (U.S. secretary of the interior) and media coordinator for the Pueblo Action Alliance, which may also explain why the issue is receiving attention from mainstream media.

72. The City of Vancouver archives, for example, hold several photographs of drag performances organized by the Greater Vancouver Native Cultural Society.

73. Meek, “Photos of Queer Life.”

74. James Kleinmann, “Exclusive Interview: Navajo Drag Queen featured on HBO’s We’re Here Lady Shug ‘Normally People Who Are Not Queer or Two-Spirit or Part of Our Culture Speak for Us,’” Queer Review, June 5, 2020, https://thequeerreview.com/2020/06/05/exclusive-interview-navajo-drag-queen-featured-on-hbos-were-here/.

75. Lady Shug, who also goes by Ty Victor, uses the pronouns she/they.

76. Renae Watchman, “Reel Restoration in Drunktown’s Finest,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 29–54, https://www.the-journal.com/articles/man-who-murdered-lgbtq-teen-in-cortez-is-released-from-prison/.

77. “Two Spirits” Independent Lens (PBS), June 14, 2011, https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/two-spirits/.

78. Gail Binkly, “Fred Martinez’s Killer Is Paroled: The Brutal Murder in 2001 Drew National Attention to Cortez,” Four Corners Free Press, September 1, 2019, https://fourcornersfreepress.com/fred-martinezs-killer-is-paroled-the-brutal-murder-in-2001-drew-national-attention-to-cortez/.

79. Jacob Anderson-Minshall, “Native American Drag Star Lady Shug Is More Than Glamour,” Advocate, June 12, 2019, https://www.advocate.com/exclusives/2019/6/12/native-american-drag-star-lady-shug-more-glamour.

80. Morales, “LGBT Navajos Discover Unexpected Champions.”

81. “RN,” quoted in Epple, “Coming to Terms,” 271.

82. In response to a question about her understanding of the five genders in ancestral Diné epistemology, Lady Shug explained to Kleinmann that “even as an adult I’m still trying to learn my culture” (“Exclusive Interview”). This decolonizing approach to queer expression is also evident in the uptick in the use of traditional regalia among Indigenous drag queens and queer people, for example, Chiricahua Apache/Diné designer Geronimo Louie (Christian Allaire, “Indigenous Ribbon Work Always Tells a Story,” Vogue, March 22, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/geronimo-louie-indigenous-ribbon-work). Diné Pride uses their drag show as a fundraiser for scholarships (“Historic Drag Show Draws Hundreds to Navajo Nation, Funds Raised for LGBTQ+ Scholarship,” The Press Room, Navajo Nation Pride, January 11, 2020, https://www.navajonationpride.com/post/historic-drag-show-draws-hundreds-to-navajo-nation-funds-raised-for-lgbtq-scholarship).

83. Josie Raphaelito, “Indigenizing Love through Diné Pride,” Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine 43, no. 4 (December 2019), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/indigenizing-love-through-dine-pride.

84. Alray Nelson, “Heres the tentative agenda for Friday!,” Facebook post, June 29, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154603964235841&set=p.10154603964235841&type=3.

85. “Largest Gay Pride Scheduled for the Navajo Nation,” The Press Room, Navajo Nation Pride, May 9, 2019, https://www.navajonationpride.com/post/largest-gay-pride-scheduled-for-the-navajo-nation.

86. “Indigenous Women Selected to Lead Diné Pride, Historic LGBTQ+ Celebration Scheduled for 2021,” The Press Room, Navajo Nation Pride, July 16, 2020, https://www.navajonationpride.com/post/indigenous-women-selected-to-lead-din%C3%A9-pride-historic-lgbtq-celebration-scheduled-for-2021.

87. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

88. Jolene Nenibah Yazzie, “Why Are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit People Being Denied Access to Ceremony?,” High Country News, January 7, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.2/indigenous-affairs-why-are-dine-lgbtq-and-two-spirit-people-being-denied-access-to-ceremony.

89. Raphaelito, “Indigenizing Love through Diné Pride.”

90. Wesley Thomas, “Navajo Cultural Constructions of Gender and Sexuality,” in Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 156.

91. Thomas, “Navajo Cultural Constructions,” 157.

92. Thomas, “Navajo Cultural Constructions,” 158.

93. Epple, “Coming to Terms,” 268.

94. Epple, “Coming to Terms,” 268.

95. Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 324.

96. Janice Gould, “Disobedience (in Language) in Texts by Lesbian Native Americans,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 25, no. 1 (January 1994): 33.

97. Young and Morgan, Navajo Language (1980), 935.

98. Young and Morgan, Navajo Language (1980), 149, 811.

99. Yazzie and Hannabah Blue, pers. comm., August 13, 2018; and Yazzie, “Why Are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit People Being Denied Access to Ceremony?”

100. Mithlo, “‘Real Feminine Journey,’” 27.

101. Natasha Kaye Johnson, “Navajo Artist Creates Skateboards Featuring Female Warrior Images,” Indian Country Today, September 7, 2007. Although Yazzie now prefers they/them pronouns, at the time of this interview they used she/her.

102. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

103. Joanna Hearne, “‘This Is Our Playground’: Skateboarding, DIY Aesthetics, and Apache Sovereignty in Dustinn Craig’s 4wheelwarpony,” Western American Literature 49, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 47. More recently, Blackhorse Lowe’s 2019 film Fukry has explored related themes.

104. Hearne, “‘This Is Our Playground,’” 52.

105. Jeff Ament, “Duty Now for the Future: Jim Murphy,” Juice, March 1, 2015, http://juicemagazine.com/home/duty-now-for-the-future-jim-murphy/.

106. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?,” in Photography’s Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 41.

107. Hannabah Blue, in Jolene Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

108. Jacqui Palumbo, “The Native American Couple Redefining Cultural Norms—in Photos,” CNN Style, February 3, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/tomas-karmelo-amaya-sweetheart-dancers-swing/index.html.

109. Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

110. Jenny Irene Miller, for example, a queer, two-spirit Native Alaskan, is creating the ongoing series Continuous to document, in photographs and interviews, Indigenous queer people in Alaska. See “Photographer Aims to Expand the Image of Indigenous Alaskans,” Alaska 86, no. 1 (February 2020): 24; and Jenny Irene Miller, “Continuous,” jennyirenemiller.com, https://www.jennyirenemiller.com/continuous.

111. Jolene Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019. Individual counties in New Mexico issued marriage licenses starting in August 2013, but there was no statewide law until December of that year.

112. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

113. Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

114. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

115. Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

116. Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019.

117. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.

118. This vulnerability is underscored by a moment in the interview when Yazzie asks permission to photograph the family outside their house. “If not, it’s totally fine,” they say, “if you don’t want anyone to know where you live” (Yazzie interview with Mayda Benally and family, June 8, 2019).

119. Yazzie, “Why Are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit People Being Denied Access to Ceremony?”

120. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

121. Owlfeather, in Living the Spirit, 104. Today, Owlfeather goes by Clyde M. Hall.

122. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

123. Yazzie says of themselves: “I identify as ‘bah’ or dilbaa náhleeh (masculine woman) or nádleeh asdzaa. I prefer a masculine gender role that doesn’t match my sex” (Yazzie, “Why Are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit People Being Denied Access to Ceremony?”).

124. Susan Morgan, “Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around Home [exhibition review],” Aperture, no. 186 (Spring 2007): 12.

125. Yazzie, pers. comm., January 30, 2020.

1. Manny Loley, “butterfly man tells a story,” Poetry 220, no. 4 (July–August 2022): 304–5.

2. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Return to ‘The Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913’: Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation,” in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 73.

3. Butler, Excitable Speech, 5.

4. Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75) is a series of twenty-four framed panels that juxtapose photographs of the Bowery with text related to intoxication.

5. “Esther Belin in conversation with Manny Loley,” produced by Rachel James, The Poetry Magazine Podcast, July 15, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/158296/esther-belin-in-conversation-with-manny-loley.

6. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

7. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 3.

8. Lloyd H. New, “Using Cultural Differences as a Basis for Creative Expression,” 1968, reprinted in Ryan S. Flahive, ed., Celebrating Difference: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962–2012 (Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press for IAIA, 2012), 142.

9. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 240.

10. Gilpin, Enduring Navaho, 3.