Queer Intersections

Navajo Politics

The political relationship between the Navajo, their Nation, and the United States changed continuously over the century leading up to the publication of The Enduring Navaho. Having endured Christopher “Kit” Carson’s “scorched earth” policy, which culminated in their subjugation and imprisonment at Fort Sumner (also called Bosque Redondo and Hwéeldi) from 1864 until 1868, a group of forcibly exiled Navajo successfully negotiated a treaty with the United States that allowed them to return to their homeland—although the land to which they returned was only part of their original country. Just three years later, Congress brought a formal end to treaty making with Native people, denying their status as nations. The Navajo had clearly articulated their status as a nation in 1868, however, and that status—and its connection to their land—supported some of their claims to legal and political sovereignty throughout the twentieth century. Across the board, their colonial status as “domestic dependent nations” meant that the United States held ultimate decision-making power over Native nations. The Enduring Navaho opens with a sweeping introduction to Diné geopolitics that is guided by Gilpin’s four photographs of the sacred directional mountains.

Gilpin first spent significant time in Navajo homelands in the 1920s—not coincidentally, a decade that saw significant colonial expansion into Dinétah (the Navajo homeland; literally, “among the people”). In 1921, Anglo geologists found oil on the Navajo reservation, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs created a Navajo “government” to facilitate commercial development.7 To that end, they first invented a business council, in 1922, intended to legitimize oil production contracts with non-Navajo corporations. It was replaced by a tribal council in 1923, which was modeled on the U.S. government and expanded representation in an attempt to enhance its legitimacy. But it was not independent; federal policy changes continued to interfere with Navajo sovereignty. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, often characterized as the “Indian New Deal,” was a top-down U.S. government initiative intended to support economic development on reservations—but on the Navajo Nation, it backfired badly, as livestock reduction programs failed to take into account Navajo social structures and cultural realities.8 In the text of The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin outlines this history, inviting her viewers to see it as necessary context for her photographs of shepherds, weavers, and government officials.

In 1936, the Department of the Interior called on the Navajo to create a constitution, but the interior secretary approved only a simplified set of parliamentary procedures rather than the constitution that had been drafted by Diné participants in the process. The establishment of a substantive tribal government, albeit one focused largely on trade with and for White outsiders and frequently disrupted by U.S. policy and program changes, led to the development of secondary institutions such as the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild in 1940 and the establishment of a Navajo judicial code and a tribal police force in the early 1950s. In that decade, the U.S. government again reversed its position on tribal sovereignty, passing legislation that sought to terminate federal recognition of tribal status and the administrative programs that went with it.9 Termination initially targeted tribes that were considered self-sustaining or otherwise allegedly no longer in need of recognition or assistance from the United States. Termination was overtly assimilationist in intent, and many tribal members felt that it was another attempt on the part of the federal government to eliminate Native people by removing the support systems and resources upon which they had become dependent thanks to the damaging policies and practices of the previous century—including Carson’s wanton destruction of Navajo people, communities, livestock, and homes, and the government’s annexation of Dinétah’s arable land and natural resources.

Facing termination, Navajo people and their allies in nongovernment organizations sought to increase tribal control of land and resources and improve conditions and opportunities for Navajo people—on truly sovereign terms. In 1953, the Navajo government established an Education Scholarship Fund, and in 1954, the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (NMAIA) sponsored the first of a series of conferences that brought together Navajo, Pueblo, and Apache participants to address shared social and political concerns. Out of these conferences grew various initiatives, including youth conferences that led directly to the creation of the American Indian Movement and other radical activism, as well as grassroots local political organizing. One emphasis of radical Navajo activism was cultural preservation: throughout their history, Diné leaders have consistently argued for a tribal government that reflects the interwoven epistemology of Navajo language, philosophy, medicine, and landscape, reflecting their desire for cultural as well as legal sovereignty.10 Throughout the same decade, new economic opportunities—sawmills and uranium mines, specifically—were added to the oil production that had provided the Navajo Nation with consistent income. For some Navajo leaders, these were positive developments, and for others, they were dangerous exploitations of the land and the Diné that were leading to environmental devastation and poverty. Gilpin’s lifelong involvement with the NMAIA sometimes embroiled her in tribal politics, and that is reflected in the relationships on which she relied to complete The Enduring Navaho—but she consistently and intentionally refrained from endorsing local political positions in public.

Gilpin’s experience as a lesbian and as a westerner informed the unexpectedly radical edge of the project that would become The Enduring Navaho. When Gilpin first visited the small Diné community of Red Rock in 1931, she was only marginally aware of the political challenges facing the Navajo; her primary motivation was simply to visit Forster, who had accepted a position there as a public health nurse. The couple became close friends with members of the Red Rock community and others across Dinétah. Over the next four decades, as they witnessed the profound changes caused by colonial actions and pressures, they became convinced of the necessity of Navajo self-determination. By the late 1950s, Gilpin envisioned The Enduring Navaho as an attempt to express Diné, rather than Anglo, epistemology in its articulation of history, geography, and national identity. Tracing her descriptions, both visual and verbal, of Navajo people and culture over time, we discover her own learning process and subsequent adaptation of her narrative. As she wrote to her museum colleague and lifelong friend Mitchell Wilder, “I have to know I am right in what I am writing about. I have found some sad discrepancies among AUTHORITIES! Several that differ with my own experience, so I have gone back to the Navaho for the answer.”11 Recognizing the disproportionate authority conferred upon Euramerican voices by U.S. officials, Gilpin wanted accurate information to reach the non-Navajo people who continued to have significant power over the Navajo Nation and its future, regardless of the legal fact of Navajo sovereignty.

What does it mean to observe that Gilpin was a woman, and/or a lesbian, as we look at her photographs of Navajo people and places? In any place and moment, there is a difference between lived lesbian experiences and those of others, and so without making essentializing claims about Gilpin’s gender or sexuality, I want to consider how the culturally and historically specific relationships engendered by those aspects of her identity informed the development of The Enduring Navaho.12 Although I accept the gender identity that Gilpin assigned herself, she lived in a historical moment that had almost no language for trans identity or experience. It is notable in that context that among the quotes Gilpin copied out and saved in a notebook is a line from Marianne Moore’s poem “Sun!”: “You are not male or female / But a plan / Deepset within the hungry heart / Of man.”13 Moore’s refusal of binary gender obviously held some appeal for Gilpin, but the photographer’s understanding of her sexuality as productive of gender nonnormativity was nonetheless constrained by the language and ideologies available to her—as indeed is ours. In accepting this—in assigning Gilpin a lesbian identity—I follow and borrow from the Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who has taken a stand for the strategic embrace of an essentialized Indigenous identity as a tool for survival, even as I follow the example of Hilary N. Weaver and others in considering Diné identity as a cultural identity, informed and interpellated by members of the culture group as well as by the individual, and only incidentally defined by external markers such as federal enrollment and/or blood quantum.14

Similarly, my questions about Navajo experiences of sovereignty are driven by information available in physical and oral archives. Throughout this book, I begin with Gilpin’s documentation (visual and otherwise) and expand into the networks revealed by an analysis of her contacts and historical context. Both lesbians and Native Americans throughout the twentieth century sometimes deployed apparently essentializing identifications—gendered, sexual, racial, and tribal—in strategically contingent ways as they pushed back against oppression. From a queer studies perspective, these shared tools reveal an awareness of their users’ similar relationships to structural and institutional forms of power and the inherently unstable nature of identity. Recent developments in scholarly thought and practice allow us to recuperate the value of Gilpin’s position as a lesbian in Dinétah, recognizing its intersectional aesthetic power in the compelling, unusual, and beautiful images that she created with her camera.

Laura Gilpin, Photographer

Laura Gilpin was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1891. She was sent to school on the East Coast and returned there as an adult to attend the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York City. She studied directly with White, as well as other faculty members (including Anton Bruehl, Minor White, Paul Anderson, and Max Weber), and soon earned White’s respect for her technical skill.15 Active in modernist photographic circles, she also worked consistently throughout her career as a portrait and commercial photographer in museums, theater, architecture, and other industries. In 1917, she became very ill with the Spanish flu and returned to Colorado Springs, where Forster (whom Gilpin called “Betsy”) nursed her back to health. The two fell in love and, with only occasional obligatory separations, spent the rest of their lives together—fifty-five years, until Forster’s death in 1972.

In 1930, Forster eagerly accepted a nursing job on the Navajo Nation, in Red Rock, Arizona—360 miles from Colorado Springs. Despite the distance and the fact that Gilpin maintained a studio in Colorado Springs, she made numerous visits to Red Rock during the years that Forster worked there. Gilpin always traveled with her camera, and by the 1940s she had established herself as an authority on the prototypically modern southwestern landscape, its archaeology, and the people and material culture of the Pueblo and Navajo nations that surrounded her.16 During World War II Gilpin worked at Boeing, in Wichita, Kansas; in 1944, Forster suffered a debilitating case of polioencephalitis. After the war, the couple moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and over the next three decades, albeit somewhat sporadically, they worked together on their book about the Navajo people and communities they knew, a book that would eventually be published in 1968 as The Enduring Navaho.

Fifty years earlier, Gilpin’s star was on the rise: throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s she exhibited widely, consistently won awards, and was increasingly recognized as a leader in the field of pictorial (i.e., art) photography. As Gilpin traveled, Forster began to act as her curator and registrar, helping to organize exhibitions around the country of the photographer’s work. In 1920, Gilpin sent her work abroad, exhibiting several photographs, including The Prairie, at the London Salon of Photography (Figure I.1). The Prairie caught the attention of F. J. Mortimer, editor of Photograms of the Year, a publication and traveling exhibition that celebrated the “outstanding pictures” of the salon. As a result, her work met an even wider audience than Gilpin had anticipated. Over the next few years, The Prairie was one of the staple images in Gilpin’s exhibitions, and it continued to receive acclaim. When it was included in a show of her work in New York in 1924, the photographer Ralph Steiner wrote to her that The Prairie “had so much feeling in it. . . . You have some pictures which must be admitted to the small group of really worth while photographs that have been done.”17 Friends encouraged her to move to New York to take full advantage of her success in a lively market, but Gilpin asserted that she was a westerner and would stay in the West.

Her work continued to travel, though, and to attract critical accolades. In 1924, Gilpin’s photograph The Marble Cutters won best picture in a competition held by the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization founded by White to promote fine art photography (Figure I.2).18 In 1925, Visiting Nurse with the New Baby (for which Forster was the model) won first prize at the Sixth Annual Salon of Pictorial Photography in Seattle (Figure I.3).19 In 1926, the feminist magazine the Woman Citizen featured Gilpin’s photographs, including, “for the first time,” a photograph of a Taos Indian that Gilpin titled Arab of the American Desert, and praised her as “an artist in the finest sense of the word, and a craftsman of rare patience and ability” (Figure I.4).20 As Gilpin described it, “We work in light as a painter works in colors, or a sculptor in marble. And if we forget that, . . . then we have stodgy, dead prints. It is by no means an easy medium. . . . But its changes, and its fascination, are endless.”21 The superlative results of her “fascination” traveled to St. Louis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Denver—even Budapest.

Gilpin’s steadfast refusal to move to New York, and her embrace of regional and particularly Native American subjects, relegated her to the margins of photographic history surprisingly quickly, despite her strong ties to influential people in the field. Gilpin was good friends and a lifelong correspondent with the curator and photography historian Beaumont Newhall, whose classic text Photography: A Short Critical History established an early canon of art photography. Newhall left Gilpin out of his survey, even though he included her mentors and champions, White and Gertrude Käsebier.22 We might be tempted to attribute this to his distinct preference for machine aesthetics and slightly surrealist images, but a photograph by Paul Strand of a gateway in Hidalgo, Mexico, and a picture by Edward Weston of sand dunes in Oceano, both included, are uncannily like Gilpin’s contemporaneous work. Although there is a distinct gender bias in Newhall’s selection, particularly when we consider the number of women working in photography at that moment, he does include several women who were Gilpin’s contemporaries: Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke-White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Gertrude Fuld along with Käsebier. All were working in either Paris or New York in the 1930s—cities that were considered the centers of the art world and that added legitimacy to the still-precarious status of photography as a fine art. Two decades later, in 1958, Newhall coauthored Masters of Photography with his wife, Nancy. Gilpin is once again overlooked; the only women featured in that book are Julia Margaret Cameron and Dorothea Lange. The Newhalls quote Weston as justification for their aesthetic choices throughout the volume: “How little subject matter counts in the ultimate reaction!”23 By this time, Gilpin had largely abandoned the overtly formalist abstraction of her earlier work, although she would likely have agreed with Weston’s sentiment on a theoretical level. Her commitment to the West and to the Indigenous subjects of The Enduring Navaho exiled her from the canon of fine art photography in the eyes of East Coast critics like the Newhalls.

In 1979, Beaumont Newhall wrote the foreword to Van Deren Coke’s book Photography in New Mexico, published by the University of New Mexico Press. He mentioned only “great” men by name: “Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Eliot Porter,” as well as “Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and J. K. Hillers.”24 The book was published in the year Gilpin died, lending poignancy to Newhall’s persistent refusal to acknowledge her contributions to the field. It is even more surprising when we see the esteem in which Gilpin is held by Coke, whose chapter “The Postwar Period” begins: “The dean of all the photographers in the Southwest today is Laura Gilpin. She is a native of the West and has a great fondness for the region as well as a true love and understanding of the Native American of the Southwest.” Although Coke describes her as a “master of her craft,” he insistently frames her work in ethnographic as well as aesthetic terms, concluding that “Gilpin has made photographs that meet the needs of the scientists but also have compelling attraction for those who are interested in expressive pictures of the Indians.”25 As this ethnographic preoccupation suggests, Coke was aggressively regionalist in his curation of Gilpin’s photographs. Despite his discussion of her aerial photography and other endeavors that fit squarely within the auspices of international modernism, the four photographs by Gilpin he chose to include were of Native American and Spanish colonial subjects. The decision to erase or distort Gilpin’s contribution to the history of photography on the part of gatekeepers such as Newhall and Coke was seen in starkly sexist terms by Gilpin’s advocates: “What I got from my recollection of that time,” recalled the photographer Herbert Lotz, “is that Laura didn’t get a lot of credit from Van Deren Coke and that gang. They were much more into the guy photographers.”26

Unfazed by the coastalizing bias of critics like Newhall, Gilpin built a career of photographing the American West—its land and its people—for outsider audiences. Within the field of Native American art history and visual culture, much attention has been paid to White representations of Indigenous people. Histories of photography in Native America inevitably begin with Edward Curtis and his monumental undertaking, The North American Indian, which he pursued for more than two decades. A photograph by Curtis (1868–1952) hung in Gilpin’s childhood home; notoriously, she often cited it as an early influence. She likewise cited the work of her relative, the western photographer William Henry Jackson (1843–1942). Jackson made a name for himself photographing Native American places and people: at Mesa Verde, fifty years before Gilpin took her own photographs there, and in Nebraska, where he documented Osage, Pawnee, and other Indigenous people of the region before their forced removal to Oklahoma.27 Many scholars have pointed to the Gilpin family’s Curtis photograph as evidence of Gilpin’s place in an ethnographic genealogy. Such interpretations ignore the specific character of this particular image—of Navajo riders in the Canyon del Muerto, seen from a distance in a composition that favors formal, pictorial values over ethnographic detail—falling prey to the pernicious stereotype that any image of Native Americans must occupy a particular niche in the history of photography. Long before she began making photographs on the Navajo Nation, Gilpin was implicated in a semiotics of cross-cultural representation informed by histories of colonization and tourism that paradoxically combined genocide and forced assimilation with demands for cultural preservation and picturesque authenticity.

The North American Indian consolidated several tenacious tropes for Native representation and reinforced the cultural narrative of the “vanishing Indian.” Curtis’s legacy is unavoidable in part because it continues to serve as a point of critical reference for contemporary Native artists: Shan Goshorn, Will Wilson, Wendy Red Star, Marina Wilbur, and many others have appropriated or responded to Curtis’s epic series.28 Both Curtis and Jackson were working in a tradition of salvage anthropology, and are most relevant to Gilpin’s work as examples of what her project was not. Among the few scholars to acknowledge this is the feminist critic Adrian Oktenberg, who has rightly observed that “Gilpin’s photographs of Indians are totally unlike those of the more familiar Edward Curtis.”29 Unlike Curtis and Jackson, Gilpin spent her life in the Southwest, working around and among the Indigenous, Hispanic, and Anglo people of the Navajo Nation, the various pueblos, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Involved in her community as a business owner, educator, political activist, and advocate as well as an artist, she developed a nuanced understanding of the visual politics of Navajo representation and its connection to their complex sovereignty politics. Over four decades, Gilpin became a sympathetic and politically astute visitor to the Navajo Nation—a perspective that she sought to share in The Enduring Navaho.30 Gilpin was explicitly invested in modernization, whereas Curtis pursued a sense of timelessness. She dated her photographs precisely and throughout The Enduring Navaho articulated and even emphasized the passage of time on scales ranging from the geological to the individual. Curtis’s goal was to create a comprehensive document of every Indigenous tribe in North America; Gilpin’s was to share her interactions (and those of Forster) with Diné individuals in specific times and places. In almost every way, Curtis’s practice was antithetical to Gilpin’s photographic and social worlds. Gilpin was not just friends with many of the people she photographed but tied to them through affinities for land and place as well as her analogous experiences of marginalization, erasure, and disenfranchisement. At the same time, Gilpin never lost sight of her aesthetic goals: in a set of slides she used to teach the history of photography, she placed herself in a lineage that excluded Curtis entirely, curating instead an international and formalist genealogy for her work.31

Context and Historiography

Curtis and Jackson were two among many settler colonial photographers who deployed photography as a technology of violence against Indigenous people. I suggest throughout this book that Gilpin queered her practice in an attempt to resist its violence, offering instead a vision of mutual liberation.32 I follow Abigail Solomon-Godeau in troubling the categories of insider and outsider that have dogged identity-based analyses of twentieth-century art.33 Still, given that far more scholarly ink has been spilled on representations of than on representations by Indigenous people, one might reasonably ask why we need a book about Laura Gilpin. I have suggested that Gilpin’s project was unique because it was overtly collaborative, developed over decades rather than weeks or months, and resistant to claims of expertise or authority. As a result, The Enduring Navaho functions substantially differently from other White-authored texts or photographic bodies of work and opens up a new space of political possibility that continues to have relevance today. By incorporating Diné artists and voices more explicitly into my own study, I foreground that ongoing relevance while effectively historicizing Gilpin’s project in terms of the ongoing negotiation between and among Navajo people about their relationship to the United States and to the practice of photography on the Navajo Nation.

Dozens of professional photographers—and thousands of tourists—took photographs in the Navajo Nation between 1930 and 1970. Most were temporary visitors to the region who had little knowledge of Navajo culture, and by and large their images confirm stereotypical expectations of tourist-driven destinations and subjects. In contrast, when Forster moved to Red Rock, she and Gilpin embarked on a lifelong series of friendships, professional collaborations, and activist engagements across the Nation. Gilpin subsequently spent more than three decades taking the photographs and working with Forster to write the narrative that would become her 1968 book The Enduring Navaho—working consistently in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. The decades it took Gilpin to produce the book forced her to confront the reality of time passing. “As I realized the speed with which changes were coming to the reservation, the possibility of this book began to formulate, though work on it has of necessity been intermittent.”34 Gilpin saw the changes on the Navajo Nation as an opportunity to showcase the strengths of Navajo culture, not as a threat to a romanticized “traditional” way of life. As Larry McSwain, a reporter for the Gallup Independent, argued in 1955, when Gilpin took photographs of the same people, decades apart, and juxtaposed those portraits, viewers were presented with “a unique contrast to stereotyped Indian photographs.”35

On the Navajo Nation, the most archivally prominent of Gilpin’s Anglo contemporaries were Milton Snow (1905–1986), Navajo Service photographer between 1937 and 1958; Helen M. Post (1907–1978), who was employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to photograph Navajo people between 1938 and 1942; and Life photographer Leonard McCombe (1923–2015).36 There are no Navajo photographers in Gilpin’s generation, or even the following one, with equivalent public archives. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole, Muscogee, and Diné, born 1954) and Roessel, born in 1961, are both members of the first generation of Diné photographers to achieve national recognition. Roessel is notable for his commitment to presenting an insider perspective on Diné subjects traditionally taken up by outsiders, including books for readers of all ages.37 A scholar and administrator who was trained as a photojournalist, Roessel has used his medium to promote cultural and political goals of sovereignty and survivance, as Gilpin did before him—perhaps explaining his interest in, and sympathy for, her work.38

Tsinhnahjinnie identifies as two-spirit, and her work opens up the vexing question at the heart of The Enduring Navaho: Where is Diné queerness in Gilpin’s understanding of Navajo society? Gilpin chose to hide her own sexuality in plain sight, introducing Forster at every opportunity, using “we” rather than “I” as her first-person pronoun and dedicating the book to her partner—but she is far more circumspect about the other people she discusses. This is understandable in the context of the 1950s and 1960s: both Navajo and U.S. society were conservative to the point of active homophobia, and she may well have considered it counterproductive to her argument for Navajo sovereignty to be explicit about identities that were literally illegal. Today, Diné artists and photographers celebrate the rich history of their identities in every imaginable way, and throughout this text I look to Tsinhnahjinnie and others not only as producers of visual culture but as theorists and critics of a decolonizing Diné experience.39 Reading Gilpin’s photographs through their work, in other words, I invite us to see them as part of a liberatory genealogy.

Gilpin has historically been marginalized by narratives that privilege male artists, coastal centers of photographic activity, and abstraction within modernist photography—and that segregate Indigenous (art) history from the rest of American (art) history. Although she described herself as a landscape photographer, her portraits of Navajo people have been objects of sustained critical discussion since the 1930s. Scholarly literature on Gilpin is grounded in the historian Martha Sandweiss’s authoritative biography, Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace. It is an impressive but imperfect text, and in the present volume I address several of her distortions and intentional omissions: like almost all Gilpin’s biographers, she entirely passed over Gilpin’s sexuality, for example, and she did not choose to explore Gilpin’s relationship to Indigenous history or to contemporaneous Navajo politics. Sandweiss’s project was overtly hagiographic due to its affiliation with the gift of Gilpin’s archive to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas—a bequest shepherded by the photographer’s old friend and supporter, by then director of the Carter, Mitch Wilder.

In contrast to Sandweiss’s celebratory tone, the most aggressive critique of Gilpin’s work has been mounted by James Faris, first in the essay “Laura Gilpin and the ‘Endearing’ Navajo” and then in his monograph Navajo and Photography. In the latter, Faris engages with contemporary Navajo artists in order to argue for the distance and difference between their work and that of White photographers. One of the few contemporary Navajo voices to speak directly to Gilpin’s body of work is that of Roessel, whose 1996 essay “Navajo Photography” takes a more nuanced approach to Gilpin’s legacy, recognizing its importance to the people she photographed and to Diné visual history more broadly.40 Addressing the significance of Gilpin’s lesbian identity, Judith Fryer Davidov stands out in the scholarship with her 1998 chapter on Gilpin in Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture, although her arguments are grounded in an essentializing understanding of gender rather than a historicized analysis of lesbian experience. Jonathan Goldberg also addresses the question of Gilpin’s queerness in a chapter of his 2001 monograph Willa Cather and Others, although his focus is on literary analysis. Despite these tentative steps forward, Gilpin’s biography remains distorted and the individual Navajo subjects of her photographs continue to be erased—as does the importance of the connections between these histories. Gilpin and Forster’s lifelong romantic partnership has been long been described as a “friendship” by Sandweiss and countless other historians, and no study, as far as I have discovered, has considered the biographies of the Navajo people Gilpin portrayed. The first erasure is a symptom of the heteropatriarchy of the academy; the second is embarrassing evidence of a pervasive racism in the way we are taught within the discipline of art history to look at representations of Indigenous people.41 The long-standing structures that enable these elisions in the extant scholarship were instrumental in the oppression faced by Gilpin, as a lesbian woman, and by Navajo people, both individually and as a nation, throughout the twentieth century. Gilpin did her most groundbreaking and lastingly significant work, both politically and aesthetically, at the sites of these distortions and erasures.42

As an Anglo photographer, Gilpin does not “belong” in the history of Native American art, yet, as Roessel acknowledges, she is a key figure in Diné visual history. Native American art history, as a scholarly discipline, is undergoing rapid change after several decades of foundational work by scholars such as Ruth Phillips, Janet Berlo, Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), and Lucy Lippard.43 This is due in part to the rise of a generation of Indigenous scholars and their allies, who have consistently called for the decolonization of American art history, and is also the direct result of a wave of Indigenous art and activism that has used digital media to reach wider audiences than ever before—including young academics, whose work also increasingly crosses over into public scholarship. Jessica Horton, Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), Laura Smith, Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), Joanna Hearne, S. Elizabeth Bird, Steven Leuthold, and Jas M. Morgan (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux) have all produced important work in the field.44 As is so often the case, museum curators have led the way: along with Ash-Milby, heather ahtone (Chickasaw), Anya Montiel (Mestiza / Tohono O’odham descent), Stacy Pratt (Mvskoke), Christina Burke, Candice Hopkins (Carcross / Tagish First Nation), and Jill Ahlberg Yohe are just some of those who have transformed the field over the past decade. These scholars, along with many others whom I cite throughout this book, have helped shape my thinking about Gilpin and the resistant narrative of The Enduring Navaho. As a scholar of queer and Indigenous histories, I have become increasingly conscious of our disciplinary failures when it comes to telling intersectional histories—failures that are often reflections of archival absence or erasure.45 This book is my attempt to redress a few of those failures—in some cases by pushing at their limits.46

Throughout this book, I use the word intersectionality (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to clarify the ongoing theoretical and political work of Black feminism in the face of structural racism) as a spatial metaphor as well as a conceptual frame.47 The Enduring Navaho, and Gilpin’s work more broadly, is overdue for serious scholarly consideration. At the same time, it is newly relevant, as decolonial struggles are mobilized in order to assert sovereignties that foreground land rights and queerness as twin sites of oppression—not just coincident, but codependent. Crenshaw rightly emphasizes the amplifying effect of layered oppressions in her analysis of intersectionality—and my project similarly considers the overlapping erasures of queerness and Indigeneity. A close reading of The Enduring Navaho suggests a space of possibility within intersectional oppression for collaborative resistance. Revisiting The Enduring Navaho is an opportunity to shine new light on aspects of Indigenous and queer history that have been overlooked and overshadowed. More broadly, this book also offers a new structural model for theorizing intersectionality in terms of ally politics that has application far beyond the specific site of the ancestral Navajo homeland, Diné Bikeyah.

Gendering the Photographic Gaze

The Enduring Navaho was published on the eve of an emerging feminist discourse that first took up the question of the female gaze and soon thereafter the specifics of lesbian subjectivity. Early feminist visual theory was rooted in psychoanalysis and structured the “female gaze” in essentializing and often heterosexist terms rooted in a reproductive economy. Gilpin, who had no experience of or, as far as her archive reveals, desire for motherhood, is more usefully framed in relation to Monique Wittig’s 1980 observation that the category of “‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economies,” and as a result, “lesbians are not women.”48 Gilpin’s lifelong resistance to being categorized as a “woman photographer” echoes Wittig’s critique of the naturalization of womanhood as a mechanism of political inequality. The photographer further recognized that to be so categorized would be to accede to a gendered hierarchy that lowered her status—which was high—among her peers. Gilpin’s antipathy to being gendered is evident in her response to an aspiring photographer: “You ask how hard is it for a woman to become a pro. My answer is it’s just as difficult as it is for a man.” Although this sounds dismissive, Gilpin goes on to offer mentorship, giving her correspondent concrete advice about how to pursue a career in photography and closing her letter with an invitation to visit.49

When Gilpin was interviewed for Ms. magazine in 1974, she similarly rejected second-wave feminism as a useful frame for her life or career. “I have never had any reason to be concerned about women’s lib,” she wrote to Harriet Lyons, at the magazine, after her interview.50 Such disavowals often frustrated women in the movement, but viewed from Gilpin’s perspective—that of an eighty-three-year-old lesbian who had navigated the art world from beyond the coastal centers that defined feminism in largely heterosexual and reproductive terms, long before the movement emerged—it understandably seemed presumptuous for anyone to claim her career for feminism. Despite this ideological distancing, however, Gilpin deeply understood the value of moving out of range of heteronormative social spaces. As the Chickasaw artist Kristen Dorsey observed in 2019, “Feminist art has existed on this continent long before the need for the word feminism. We have always been powerful matriarchs, clan mothers, and tribal leaders.”51 In Navajo society even more than in rural western and White lesbian communities, Gilpin and Forster—among many others—found alternatives to urban, Euramerican ideas about gender. The photographer’s lived experience reminds us repeatedly that gender and sexuality are socially constructed and constrained.52 Any discussion of a gendered gaze must likewise acknowledge this fact.

A rudimentary comparison between Gilpin’s work and that of a male colleague illustrates some of the challenges of identifying the role played by gender in photographic image-making. In 1951, the photographer Leonard McCombe collaborated on Navaho Means People with the prominent Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and his doctoral student, Evon Vogt.53 In that book, of about two hundred photographs, eighty-two take a man or boy as their primary subject, and sixty-five focus on a woman or girl. At about the same time, Gilpin was actively creating photographs for The Enduring Navaho. In Gilpin’s book, the numbers are almost exactly reversed: eighty photographs of women or girls, and sixty-six of men or boys. Such a comparison is clearly reductive; in addition, I have not taken Diné gender categories into account, instead forcing the numbers into an artificial gender binary. On a basic level, it is evident that McCombe prioritized images of men while Gilpin privileged images of women—and we must consider why that was. What subjects were easily available to each photographer, and which did they seek out? For whom were they taking photographs, and what were their audiences’ expectations? Gilpin pointed out additional differences in their production: McCombe shot no landscapes, while she chose to avoid photographs of intoxicated subjects.54 She attributed these differences in the first instance to McCombe’s lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of landscape and life in the Southwest generally and for the Navajo specifically, and in the second to her own unwillingness to perpetuate negative stereotypes of Indigenous people in the name of scientific accuracy or rigor. The statistical differences between McCombe’s and Gilpin’s images, combined with the latter’s observations about the qualitative differences between their projects, point to three factors at play for which gender is at best a shorthand: access, audience, and priorities.

Discussions of the gendered gaze often start with Laura Mulvey’s 1975 psychoanalytic manifesto “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she argued for the implicitly male gaze of Hollywood cinema and its corresponding objectification of women.55 The essentializing assumptions about gendered bodies made by psychoanalytic theory have been challenged by thinkers from Simone de Beauvoir to Wittig, Hortense Spillers, and Judith Butler.56 For decades, the British art historian Griselda Pollock has drawn on the Marxist tradition of social and cultural studies to warn emphatically that to reduce “signs in paintings [to] signs of the gender of the artist . . . fails entirely to grasp the deeper criticality of feminist practices [. . . that allow] a desire for difference, different self-knowledges.”57 Her reading allies feminism productively with queer studies while underscoring the latter discipline’s roots in the former.58 Compare, for example, Pollock’s emphasis on “a desire for difference, different self-knowledges,” with the film scholar Alexander Doty’s description of “various and fluctuating queer positions” that are created “whenever anyone produces or responds to culture.” Black feminist scholars have long complicated Doty’s claim that feminist analysis is primarily about production while queer analysis is primarily about reception—bell hooks, for example, called on Black artists and scholars in 1992 not only to “imagine, describe, and invent ourselves in ways that are liberatory” but also to “critically examine contemporary representations of blackness and black people.”59 Queer-of-color critics such as Roderick A. Ferguson have productively interrogated the universalism implied by Doty’s poststructural framework, which he suggests “occlud[es] critical sexual formations that preceded queer studies” and “often tries to force heterogeneous formations within singular pronouncements and deployments of ‘sexuality,’ ‘race,’ ‘class,’ and ‘gender.’”60 Despite these theoretical nuances, however, we can immediately recognize the “militant sense of difference” that Doty argues becomes a “site of resistance” and a “location of radical openness and possibility” in all arenas of feminist and queer visual inquiry.61

Photography was popular among women from the moment of its invention. Domestically, women embraced the camera as an extension or replacement of other memorializing activities.62 In these contexts, the patriarchal character of the gaze is often evident regardless of who was operating the camera. By 1893, there were also more than 1,200 women working as professional photographers in the United States. Gilpin’s mentor, Käsebier, was one of the foremost photographers in the field, and by the 1920s, Gilpin herself was widely recognized as an outstanding practitioner of her craft. Gilpin’s career, which encompassed a full range of production from family portraits to commercial advertising work alongside her art photography, offers evidence of the medium’s multivalence and economic appeal as well as its accessibility for women. Gender intersected with race, ethnicity, and class—and photography was deployed in colonizing ways as often as patriarchal ones. Käsebier and Gilpin were two White women among many who photographed Indigenous subjects; the relatively minuscule number of Native photographers of any gender working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exacerbated the apparent inevitability of photography’s colonial gaze.63

The gaze is both a metaphor for and an instrument of power, and we must consider the structural role of institutions in deploying that gaze. Gilpin almost always worked as an individual when photographing Navajo subjects, independent of institutional affiliations or support. McCombe and many of his colleagues—John Collier Jr., Milton Snow, Helen Post, and others—were, in contrast, supported by the federal government, prestigious universities, and popular national publications. These photographers came to the Navajo Nation with institutional authority that was metaphorically (and most often literally, as embodied by the staff and administrators) male; Gilpin came without those resources. Institutional patrons also constituted an audience with expectations: anthropological audiences wanted specific cultural information conveyed in a formal and anonymized format; sociologists wanted evidence of social problems and structural influences; news magazines wanted the picturesque or shocking. Gilpin’s career was indisputably marked by her economic need to cater to her audiences, but unlike her peers, she generally did not know who would buy her photographs of Navajo people and places before she took them. As a result, although her early images reveal her adaptability to both touristic and art-world expectations, they rarely conform straightforwardly to the generic types we associate with institutional patrons. By the end of her career, Gilpin no longer had to worry as much about commercial demands—and that is reflected in the reception of her images by those clients. The editors of American Heritage magazine, for example, rejected Gilpin’s photographs of Navajo people and places because “the pictures have too contemporary a look for our purposes.”64 By the time she was planning The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin’s audience was in some sense only herself, Forster, and her lesbian and Diné friends and collaborators: she had renounced the overt commercialism of her earlier work in favor of a more political vision.

Queering Sovereignty Studies

The field of Indigenous sovereignty studies ranges widely, but for self-evident reasons I focus on work that addresses Navajo sovereignty in its broadest sense (beyond legal definitions and positions of sovereignty), and on intersectional work addressing queerness and Indigenous sovereignty. Lloyd L. Lee has emerged as a leader in the field of Navajo cultural sovereignty, as has Jennifer Nez Denetdale. Their coedited 2017 volume Navajo Sovereignty: Understandings and Visions of the Diné People is a core text in the field.65 The historian Kevin Bruyneel, in The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations, and the literary scholar Mark Rifkin, in multiple volumes, have added theoretical complexity to the conversation.66 The film historian Michelle H. Raheja has emerged as a powerful voice in the articulation of visual sovereignty. Her 2010 monograph Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film set the benchmark for the field with its key insight that visual sovereignty has more flexibility and freedom than political sovereignty, and therefore is often invoked before and as preparation for the extension (or more accurately, in Indigenous contexts, restoration) of the latter.67

In many respects, sovereignty studies engage in structural work that is analogous to that of queer studies: they challenge normative power structures and remind us of lived histories and realities that exist beyond those frames. In his brilliant study of sovereignty politics, Bruyneel adapts the postcolonial political theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of a “third space of enunciation” that rendered “structures of meaning and reference . . . ambivalent” to argue for sovereignty as a challenge to “pressures to homogenize or unify representations and identity.”68 Bruyneel describes his project as antibinary, invoking instead a “nonbinaristic mapping of political time and space” that echoes my own project of interrogating the intersections between identity, landscape, and experience.69 Our shared emphasis on space as a vital component of sovereignty—whether Indigenous or lesbian—suggests, moreover, the potential of critical spatial/cultural metaphors like the rhizome for decolonizing and queer readings of the Southwest.70

Rifkin is at the forefront of queer Indigenous studies, and his 2011 monograph When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty addresses the intersectionality of queer and anticolonial politics/histories head-on.71 Sovereignty studies is fundamentally predicated on relationships; as Raheja has noted, how we identify those relationships can either impose colonial concepts of kinship or foreground Indigenous ones. Exercising sovereign definitions of kinship has the potential to decolonize intersectionality—a theoretical exercise foreshadowed in Foucauldian studies of power and postcolonial investigations of the subaltern subject, but radicalized by Indigenous studies scholars who point to the ongoing colonial relationship between the United States, Canada, and Indigenous/First Nations.72

Within Native American studies, conversations about tribal specificity and tribal nationalism have further explicated the colonialist implications of pan-Indian approaches to queer Indigenous studies. Coming from the perspective of literary studies, Jace Weaver, Robert Warrior, and Craig Womack have championed American Indian nationalism, following the lead of Simon Ortiz.73 Navajo historians and leaders have always emphasized the distinctiveness—culturally, politically, historically, and geographically—of Dinétah / the Navajo Nation, and that conviction manifested in various ways during the emergence of twentieth-century Native sovereignty movements, which often sat uncomfortably with or even overtly rejected pan-Indian frameworks. Similarly, in the context of Diné queer history, the anthropologist Carolyn Epple has emphasized the importance of “Navajo frameworks” for gender and sexuality, even when only partially accessible—as they are to her, as a cultural outsider. I adopt Epple’s position of “rely[ing] on Navajo frameworks to learn ‘the terms by which the experiences are constituted’” as central to the project of queering these histories, collaborating—as Gilpin did—with Diné colleagues in order to shape an intersectional history that respects our contemporary relations as well as those I study in the past.74 Recognizing and honoring those relations is also a project of queer history—and one that I take up explicitly in this book.

I begin my study by exploring the space of Dinétah in terms of its receptiveness to bilagáana (non-Diné/White/Anglo) feminine queerness. Gilpin and Forster were, critically, not Navajo—yet they were also not entirely complicit with White heteropatriarchy and its institutions. Why did the community of Red Rock enthusiastically make space for Forster and Gilpin, as other Diné communities did for other queer women throughout the early and mid-twentieth century? The field of queer studies has illuminated the power relations exercised by the federal government in its imposition of heteropatriarchal, monogamous family structures on Indigenous communities—structures that were actively being challenged within colonizing societies by queer people. Despite increasing recognition of the intersectional implications of queer studies, scholars have yet to discuss how Native communities have historically made—or denied—space for non-Native queer bodies. The inverse case—studies of queer Native bodies in colonial contexts—has received more attention from anthropologists who have ready access to White-authored reactions that were enthusiastically produced in the face of ethnographic difference. Native responses to White or other non-Native queer bodies are absent from academic archives—and studies are also rare due to an embedded disciplinary homophobia that coerced White social scientists into censoring their own queerness. Historians have likewise often refused to identify their research subjects as LGBTQ2S+, using justifications such as the lack of direct evidence of sexual behavior or the historical fluidity of definitions of sexuality and gender. Although the emergence of lesbian and gay studies pushed back against this erasure, the Whiteness embedded in LGBTQ historiography has had an impact on my research and this text. Intersectional queer theory suggests a sorely needed way forward.

Queerness was potentially an opportunity for political allyship across the colonial boundary, but many queer White women who worked in Dinétah had strong establishment or government ties, and regularly used their access to and familiarity with Diné people and places for their own benefit, just as they occupied Diné space. The Enduring Navaho stands as a particularly compelling product of Gilpin’s struggle with this contradiction, and perhaps because she had no institutional loyalty or obligation, is unique among contemporaneous White-authored texts in its efforts to refuse colonial authority in favor of Diné self-definition and -determination. Cultural tourism, colonialism, and appropriation are all implicated in Gilpin’s project, and although I seek to complicate that narrative, I acknowledge the extent to which it limited The Enduring Navaho’s radical potential. For example, Gilpin proactively solicited feedback about and corrections to her manuscript from Diné colleagues, and she incorporated their edits wholesale into her text. But although she thanks them in the opening material of the book, their contributions to the text are subsumed by her monovocal authorial voice, reinforcing the notion of the White/outsider expert even as Gilpin refutes the authority of anthropologists. Did she believe that her marginal social identity altered the implications of her actions? Did it, in reality, for her collaborators or readers? Were those readers conscious, at the time that Gilpin was creating her book, of her erasure of queer Diné subjectivity—an absence that strikes contemporary readers squarely, in light of the photographer’s own queerness? My study actively negotiates its own relationship to these questions: aware that I risk simply replicating Gilpin’s politics, I undertake strategic engagements with both past and contemporary Diné perspectives, explicitly inviting their critiques into my text. Throughout the project, the photographs in The Enduring Navaho serve as jumping-off points for more contemporary conversations about intersectional political potential, foregrounding Diné artists and seeking relationships that amplify, rather than obscure, Diné voices.

Inherently intersectional, queer Indigenous activism and scholarship have been particularly open to political and academic conversations about allyship. As the editors of the 2011 volume Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature observe, such alliances are vital to people whose experiences of identity politics involve overlapping and contradictory embodiments and interpellations.75 Allyship highlights the continuity between structures of heteropatriarchy and colonialism—structures that are, as Rifkin has observed, historically imbricated. “The effort to civilize American Indians and the attendant repudiation of indigenous traditions can be understood as significantly contributing to the institutionalization of the ‘heterosexual imaginary,’” he writes, making it clear that “the heteronorm [is . . .] always-already bound up in racializing and imperial projects.”76 Alongside this now canonical text, many emerging scholars of and in Indigenous queer studies are actively expanding the field’s discursive spaces beyond anthropological and historical studies of gender construction in order to explicate the broader implications of queer Indigeneity. Indigenous feminist scholars have likewise underscored the intersectionality of colonialism and heteropatriarchy; Denetdale, for example, has cited the appropriation of the notion of “tradition” by politicians on the Navajo Nation to inscribe non-Navajo gender hierarchies that consolidate the power invested in men by the colonial tribal government.77

Chapter Outlines

Throughout this volume, I use frameworks from queer theory and sovereignty studies to offer a radical rereading of The Enduring Navaho, exploring the book’s place within Diné political discourse and the history of photography in the twentieth century. Gilpin insisted to her editors at the University of Texas Press that “this book is not a book of manuscript that is illustrated with pictures, but rather a series of photographic studies divided into related groups with an accompanying . . . text which rounds out the visual statements.”78 She was careful to avoid the language of photojournalism: she did not describe her groups as photo-essays or documentary, and she did not claim to be offering an anthropological or sociological analysis of her subjects. On the contrary, in one of her final letters to her editor Barbara Spielman before the book’s publication, Gilpin reiterates a claim she made hundreds of times over the three decades spent working in and around the Navajo Nation: “I am not an authority on the Navaho!” In the same paragraph, she likewise repeats another claim: “I have tried to write a text . . . that would present the Navaho more from their own point of view.”79 This statement has prompted later scholars to file accusations of cultural appropriation. Comparing The Enduring Navaho with contemporaneous White-authored texts about life in the Navajo Nation, however, the romanticizing, patronizing, dismissive, and even fearful tones (both visual and textual) found in the latter shed a different light on Gilpin’s explanation of her work. As an offer of translation, it mirrors and attempts to credit the work of the numerous Diné translators, both formal and accidental, upon whom the photographer herself relied.

Speaking of language: individual Navajo people refer to themselves variously as Native, Indian, Navajo, Diné, or one of the People. Similarly, the Navajo Nation and traditional Navajo territory has been known and named as Navajo Country, Navajoland, Dinétah, and (in part) the Navajo reservation or Navajo Nation. For any individual speaker or reader, myself included, each term connotes subtle differences in history, politics, and one’s lived experience. Throughout this text, I do my utmost to respect the choices about language made by those I discuss, a choice that means my vocabulary may sometimes appear inconsistent or even inappropriate. I encourage you, the reader, to consider it instead a proxy for the nuances of cultural, political, and individual histories that my text, out of necessity, sometimes abbreviates.

Gilpin’s own outsider status productively complicated—in theoretical terms, queered—her interpretation of Navajo life and its relationship to Anglo American culture, bringing to her act of translation an unusual dimension of insight that complemented that of the people whose portraits she made. Without denying the limitations posed by Gilpin’s colonial and ethnic position in relation to Navajo people, therefore, I consider the possibilities of reading The Enduring Navaho as an act of knowingly imperfect ventriloquism. Throughout the book—in both images and text—the photographer layered Navajo and queer experience to create a narrative voice that comes from multiple speakers simultaneously. Our awareness of those multiple origin points inflects our interpretation of the text—as it must have done for all readers, Diné, Anglo, or otherwise, who knew Gilpin or whose lived experience encouraged them to read between her lines. Seen this way, we might even consider Gilpin’s genuine determination to “interest the layman” in the need for Navajo sovereignty as a coded expression of queer liberation.80

I take as given the premise that objects generate meaning in context, and thus that the meaning of The Enduring Navaho has changed over time and depending on the reader(s)—and will continue to do so, sometimes in contradictory ways.81 Throughout this book, therefore, I attend to the impact of Gilpin’s work—both individual photographs and the volume as a whole—in specific times and places, rather than make universalizing claims about its significance. The Enduring Navaho was welcomed by many, perhaps most, of the people whose portraits appear in it, but her photographs have also sometimes caused pain or suffering. The book meant something different to Gilpin’s lesbian social network than it did to her Navajo one—and it has continued to signify differently in queer and Diné contexts into the present moment. Over the course of its existence, The Enduring Navaho has shared many of the limits facing White advocacy more broadly in a field that must ultimately privilege Indigenous visibility and voices. As a scholarly discipline, Native American art history has been disproportionately attentive to White people and their reactions, (mis)interpretations, and consumption of Native culture, perpetuating hierarchies that privilege White voices and ignore Indigenous experience. Occupying the same precarious in-between as my subject, I likewise seek the balance that Gilpin sought—and that she recognized she did not always achieve—between a history of her own queer experience and her ability to amplify the voices of Indigenous people. This model of active allyship—or more accurately, of its possibility—remains an open question in contemporary American culture, and I am constantly aware of the suspect parallels between my project and hers.82

Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of The Enduring Navaho, each chapter in this volume works outward from a single image or small group of photographs, teasing out Gilpin’s subtly imbricated formal, material, historical, and theoretical concerns and, in the process, acceding to her demand that we see her subjects, both lesbian and Indigenous, on their own terms. Such re-vision engenders completely new, rather than simply supplementary, histories in and of the American Southwest—histories that recognize Indigenous and queer worldviews as dominant cultural narratives rather than marginal mythologies. My first chapter, “Looking Like a Lesbian,” explores the myriad ways in which Gilpin’s gender and sexuality fundamentally informed her practice and professional choices throughout her career. Gilpin’s life changed when she met Forster, who had strong political opinions and an incisive sense of humor. The central image in this chapter is one of Gilpin and Forster casually touching one another while camping. Likely taken by their friend, Brenda Putnam, with Gilpin’s camera, it hints at questions of collective authorship as well as physical intimacy. Chapter 2, “The Price of Salt,” moves my conversation into the Navajo Nation, and specifically to a photograph of one of the most photographed Navajo families of the 1950s. In The Summer Shelter of Old Lady Long Salt, Gilpin created an image that artfully draws together landscape and portraiture to offer a layered microcosm of the homosocialities in and around Navajo society at midcentury, and productively interrogates her—and Forster’s—position within them. Chapter 3, “Seeing the Four Sacred Mountains,” takes up landscape photography as the ground for Gilpin’s study and for Diné identity. Gilpin opens The Enduring Navaho with four aerial photographs of the directional mountains that mark the boundaries of the Navajo homeland. Echoing the story of emergence that she relates in the opening text, these photographs lead Gilpin across time as well as space, demanding that her readers account for the social geography of the land they imaginatively traverse throughout the book as a whole. I turn decisively from landscape to portraiture in chapter 4, “A Navaho Family,” tracing large-scale political shifts through the lifelong friendship between Gilpin, Forster, and the Nakai family of Red Rock and the striking portrait Gilpin made of the family in front of an American flag in 1950. The reception of Gilpin’s portrait was shaped by the parallel rise of activism in Indigenous and lesbian communities in the 1950s, and the social pressures informing those movements likewise directly affected the Nakais. By the 1970s, A Navaho Family was emphatically doing the political work Gilpin had hoped it might when she closed her book with it in 1968. In chapter 5, “New Ceremonies,” I confront the question that haunts The Enduring Navaho: where is the Diné queerness in this book by lesbians? Through and in collaboration with the work of Jolene Nenibah (Bean) Yazzie, a graphic artist and photojournalist, I interrogate the violence perpetrated by colonial and missionary forces against ancestral Diné understandings of identity and family, and the ongoing enactment of resistance.

Throughout the book, as part of my reading of Gilpin’s work, I performatively respond to the mandates of The Enduring Navaho—first, to recognize the recursive nature of historical presence in the present, and second, to privilege Diné voices. I emphatically reject one limitation of Gilpin’s project and acknowledge the danger of its influence on mine: although she invited and unhesitatingly accepted editorial input from a variety of Navajo colleagues throughout her process, she did not foreground those voices directly, choosing instead, in the conventional style of her day, to subsume their voices within a consistent narrative voice that appears to be hers alone. I counter this historical fact by inviting those voices back in—and also by introducing those of contemporary Diné artists whose work participates in the ongoing exercise of sovereignty that Gilpin saw and supported. Revisiting The Enduring Navaho rewrites our scripts about the inevitability of the sociological and anthropological gazes that pervade early and mid-twentieth-century photographic history (and even twenty-first-century scholarship), as Gilpin explicitly invited her readers and viewers to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their terms, and to understand Navajo people as vital contemporary actors in American culture. It is a lesson with new relevance today.