Reaching through history: countering queer erasure in histories of Navajo modernism

Siddons, Louise (2024) Reaching through history: countering queer erasure in histories of Navajo modernism. Association for Art History: annual conference, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom. 03 - 05 Apr 2024.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

In their 2011 mural, Bik’eh Hozho (figure 1), dilbaa artist Bean Yazzie depicted hands reaching through a partially completed weaving. Uncanny, it serves as a visual metaphor for the invention of Diné modernism and the corresponding erasure of woman-identified queer Diné as makers. That erasure began with museum-based modernist collectors who artificially raised Navajo textile design above other Diné cultural practices/products.

From their first encounters with Navajo people, anthropologists focussed on nádleehí (people with male physiology who have feminine social roles) over their study of dilbaa (people with female physiological traits who have masculine social roles). This gendered bias was reinforced by the collector-driven perception that nadleehe weavers were engaged in more culturally significant work than dilbaa who avoided this feminine activity.

As a result, Hosteen Klah (Diné, 1867-1937) is one of the most famous Diné weavers of the early 20th century. Physiologically male at birth, Klah adopted feminine social roles including weaving and thus identified their gender as nádleehí. Klah was patronized by Santa Fean museologist Mary Wheelwright. In 2022, non-binary weaver Tyrrell Tapaha (Diné, he/they) won the Brandford/Elliott award from the Textile Society of America.

Although this White-institutional celebration of queer weavers is usually framed as progressive, it perpetuates a century-long erasure of female-bodied people’s work. In this paper, I share an ongoing collaboration between Yazzie and myself to create a traveling exhibition and public programme that we hope will begin to redress this historiographical and colonial failure and expand its implications and methodologies to multiply-marginalised queer communities in the UK as well as the US.

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