Published in conjunction with an acclaimed new exhibition at the Navajo Nation Museum, this landmark volume explores the complex social, cultural, and political transformations across the Navajo Nation during the critical livestock-reduction period as documented through the extraordinary photography of Milton Snow.
Milton Snow was a non-Native photographer hired to document Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier’s paternalistic federal Indian policies, which were intended not only to rehabilitate the land through the elimination of up to 50 percent of Navajo livestock but to introduce and reinforce the use of Western logics and technologies. The images Snow captured from 1937–1959 offer windows to a complex past.
Featuring over two hundred archival illustrations and photographic plates from the Navajo Nation Museum, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and the Museum of Northern Arizona, this volume privileges the voices of Diné scholars, artists, community members, and allies. The seventeen contributors to the first-ever publication of the Navajo Nation Museum’s Milton Snow Photography Collection explore themes of landscape and home; education, nation, and democracy; community and kinship; refusal and resistance; and visual sovereignty and critical archival studies. Here, Denetdale and McEnaney merge deep historical context and archival research with Diné knowledge systems, oral histories, and community-based relationships, situating the archive as a site for renewed storytelling and sovereignty.
