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"Our Livestock Will Never Diminish" / "Nihinaaldlooshii doo nídínééshgóó k'ee'aa yilzhish dooleel"
Breathing Life into the Photography of Milton Snow Across Diné Bikéyah
Edited by Jennifer Nez Denetdale and Lillia McEnaney
Published by UNM Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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Table of Contents
About the Book
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.
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: UNM Press (February 23, 2027)
- Length: 344 pages
- ISBN13: 9780826370006
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Raves and Reviews
“This book joins a growing body of work that punctuates a new and exciting era of Diné studies. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how Indigenous people exercise sovereignty through decolonizing visual narratives of conquest.”
– Melanie K. Yazzie, coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation
“Foregrounding perspectives from Diné scholars, artists, and community members, Jennifer Denetdale and Lillia McEnaney document and contextualize the photography of Milton Snow, an undersung ‘hero’ of the history of photography of the Navajo Nation. Their volume shows not only his remarkable artistic talent, but perhaps more importantly, his sympathy with the Diné people during the infamous period of the livestock- reduction program. Comparable to Hwéeldi—the previous century’s Long Walk to Bosque Redondo–—stock reduction radically transformed Navajo life.”
– James C. Faris, author of The Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People
“An intimate and compelling counterpoint to the longstanding but deficient narratives regarding overgrazing. No reader will ever be able to think about stock reduction in the same way.”
– Kathy M’Closkey, author of Swept Under the Rug: A Hidden History of Navajo Weaving
