In trying to find ways of dealing with that struggle, Yazzie found art as a way of expressing that frustration. Two of bah’s brothers were incredibly artistic and challenged Yazzie in developing those creative and channelling skills. Through trying to mimic what bah saw in magazines and comics, it quickly became apparent that there was a major gap in representation within those pages.
“I started to notice how some superheroes, I couldn’t really relate to any of them—because, you know, there’s the favorites of Spiderman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman—I could just never relate to any of them,” Yazzie explains.
In thinking about what kind of superhero Yazzie may be able to relate to, bah was also bearing witness to dear friends enduring traumatic life experiences such as rape, molestation, and domestic violence. It was through these stories and wanting to provide these individuals safety and strength that bah began to draw strong women warriors and created the series Sisters of War.Related article: Amplify Black and Indigenous Voices “In our creation stories, they don’t really talk about women warriors, and that’s one thing I always wanted to capture, especially with their regalia. Some of them that you’ve seen; they have hats on, and usually men warriors are supposed to only wear the hats. So, even when it comes to sexism, the stereotypical roles of a woman’s place and a man’s place, I started to question those and tried to turn a woman’s role into a man’s role,” Yazzie elaborates. Oftentimes, bah’s artwork is considered controversial within Native communities because of its challenge of binary representation and regalia. However Yazzie’s work has also been embraced by many in the community and has been featured in many murals and art exhibitions, including the Harwood Museum of Art, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and most recently at Denver’s Museo de las Americas. In addition to creating the comic, superhero-style series Sisters of War, Yazzie has collaborated with spouse Hannahbah Blue on extremely impactful and necessary projects which highlight the stories, struggles, and tragedies of women within Indigenous communities. The Sing Our Rivers Red event and movement showcased a display of intricate, delicately designed, and beautifully crafted earrings, and while each piece embodied a traditional, Native beauty, each earring is missing its other half. As a way of awareness to the in-numerous number of Native and Indigenous women who are murdered and/or go missing, organizers, including Blue, brought the annual display to America from Canada. Canada has tracked the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women since 1980, yet as of 2020, law enforcement in the United States still does not have adequate agencies established to track and respond to these horrendous events. Blue is a poet and wrote pieces reflecting on these tragedies to bring awareness, and ultimately change, while Yazzie created an illustrated art piece to bring a visual representation to the words Blue composed. The collaboration between them was titled Make the Night Holy Again, as many times, it is at night when Native and Indigenous women go missing. While Blue and Yazzie are life and collaborative partners, they also share a unique experience in facing oppression from every angle as they navigate through life. From the Anglo-American perspective, they are misunderstood in their Native and Two-Spirit identities, and within their Navajo community, they are misunderstood as Diné, LGBTQ-identified women. “I think the biggest thing that we’ve experienced is people not knowing and not having a lot of connection, understanding, or awareness of our communities, and that’s been frustrating,” says Blue. “Even though it’s not blatant racism, it’s still harmful. We’ve definitely felt embraced here (in Denver) as a gay couple, but the intersectionality of being gay and Native, it’s just like people don’t really know how to interact with us.”
Related article: August 19, 2020- Art The couple are preparing to leave Denver so they can move back to New Mexico in order to be closer to family. Due to COVID-19, their Navajo tribe members and family have experienced intense and tragic impacts, so moving back feels like the right thing to do. However, the decision doesn’t come without some trepidation.
“Our reservation, even though we have in our creation story and this tradition of accepting and really valuing Two-Spirit people, we still had a hard time finding a medicine person who would conduct our wedding,” Blue says.
She goes on, “I think our traditional knowledge has been greatly influenced by colonization, assimilation, and Christianization, and that’s even affected our ceremonies. The ‘traditional Navajo ceremony’ is very gendered and focused on procreation.”
The now-married partners had to source outside of the traditional, ceremonial leaders and scripts in order to have their wedding. One medicine woman whom the couple asked to perform their ceremony said she wouldn’t feel comfortable because, while there once was a ceremony for LGBTQ weddings, it stopped being performed due to the Christian influence in their tribe and has since been lost.
“Even our own tribe doesn’t have gay marriages; even our own tribal government is not allowing us to have the marriage license in the Navajo Nation,” Yazzie laments.
With the many genders that are expressed within the Navajo language and accepted within that community, including the encompassing Two-Spirit term, many of the traditions are still based on the gender binary and create issues similar to the LGBTQ hierarchy of representation.
Blue explains, “Another aspect to it is that there’s still this paternalism in our community, even in, like, Western, gay culture, gay men have arguably more visibility, at times more power.”
There is a greater understanding that if there is not equal access to participation in ceremony and representation of all genders within the traditions, women, gender-variant, and LGBTQ folks are deemed less valuable.
Art by Jolene Yazzie
