ABSTRACT
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, attempts on the part of traders and museums to recuperate “authentic” Navajo craft practices in service of growing tourist and art markets sat uncomfortably alongside government claims that contemporary Navajo culture had become inauthentic, intended to justify assimilationist policy. When the United States entered World War II, similar tensions around authenticity emerged in relation to Navajo service members, who on the one hand were valued as Codetalkers who used Diné Bizaad (the Navajo language) as the basis for unbreakable code communications in the Pacific theatre, and on the other, were disenfranchised due to widespread illiteracy. This chapter explores the intersections between notions of authentic Navajo identity and authentic American identity as parsed by a series of portrait photographs taken between 1930 and 1960 by Laura Gilpin of Mary Ann Nakai and her family. Presenting the portraits side-by-side in her 1968 book, The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin used visual rhyming between Navajo textiles and the American flag to call attention to the assumptions made by white viewers about Navajo identity, challenging them to reconsider definitions of Americanness that circulated during the Cold War.
