ABSTRACT
Although settler colonial discourses about yoga often eclipse Native peoples, today in the U.S., there is a growing interest in yoga among Native Americans. This essay analyzes two Native, cinematic representations that center Haley Laughter, a Diné (Navajo) woman, practicing yoga on Diné lands. Laughter is the founder of Hozho Total Wellness—an organization that brings yoga to Native people—and a prominent and well-respected figure in the Native American yoga movement. These films, Hozho Yoga and Hot Hooghan Yoga, were posted to the Hozho Total Wellness YouTube channel in February 2017 and April 2019, respectively. They demonstrate the powerful and vital ways that Laughter fuses yoga and Diné cultural practices. Although yoga and Diné philosophies emerge out of completely different sociohistorical contexts, they also share similarities as Indigenous epistemologies. My examination of these videos employs a “choreographic analysis” or close readings of bodies and movements. I argue that in the videos, Laughter blends yoga and aspects of her Diné culture in ways that challenge settler colonialism by making visible Native people and practices in the contemporary moment and their enduring interconnectedness with more-than-human relatives and holistic understandings of the mind, body, and spirit. A close reading of Laughter’s body, poses, transitions, and sequencing on Diné lands also provides insight into why Diné and other Native peoples—whose tribal nations also have epistemologies which emphasize human and more-than-human respect and reciprocity and mind, body, spirit connection—might draw on yoga as a way to strengthen their Native identities.
