Out of the Picture

A groundbreaking photography exhibition illuminates the impact of federal policies on Diné life

by

At first glance, the black-and-white photograph appears timeless: barren desert landscape, tufts of sagebrush and a sweeping familiar horizon. The man crouching in the right corner of the frame gracefully balances with his hands resting on his knees. He wears a cowboy hat, boots and an expression that reads first as thoughtful and then as mournful the longer one looks.

Taken between 1935 and 1936, the photograph’s caption information does not identify the man, only the land: the site of two former hogans—sacred homes used by the Navajo, or Diné— on Tolani Lake in Arizona.

The caption also includes the photographer’s credit: Milton Snow.

Few people know Snow’s name, scholar Jennifer Nez Denetdale confirms. Professor and chair of American Studies at the University of New Mexico—and the first Diné to earn a history Phd—Denetdale initially came across Snow’s work in the course of her own as an academic who focuses on the history of her people.

Most Navajo people will recognize the kinds of images captured in those photos, she says, which were taken in the same era as those by renowned Southwestern photographer Laura Gilpin, “but they won’t know anything about Milton Snow or the historical and cultural context for Snow’s photography.”

That’s about to change.

Nothing Left for Me: Federal Policy and the Photography of Milton Snow in Diné Bikéyah opens on May 4 at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, where it will exhibit for the next year. A second exhibit of Snow’s work, also co-curated by Denetdale, will open in the summer of 2025 at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona.

Both will examine the work Snow—a non-Native American born in Alabama in 1905—produced after he was hired in 1937 by the Navajo Service—a consolidation of the federal Indian and Soil Conservation services—to document the impact of federal programs on Navajo lives.

Chief among those programs: the 1930s-era livestock reduction program implemented by Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier: a mandate for Navajo people to reduce their livestock herds—sheep, goats, horses and cattle—by half. The order came during the Great Depression, ostensibly in response to the Dust Bowl and a national preoccupation with soil erosion, but also as part of a wave of federal programs aimed at reshaping Navajo life.

Many of those policies continue to reverberate today.

The exhibition also arrives at a time of notable reckoning and change for how museums present Indigenous narratives and objects. At the start of the year, changes to the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act prohibited the display of certain objects in museums without tribal permission, and updated processes to repatriate sacred items. The exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery debuted at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year (through June 4), where it became that museum’s first community-curated Native American exhibition. MIACs’s exhibition Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles (through June 2), for which the Snow exhibition co-curator and museum anthropologist Lillia McEnaney served as project manager, also foregrounds Diné perspectives and challenges traditional modes of curation and interpretation.

The Snow exhibition centers Diné experiences, Denetdale says, and has Diné “center components…we hope inspire remembrance and reflections” of the 1930s and 1940s for Navajo people.

Part of that perspective includes Indigenous resistance to the livestock reduction program, which the exhibition’s title reflects, as it’s based on a quote provided by Marilyn Help (Diné), in response to the Collier era. She says:

“You people…are heartless. You have now killed me. You have cut off my arms. You have cut off my legs. You have taken my head off. There is nothing left for me.”

***

In another Snow photograph from 1936, sheep graze as far as the eye can see. Without knowing, the image does not necessarily capture how sacred Diné people consider their herds. In another, four men stand on and around a corral, counting Navajo cattle—Collier’s directive to cull their herds an unspoken threat.

While the federal government hired Snow to show their interventions were improving Navajo life, the exhibition materials note they show “radically harmed and altered communities, landscapes, and homes,” and “the construction of dams, mines and imposed grazing and agricultural practices; and newly formed political, educational and socioeconomic organizations, all of which point to the pervasive, oppressive nature of American colonial administration.”

The images also hint at what Denetdale characterizes as “an environmental crisis” of the time period. The land “was just denuded. There was erosion. There was massive culling in the land. There was a drought. And the Navajo had so much livestock.”

Denetdale is writing a chapter for a history textbook commissioned by the Navajo Nation on the livestock reduction era, and notes the “patronizing and condescending” tone of some of the historical documents. The policies Collier implemented “forever changed” Navajo life, she says, which at the time depended on livestock grazing, and created impacts still seen today, such as “a dependency on wage economy, as well as benefits like Social Security, like welfare, because dependance was created.”

Originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico, Denetdale says when she drives home, she sees the history of the livestock era in the land, which “is not particularly in good shape. There’s a drought; there’s not a lot of plants; there’s no grazing lands. People who have sheep can’t move them seasonally to different places that they once did before the livestock reduction there.”

At the same time, she says, “as I’m reading about this, I think about what should have been done to address what was obviously a problem with not enough grazing lands and the idea that Navajo people had too many sheep, too many, too much livestock. I don’t know what the answers are.”

Indeed, the show will not attempt to provide all the answers. Instead, Denetdale and McEnaney say Snow’s photographs will serve as an entry point for asking questions both about what Snow’s photographs depict directly, and the sometimes-ignored political, racial and gendered stories behind the images.

For instance, Snow’s photographs don’t show the resistance Diné people brought to Collier’s proposals. So “we’re foregrounding that resistance through quotes from individuals that have historical memory of the program,” McEnaney says. So while many of Snow’s images “might seemingly depict one thing…they’re then paired with an individual narrative that talks to the realities that were happening during that period of time.”

In this way, the show examines the specific “historical trauma” of livestock reduction, she says, while also examining the history of photography and Diné communities. “So, it’s bringing these two modes of colonial control into conversation together and thinking about how the legacies of photography and anthropology and colonial policies are all intertwined and informing and generating each other at the same time.”

***

Buddy Smith and his family—a wife and three children—stand in front of their camp, posing for Snow. Two of the children appear either shy or upset. No one is smiling. The year is 1936.

Collier, who served as commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945 and was considered a driving force behind the federal Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—often referred to as the Indian New Deal—presented the livestock reduction plan as a means to address an environmental situation.

But his policies overall “were intended to re-engineer Navajo life,” Denetdale says. In addition to introducing wage labor, “there’s a remodeling of Navajo families as a nuclear modeI.”

In Diné history, Denetdale says, people identify “through a structure of matrilineality,” whereas Collier’s policies “privileged patriarchy.”

This remaking of Native lives extended from individuals to larger societal shifts. In her research, Denetdale says she “found one document in the 1950s saying that there’s still too many people in the land and then there’s a list of ways to move people off the land: boarding school, relocation to other places, migration to cities and towns, which people know” as [the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation policies] of the 1950s’ so-called “termination era.”

That period saw efforts by the federal government to relinquish their responsibilities toward tribal governments, with the BIA relocation program aimed at moving Indigenous people into urban areas for job training, and into other areas for season or mining work.

“Today, on the Navajo Nation, we have very poor infrastructure,” Denetdale notes. “We are dependent on outside cities and towns. Usually on the first of the month, there’s just this flood of thousands of Navajo people into places like Gallup and Albuquerque and Farmington. We do have consumer power, but because of all of this strangulation by federal government laws and jurisdiction on Navajo Land…we have yet to see a booming economy. I think these exhibitions inspire those kinds of connections between the past and the present.”

The New Mexico show, as well as the one next year at the Navajo Nation Museum in Arizona, for which Denetdale received a $95,000 grant through the Henry Luce Foundation’s Indigenous Knowledge Initiative, are intended as gateways for visitors to learn about and consider an important era in US history.

McEnaney is also co-curating and project managing a second exhibition at Maxwell that also opens May 4: ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K’é, Iiná / Land, Home, Kinship, Life, with Diné photographer Rapheal Begay, who co-curated the MIAC Horizons show. The Maxwell museum will feature Begay’s photographs in a temporary exhibition, while Axle Contemporary mobile artspace will take them on the road starting June 6 and tour them through Diné Bikéyah.

“It’s looking at Diné photography from a completely different lens in the same gallery space,” McEnaney notes.

***

Snow’s work was intended to be documentary, but some of the photos seem intentionally provocative. In one, a man sits on horseback on the left side of the frame. Another stands in the deep gulley of the eroded landscape. Shadows play across the sandy dirt and the sun appears to be shining brightly, but it’s unclear what they are doing or why. In another, unnamed Navajos construct a dirt dam for irrigation purposes.

In all, Snow spent two decades on the Navajo reservation, which crosses Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. He also photographed Hopi people; hundreds of those photos can be viewed online on Northern Arizona University’s Colorado Plateau Digital Collections.

“From the accounts I’ve heard, he had a very positive relationship with Navajo people,” Denetdale says. In his portraits, “he labeled names and places and that’s not common for photographers of Native peoples, of Navajo people, to do very often.”

Snow’s photographs also lack, McEnaney notes, the tension sometimes present in images of Indigenous peoples.

“You can just tell by people’s body language in a lot of these images that they’re not being photographed under duress, unlike a lot of [Edward S. Curtis] images and a lot of the more historical images that folks are used to seeing of Indigenous communities,” she says. “You can really kind of glean some sense of respectful relationship between subject and photographer.”

That respectful relationship, though, existed in a larger political context, which creates “an interesting dichotomy,” she says. As such, “we’re asking visitors think about photography through a really critical lens and…the photograph as a knowledge holder in really complex ways.”

The show will ultimately depict an era of great transition for Diné people, and will also ask all visitors to consider the impacts of those changes—and their own perceptions of “what people think are reflections of true Navajo culture,” Denetdale says.

It will also be an introduction to Snow, whom Denetdale says traveled those hundreds of reservation miles in a van he’d outfitted with a dark room inside, on top of which he slept at night. He had health issues, a stutter, and shook so badly the precision of his photos is all the more impressive. He left very little in terms of a written record—but a wealth of photographs open for interpretation.

“It’s a fascinating story,” Denetdale says.

Nothing Left for Me: Federal Policy and the Photography of Milton Snow in Diné Bikéyah

Opening exhibition and talk, 3-5 pm; Talk by co-curator Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné) from 3:30-4 pm Saturday, May 4: Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico (500 University Blvd NE, Albuquerque).

ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K’é, Iina / Land, Home, Kinship, Life

Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, May 4-July 27

Kickoff celebration with Axle contemporary, 4-7 pm, June 1

On the road June 6-29: www.allrez.net/