Ceremony as public memory: queer storytelling in contemporary Navajo art and writing

Navajo writer Manny Loley’s poem “butterfly man tells a story,” which he presents first in Diné bizaad and then in English, offers readers the significance of naming and stories and the importance of intergenerational relations. A second poem, titled “Hasísná” and “Emergence,” adapts ceremonial uses of repetition and parallelism to a personal story of coming out. Using form rather than narrative to connect the two poems, Loley gently reveals butterfly man as a hataałi—a ceremonial singer—and reminds us that queer people—nádleeh nahalinigii—have been here from the beginning. Constructing queer family through ceremonial forms, Loley’s poems are kin to artist Bean Yazzie’s ongoing series, The Dilbaa Project, which transforms co-created interviews and intimate photographic portraits into relational autoethnography. Dilbaa is a Dine bizaad word for a gender identity related to lesbian and transmasculine identities; the project is first of all about queer comunity. Ceremony is at the heart of Yazzie’s project: in a culture where one’s social identity is determined, guided, and protected by ancestral ceremony, their prevailing question is how we can use storytelling to rediscover ceremony for queer relatives. For both Loley and Yazzie, ceremony is public memory.