Return to “The Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913”: Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation

This chapter examines an incident of Diné resistance in 1913 to U.S. federal agents’ attempts to criminalize and punish traditional forms of marriage and sexuality, including polygamy and non-heterosexuality. It shows how over time the Diné have come to conflate nation(hood) with family, marriage, and sexuality in ways that normalize the heteropatriarchy they once resisted. A critical gender- and sex-based critique of federal criminalization efforts with Diné marriage and sexuality provides a way to understand U.S. colonialism as a social formation and what its consequences have been for Diné resistance.