Jessica L. Horton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware and author of
Earth Mothers: Diné Weaving and Trans-Indigenous Ecofeminism
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Published:July 2024
On tour in Eurasia and Latin America from 1966 to 1968, Diné (Navajo) artist Bertha Stevens wove new places and agents into the vital holism of Diné Bekéyah, the Diné homeland. She shared a cosmologically derived Diné responsibility to perpetuate all life with disparate women who were similarly negotiating a heteropatriarchal, ecocidal form of international relations. Her exchanges with Scottish, Turkish, and Mapuche weavers prompt the author to reassess the Indigenous roots of ecofeminism, a discourse that shaped environmental art, politics, and theory in the final decades of the twentieth century. Like Stevens’s textiles, the chapter’s analysis is modeled on Diné stories relating the transmission of sacred weaving from Spider Woman to Changing Woman and her human children. Stevens transformed this matricentered artistic knowledge into a practice of earth diplomacy that elevated the customary power of Indigenous women during her visit with Mapuche weavers in Quetrahue, Chile, in 1968.
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