Contested Kinship

Abstract

Chapter 1 maps the ideological and geopolitical contours of Cold War Native arts activity, focusing on the international circulation of a modern painting movement headquartered in New Mexico and Oklahoma. Through a series of exhibitions sponsored by the United States government, Dorothy Dunn, the white founding director of the Studio School of the Santa Fe Indian School, exerted an outsized influence on propaganda concerning Native Americans. In tension with Dunn’s narrative, the author develops a framework of trans-Indigenous, more-than-human kinship that reconnects the paintings to customary practices of Indigenous diplomacy. Functioning as a nonnormative form of geopolitics, Native kinship systems were systematically attacked by the federal government during the Indian Termination era. They persisted as an unsettling sign of difference in the United States’ efforts to expand the frontiers of extractive capitalism throughout the majority world during the Cold War.