Sex, Desire, and Aberration in Walter Dyk's Son of Old Man Hat, a Navajo Ethnography

Dr. Denetdale examines ethnographic depictions of nineteenth-century Navajo sexuality that piqued and alarmed federal officials, for such ethnographies informed federal Indian policies and remain part of settler colonial... [ view full abstract ]

Dr. Denetdale examines ethnographic depictions of nineteenth-century Navajo sexuality that piqued and alarmed federal officials, for such ethnographies informed federal Indian policies and remain part of settler colonial projects heavily invested in domesticating Indigenous peoples into Western categories of the normative nation and family. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, anthropologists trained their lens on Indigenous communities throughout the Southwestern United States as a laboratory to rebuild Indigenous societies in the aftermath of the genocidal military wars against and then the devastations imposed as federal Indian policy. Rebuilding Indigenous nations and communities necessarily included studies of human behavior, including sexual practices and behavior. In 1934, Yale University trained Walter Dyk arrived on Navajo land to study Navajo sexual behavior and published a book-length ethnography based upon his interviews with Son of Old Man Hat, a Navajo man who was considered respectable and yet, by Dyk’s ethnography, also deviant and aberrant because of his disclosures around sex and sexuality. This presentation also takes Dyk’s graphic sexual references of Navajos as space to consider what “traditional” Navajo kin relations and matters of intimacy might look like, for today, it is difficult to have conversations with Navajos about changing Navajo perceptions of Navajo family, marriage and sexuality that fall outside of the normative nuclear family unit.