Permeable
Thirteen years after Diné leaders signed the Treaty of 1868 with the United States to end their incarceration at Fort Sumner, the completion of the Atlantic-Pacific railroad connected New Mexico to California directly through Diné homelands. The material and ideological construction of transcontinental infrastructure facilitated the expansion of other forms of colonial violence including the extraction of coal, oil and gas, and uranium. In my research since 2015, as well as my photographic practice, I explore how Diné land, bodies, and jurisdictions have been made permeable to multiple forms of toxic assault. This process occurs in successive phases/layers and across simultaneously minute and expansive manifestations of space/time.