In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth century mobilized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth itself at the center of international relations. She focuses on a group of artists, including Pablita Velarde, Darryl Blackman, and Oscar Howe, who participated in exhibitions and lectures abroad as part of the United States’s Cold War cultural propaganda. Horton emphasizes how their art modeled a radical alternative to dominant forms of statecraft, a practice she calls “earth diplomacy”: a response to extractive colonial capitalism grounded in Native ideas of deep reciprocal relationships between humans and other beings that govern the world. Horton draws on extensive archival research and oral histories as well as analyses of Indigenous creative work, including paintings, textiles, tipis, adornment, and artistic demonstrations. By interweaving diplomacy, ecology, and art history, Horton advances Indigenous frameworks of reciprocity with all beings in the cosmos as a path to transforming our broken system of global politics.

Jessica L. Horton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware and author of Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Contested Kinship: More-than-Human Relations or the Family of Man?  35
2. Rebalancing Power: Diné Sandpainting and Sand Mining  80
3. Earth Mothers: Diné Weaving and Trans-Indigenous Ecofeminism  120
4. Tipis and Domes: Modeling the Blackfeet Cosmos at a World Fair  162
5. The Truth-Line: Oscar Howe's Sacred Pipe Modernism  217
Conclusion: Artist-Diplomat-Vampire  269
Notes  279
Bibliography  329
Index  365