Rebalancing the Cold War: Diné Sandpainting and Earth Diplomacy

Abstract From 1966 to 1968 the United States government commissioned Diné artist Fred Stevens to demonstrate sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, in accordance with a prevailing logic of a “balance of power” in international relations. Stevens’s translations of ephemeral ceremonies worked against the grain, palpably connecting Diné efforts to protect Navajo Nation lands from military-industrial incursions to the acceleration of sand mining to feed a global building boom. Stevens’s demonstrations and gifts serve as exemplars of earth diplomacy, a practice of engendering sensuous material exchanges to facilitate reciprocity among disparate human communities and the lands that sustain them.