Project ENABLE will facilitate the preservation and continued use of Diné Bizaad while also providing an opportunity to integrate traditional knowledge with current scientific thought and practices. We worked with high school biology teachers on Dinétah and a Diné language expert to identify and translate 245 terms that reflect foundational biology concepts into Diné bízaad.
As an artist, I collaborated with the team to bring a graphic identity to the project. My illustrative work features the importance of Diné history and language told through biology. Within Diné culture, there aren’t many direct translations of many scientific terms. Through my illustrations, each narrative tells the importance of our people and the various experiences that are the foundation of who we are, Diné (The People). I created an illustration that references our traditional colors, designs, and stories for each translation.
The background of each illustration features cyanotypes, a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. I am working with this process to make contact prints of the land. With the cyanotypes, I allow the land to create the final image. The cyanotypes were made from the earth, plants, and water surrounding sacred places within the Diné homeland, and the deep cochineal red signifies the importance of this color to Diné people. It is a color used in our medicines and used to protect those who are traveling. The dye used to create the deep red also has a long history with all Indigenous people as it was used in many of our weavings and is one of the earliest materials to travel in pre-colonial trades. This included designing graphics that centered the Diné language through different scientific cell cycles. Currently, the project is ongoing, with more illustrations to come.
