Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie was born into the Bear Clan (Taskigi) of the Seminole Nation and born for the Tsi'naajínii Clan of the Navajo Nation. Her mother, Minnie June Lee McGirt-Tsinhnahjinnie (1927[1]-2016), was Seminole and Muskogee and her father, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie (1916-2000), was Navajo.[2] Her father was a painter and muralist who studied at the Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[3]

Tsinhnahjinnie was born in 1954 in Phoenix, Arizona.[4] She moved to the Navajo Reservation in 1966. In 1975, she began her art education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 1978, Tsinhnahjinnie enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting with a photography minor in 1981.[5] She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from University of California, Irvine in 2002.[6]

Tsinhnahjinnie began her career as a painter, but "turned to photography as a weapon when her aesthetic/ethnic subjectivity came under fire."[7] Her body of work "plays upon her own autobiography and what it means to be a Native American."[8] Her work uses photography as a means to re-appropriate the Native American as subject. Although she is a photographer, Tsinhnahjinnie often hand-tints her photographs or uses them in collage.[5] She has also used unusual supports for her work, such as car hoods. She shoots her own original photographs, but also frequently retools historical photographs of Native Americans to comment upon the ethnographic gaze of nineteenth-century white photographers. Tsinhnahjinnie also works in film and video.[9] Using a combination of photography and digital images with a contemporary Native American photography style, she overcomes stereotypes, challenges political ideas, and creates a space for other Natives to express their ideas as well. Her goal with her art is not aimed at the non-natives but instead it is to document her life experience and share it with the world. In a statement on “America Is a Stolen Land”, Tsinhnahjinnie says, “.. the photographs I take are not for White people to look at Native people. I take photographs so Native people can look at Native people. I make photographs for Native people”. The Damn Series which she wrote in 1977 is Tsinhnahjinnie’s most widely known piece. Throughout the piece she works in Native knowledge (including humorous jokes) to repurpose images of Natives from colonialist history by shifting them back into a rightfully Indidegnous context. 20 years later, in 1994, Tsinhnahjinnie created a series called “Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant”. She uses fifteen pages of an electronic diary to reflect on life with her family, politics, and other life experiences. The diary is all written with the idea in mind that she will take the viewer on a “journey to the center of an aboriginal mind without the fear of being confronted by the aboriginal herself”. The book begins on the page “1954” (her birth year) and continues to look deeply into her personal life experiences. Through the book she writes herself from a first person point of view in order to convey herself how she sees herself instead of others views.

When she was 23, Tsinhanahjinne moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and stayed there for 20 years. During her time there she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and received her BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She also served as a board member for the Intertribal Friendship House, Oakland and the American Indian Contemporary Art Gallery while she was living there. Tsinhanahjinne chooses to display her art and passion through things like newsletters, posters, tshirts, and photos. She even teaches her skill of photography and media to younger students. Eventually after 20 years of hard work, in the year 2000 she was invited to get her MFA from the University of California Irvine. During her time at Irvine she focused her work toward digital photos and videos. In that same year, she was awarded the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award. Currently, Tsinhanahjinne is working as a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California Davis. While she has been working there she holds organized conferences that hold the purpose of bringing together native american photographers like herself to discuss topics such as “Visual Sovereignty”. Along with being a professor for the University, Tsinhanahjinne is the Director of C.N Gorman Museum for the school.[10]

"I have been photographing for thirty-five years, but the photographs I take are not for White people to look at Native people. I take photographs so that Native people can look at Native people. I make photographs for Native people."[11]

"It was a beautiful day when the scales fell from my eyes and I first encountered photographic sovereignty. A beautiful day when I decided that I would take responsibility to reinterpret images of Native peoples. My mind was ready, primed with stories of resistance and resilience, stories of survival. My views of these images are aboriginally based - an indigenous perspective - not a scientific godly order but philosophically Native."[12]

• Lidchi, Henrietta and Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J., eds. Visual Currencies: Native American Photography. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2008.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59714-057-7.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Our People, Our Land, Our Images." Native Peoples Magazine. Nov/Dec. 2006
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Native American Photography." The Oxford Companion to Photography Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?" Photography's Other Histories. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003: 40-52

• Lester, Patrick D. The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters. Norman: The Oklahoma University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8061-9936-9.
• Reno, Dawn. Contemporary Native American Artists. Brooklyn: Alliance Publishing, 1995. ISBN 0-9641509-6-4.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59714-057-7.
• Celia Stahr. "Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2022070>.
• Rushing III, W. Jackson. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0415137485
• Paul Apodaca, et al. "Native North American Art." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.<http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T061112pg1>.

• Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, official site