The wor(l)ds contained in this MFA thesis document and accompanying MFA exhibition, Stories Held in a Time Traveller’s Hogan, offer glimmers into Diné Time, Diné Aesthetics, Indigenous Futurisms, and Sa’ąh Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ǫ́n.  These Diné Knowledges reach across time and space to Diné Ancestors, to Diné Time Travellers, to the Land, and to family.  These connections are held within constellations of temporality and relationality that are created by stories.  Throughout this re-search journey, I began to wonder, how do we activate the Land as Time Machine?  What happens when portals, or spaces of fluid time energy, on the Land start making their own stories?  Diné Time Travellers open up a space for these questions.  They are masterful weavers of time, story, and Diné aesthetics.  Their weavings illuminate pathways for dreaming expansively outside of colonial realities.  For this thesis project, the Diné Time Travellers wanted to visit the Sacred Mountains to spend time with their stories that reside in the Land there.  This document and exhibition are alive with those stories.  

Keywords: Indigenous Futurisms, Diné, Navajo, Storytelling, Diné Aesthetics, SNBH, installation, Land-based, Time Travel, Diné Time Travellers

Website: www.nicoleneidhardt.com

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