A hairy question: Taylor Tobias, ‘The Politics of Hair: Challenging the Colonial Legacy of Hair Codes and Defending Diné Hair Sovereignty’, Graduate dissertation, Colgate University, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

A hairy question: Taylor Tobias, ‘The Politics of Hair: Challenging the Colonial Legacy of Hair Codes and Defending Diné Hair Sovereignty’, Graduate dissertation, Colgate University, 2025

21Jun25

Excerpt: On his first day of kindergarten, five-year-old Diné (Navajo) student Malachi Wilson was sent home early (2014). Neatly braided down his back, Wilson’s long hair defied F. J. Young Elementary School’s mandate that “boys’ hair shall be cut neatly and often to ensure good grooming.” Although the school eventually gave Wilson a religious exemption for his long hair, many other students were not given the same consideration. Just last year, an eight-year-old Diné boy in Kansas was forced to cut his hair to comply with his elementary school’s hair codes. The pervasive and pathological mistreatment of Diné and other Indigenous students’ hair has motivated this essay. The very existence of hair codes reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the cultural and spiritual significance of hair—particularly for the Diné people. In the Diné language, it is impossible to say the word “leg” or “hair” because these elements of the body must linguistically be possessed. For example, the Diné stem for hair, – atsii’ cannot occur in speech unless there is a prefix, such as shi – (my) or ni – (your), to designate possession. Such an indication is significant because components of the body, like hair, carry the potential to exert negative and positive influences on an individual throughout their life. In this essay, I refer to the knowledge system that informs Diné people’s conceptions of hair and its dual influence as hair cosmology. Hair cosmologies emerge from mythological stories of human construction and bodily effect. These myths encode communal laws that regulate the manipulation, protection, decoration, and maintenance of one’s hair, thereby establishing a framework for hair cosmology.

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