Rooted in Community, Leading with Purpose – Elton Naswood

Photo by Two-Spirit/Native LGBTQ+ Center for Equity

This Pride Month, we're celebrating someone who shows up time and again for our communities. He volunteers for grassroots organizations, communities, in courtrooms, in clinics and health care centers, and in every space where Indigiqueer and LGBTQ+ Native people have been left out of the conversation.

Elton Naswood (Diné/Navajo Nation) is the Executive Director of the Two-Spirit & Native LGBTQ+ Center for Equity. His journey to that role began at home — in the hogan, listening. It was his grandmother and elder aunt who first gave him language for who he was, speaking to him in Navajo about his identity as a Nádleehí. Those words, passed down in the traditional way — stories told only in wintertime, when everyone gathered inside out of the cold — planted something in him. Years later, when these teachings were combined with his studies, it all came together. "That storytelling helped shape my own identity as a Nádleehí, as a gay male," he reflects. “The oral tradition my family carries became the foundation on which I stand on.”

This foundation has held him through years of community work — from coordinating HIV/AIDS services at AIDS Project Los Angeles, to building capacity at tribal health agencies across the country, to his recent work with the National American Indian Court Judges Association. Everywhere Elton has gone, he has brought that same belief: that our identities come first, and everything else — the advocacy, the programs, the policy — has to be built around who we actually are.

He holds the full picture without flinching — the fierce and the vulnerable, the sacred and the struggle. That's the kind of leadership our communities need and deserve.

To learn more or support the Two-Spirit & Native LGBTQ+ Center for Equity, visit the website or follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Full PFLAG Interview with Elton on YouTube.

Ahéhee Elton and Two Spirit Center!

Photo: Barbie Buffalo, Jaynie Parrish, and Elton Naswood in Denver, CO (2023) at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting.