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Navajo teachings contain descriptions of Navajo weaving whose thrust is that weaving was a skill the Navajo learned from Spider Woman while still in the underworld. By contrast, the majority of ethnographic, historic, and aesthetic studies propose that weaving is a skill the Navajo acquired after they arrived in the American Southwest. Much of these latter studies are inundated with recycled romantic stereotypes about Navajo weaving and weavers, and the relations between weavers and traders. Still, since such studies received broad circulation they inevitably influenced the formation of ideas and standards about Navajo weaving and culture. With few exceptions, these ideas have been Euro-American-centered. Kathy M’Closkey’s Swept Under the Rug
Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 5 examine the effects of the imposed economic relations on Navajos. M’Closkey describes how, since the formation of the Navajo reservation, Navajo resources and labor were exploited by non-Navajos that, in so doing, turned the reservation into an internal colony, a satellite, vis-à-vis the centers of regional and national political and economic powers. Chapter 6 scrutinizes the transformation of historic Navajo weavings from craft to art. This chapter examines the profits the lucrative art market offered those who collect and invest in Navajo rugs at the expense of the Navajo people who weave them. As market demand for historic Navajo rugs augmented their value, it simultaneously deprived Navajo people of their own cultural heritage because historic weavings were rendered out of reach for the Navajo Nation’s own museum. Chapter 7 re-examines Navajo weaving and aesthetics from a Navajo perspective, and chapter 8 provides a fresh look at Navajo weaving as an art form and explores its meaning to Navajos weavers.
Read more about Swept Under the Rug: A History of Navajo Weaving here.
There are two contradicting, but broadly held, views and understandings when it comes to the deep history of indigenous Native American Indian peoples in the Great Basin culture region of North America. The predominate one found in archaeology and across much of the social sciences is that today’s indigenous Native American Indians of the Great Basin (the Paiute, Shoshone, Washoe, Ute, Bannock, Kawaiisu, and Chemehuevi) have only resided in the area for a relatively short time; on the order of perhaps 1000 years. The other understanding of Great Basin human history held by the Native Americans and those scientists who look at a slightly different dataset, includes indigenous Native Americans as deeptime participants of the region.
Often argued under the rubric of Lamb’s 1958 Numic hypothesis, these two conflicting views on history have slowly been coming together. As initially argued by Dr. Jones in Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West, and then Lithic Projectile Points and the Great Basin Region of North America, new archaeological analyses is lending continued support to an emerging understanding. This emerging understanding centers around the idea of cultural transmission: the mechanism by which technological skills, knowledge, and practices are passed from individual to individual and from group to group.
In an attempt to explain the spatial and temporal patterns observed in the archaeological record, such as why a particular artifact is found in one region but not in another region, or why an artifact type differs in shape or size between two sites, the idea of cultural transmission has slowly gained ground. As cultural transmission has been embraced in the Great Basin, the Numic hypothesis has lost what shaky evidence it had to start. In a recent paper entitled The Cultural Transmission of Great Basin Projectile-Point Technology II: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation authors Alex Mesoudi and Michael J. O’Brien lend support to the emerging understanding of Native American deeptime history in the region.
Read more about Native Americans in the Great Basin and archaeological cultural transmission here.
James Cox takes the title of his book from Sherman Alexie, for whom “white noise,” the static that remains on a television after broadcasting ends, represents “the oppressive noise of white mass-produced cultures, the loud demand to conform to the invader’s cultural belief system or be destroyed” (p. 11). Cox takes “white noise” to signify a broad history of colonial domination and erasure, which Alexie and the other novelists he considers write to resist. The introduction to Cox’s book, “A Cup of Water,” states his purpose to demonstrate how Euro-western and Euro-American literary and popular narratives, which almost always “culminate in the absence of Indians” (p. 13), support ongoing colonial dominance and produce real-world consequences for living Indians; and to explore the strategies used by some contemporary Native fiction writers to intervene in these colonial narratives of conquest, to render them powerless and suggest that “conquest, as imagined by non-Native authors, did not take place” (p. 18). Cox argues that his study “implements Osage scholar Robert Warrior’s proposal … that, in any scholarship on work by Native authors, the ‘critical interpretation of those writings can proceed primarily from Indian sources,’” (p. 4); thus he intends to avoid “academic colonialism” by privileging the voices of Native writers in his own interpretations (pp. 4-5). If reality is constructed by stories, and if, as Greg Sarris observes, “In oral discourse … no one party has access to the whole of the exchange…. [O]ne party’s story is no more the whole story than a cup of water is the river” (quoted, p. 16), Cox wishes his own “cup of water” to resist the narrative flow that justifies domination and to “nourish” new plots for Native people (pp. 16-17).
Read more about Muting White Noise: Native American and European Novel Traditions here.
