A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer

Author here if anyone has questions...

Any question I have starts with "tell me a lot about the Navajo people"... so no questions for here. Just want to say: good article.

Yes, my question is: did the weaver have any questions?

I went into a lot more of the Navajo history in my previous article [1] so I didn't repeat it in the new article. The quick summary is that the Navajo suffered a century of oppression, were forced off their land in the Long Walk, and had their sheep slaughtered in the 1930s in the Navajo Livestock Reduction. In the 1960s, the Navajo had 65% unemployment, $300 per capita income, and lacked basic infrastructure. Various groups looked to industrialization as a solution, so Fairchild opened an IC manufacturing facility on Navajo land in 1965, employing 1200 Navajo workers and becoming the nation's largest non-government employer of American Indians. The plant was generally considered a success, but in 1975, Fairchild had business problems and laid off 140 Navajo employees. Things went downhill and a radical group, AIM (American Indian Movement), took over the plant with rifles. The armed occupation ended peacefully after a week, but Fairchild closed the plant and moved production to Asia.

[1] https://www.righto.com/2024/08/pentium-navajo-fairchild-ship...

Marilou Schultz asked me to suggest some chips that would make good weavings, and I suggested the 555, among other chips. She also had questions about the different colors and textures in the chip. She notices a lot more about the colors than I do; I look at a chip in terms of functionality and connectivity and don't pay attention to the colors.

Oh wow, thanks for the info!

Cost for a piece like this? It's striking!

I don't know the cost of her weavings. They are very time-consuming to create, so I hope she charges a good price.

This piece would be very enticing for a tech billionaire.

Speaking of colors, you mentioned the significance of the purple/lavender in the weaving. But I don't see any in the pictures! What am I missing?

Just to be clear since "oppression" is a very broad term: the Navajo (and most other Native American tribes) are victims of genocide. It was a far, far, far more systematic destruction effort than mere marginalization.

Children were stolen, forbidden from learning their native language, killed en masse, food supplies were destroyed, land was continuously taken from them the second anything valuable was discovered on it, etc. etc.

It's really horrific stuff and the effects are still extremely clear on the reservations today.

I haven't seen the weaving in person; I think the colors don't come through clearly in the photo. From talking with the weaver, the lavender is apparently in the metal regions.

between navajo, and the northernmost south american migrations [i.e. Aztec]

it appears northam was colonized thousands of years before anybody else even knew, let alone cared for it.