Investigating Culturally-Contextualized Making with the Navajo Nation: Broadening the Normative Making Mentality

Abstract

While the Maker Movement has grown over the past couple of decades, the normative understanding of what making is and who are recognized as makers has been largely defined by a limited perspective. This perspective threatens the very democratization that the Maker Movement has come to represent. To broaden the dominant narrative of making, this paper examines counter-stories in the form of interviews that describe how members of one Native American community understand the experience of making. The Navajo Nation is home to the Diné. While the Diné are world-renowned for their traditional crafts, these crafts are just one small part of how the members of this community understand making. The unique ways that the Diné describe making have the potential to help broaden normative understandings of it. This study is driven by the following research question: In what ways do the Navajo describe the experience of making? Specifically, this paper looks to challenge how one is defined as a maker, what steps are considered part of the making process, what things people produce that are considered artifacts of making, and what the goal of making should be.