Cultural Reference

A reference to followers of the Roman god Bacchus (also known in Greece as the god Dionysus), the god of fruitfulness, wine, and ecstasy. As he is the god of ecstasy, a bacchanal is an event filled with drunken festivity and debauchery.

A scapegoat is a person on whom blame is wrongly placed with the intention of misdirecting accountability and willfully causing harm.

Most cultures have some form of kinship system, and depending on the culture, who is included and how the system is set up can vary. In many contemporary Western traditions, kinship is determined by one's descent from and connection to the male lineage of an extended biological network. However, depending on the system, kinsmen can include women, men, spirits, or animals. Kinship can be important as it can define what members of society are viable sexual partners for reproduction. For instance, those who are considered your kin are excluded as acceptable matches. On the other hand, kinship can also define social connections, allegiances, and communal networks of reciprocity.

The Navajo are matrilineal, meaning a kinship system based on the mother’s family rather than the fathers, this means that when married all property is owned by women and the men move into the wife’s household. Additionally, the Navajo kinship system is based on clans, and when children are born they have two clans, their mother’s and their father’s. Their mother’s clan is the dominant clan, “born to” and their father’s clan is “born for”. It is considered incest for any Navajo to engage in relations with someone who is part of their mother, father, or grandparent’s clans. The children will have stronger ties to their mother’s clan.

Natural and pharmaceutically-derived substances used to relieve pain that can cause stupor, sleep, euphoria, and addiction. The most common form of narcotics are opiates, such as opium, morphine, and heroin. Morphine was isolated from opium in 1804 by German pharmacist F.W.A. Sertürner, and heroin was developed from morphine in 1898 by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer.

All narcotics were initially developed and prescribed to manage pain. However, due to their highly addictive nature, narcotic abuse led to strict regulation and enforcement of the use of these and other substances. In the 1970s, the U.S. federal government engaged in the War on Drugs, which led to high rates of incarceration for populations who came to be associated with the criminal use of controlled substances, such as narcotics. Targeted populations included counterculture movements, the inner city poor, and the working poor, especially black and Latino communities.

Middle Way is another term used for the Navajo Way, hózhǫ́, the spiritual and philosophical intention of keeping one's life in balance and peace. Equilibrium is the key to the Middle Way, and if one's life becomes imbalanced, a ceremony must be completed to regain harmony.

Navajos have strict taboos regarding death, as it is believed that contact with the deceased can can place the living in contact with the roaming spirit of the dead, causing an imbalance in the living called ghost sickness. It is believed that if a person dies inside a structure, his or her spirit is trapped inside the structure, contaminating the structure and making it uninhabitable. A hole is created in the northern wall of the hogan to release the ghost, known as chindi in Navajo, from the structure. The hogan is then either left to decay or burned down. If the hogan is left abandoned, all openings other than the corpse hole are closed in order to warn others as to what has happened in the dwelling.

A reference to the moon leaving the sky as the sun rises. In Navajo mythology the moon and sun were created by First Man and First Woman. The sun is given a blue mask and the moon a white mask and both are given eagle feathers to help them move across the sky. However, due to the wind the moon lost its feathers and so follows a strange path through the sky. The moon is often referred to as one of the Holy People in Navajo mythology.

In Navajo folklore, Gum-Tooth Woman (sometimes known as Tooth-Gum Woman) appears to be a humorously indecent, bawdy character whose role in tales is to make sexual innuendos in an amusing manner as a way of a highlighting a moral principle.

A Navajo term which means “those who wander around,” in reference to Spaniards who conducted expeditions into the Southwest and Great Plains during the 1500s, beginning with Coronado's search for the Seven Cities of Cibola. The earliest recorded contact between the Spaniards and Navajo occurred in 1583 near Mount Taylor in New Mexico. This term is used colloquially by some Navajo to denote someone who is ethnically Hispanic or Mexican.

Although many indigenous groups in the U.S. Southwest are considered master jewelry makers and silversmiths, with unique designs and methods to their credit, silversmithing did not become a skilled trade in these communities until after European contact in the region occurred. The Navajo, for example, first obtained silver ornaments by trading with the Plains Indians, who had received it from German settlers, and also from the indigenous, Spanish, and later Mexican, further south. It was not until after the 1860s and the war on the Navajo, which culminated in the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, that Navajo took up silversmithing as their own trade, extracting the silver from U.S. coins. They quickly incorporated turquoise, abundant in the southwest and already used for many purpose, into their work. For Navajo singers and medicine men, medicine bundles and pouches were often decorated with silver, along with fringe and turquoise.