Cultural Reference

According to the Zuni migration story, as the Zuni migrated in search of the Middle Place, conceptually understood to be the center of the world and what today is known as Halona:Itiwana, or the Zuni Pueblo, the people split into several groups. One group followed the Little Colorado River south, and near to where it joins the Zuni River running west out of what today is New Mexico, they found Lake Kothluwalawa, also spelled Koluwala:wa. Underneath its waters lay a village where the Zuni kachina, or ancestor spirits, live. The Zuni believe that after they die, they return to the lake to join their ancestors.

Kothluwalawa is also referred to as the Dance Hall of the Dead.

A Great Plains tribe whose original homeland was in the area now known as western Montana, but who migrated south along the Rocky Mountains through the 1600s and 1700s. The Kiowa were a warrior nation, especially feared for their fierce and effective raiding tactics after acquiring horses from Spanish settlers south of the Rio Grande, yet they eventually succumbed to the pressure of encroaching Anglo-European settlement. In 1867, the Kiowa were relocated to a reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma. The transition to "settled" reservation life was difficult, yet Kiowa material culture flourished. As early as the 1890s, Kiowa artists were internationally renowned for their beadwork and ledger painting, a derivation of Plains Indian narrative hide painting. As both the bison and indigenous cultures suffered from federally sponsored eradication programs during the 1900s, Kiowa artists began painting on pages torn from the ledger books instead of buffalo hide, ironically overwriting the text of the settler colonizers.

Today, the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma is federally recognized, and the Kiowa language, part of the Tanoan family,is still spoken. Kiowa call themselves Ka'igwu, meaning "Principal People."

The term for biological relatives, including both men and women.

A personal item that holds sentimental significance and is cherished and kept for emotional reasons, regardless of its utility or monetary value.

A durable cotton material the color of sand.

Referring to Keres, a dialect cluster spoken by several groups of Pueblo people within what is now New Mexico. The dialect is divided into primary two groups, the Eastern and Western groups. The Eastern group includes Cochiti, San Felipe-Santo Domingo, and Zia-Santa Ana Pueblos. The Western group includes Acoma and Laguna Pueblos. Although each Pueblo speaks its own language, the ability to communicate across the dialects is possible.

Kado is the term for the Kiowa Sun Dance, a ritual ceremony performed across the Great Plains by various tribes, including the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Comanche,Kiowa, Sioux, Ute, and more recently the Navajo. The primary purpose for the ceremony is to perpetuate the cycle of life by symbolically defeating spiritual and physical challenges during the course of the ritual, which can last as many as four days. The ceremony is also an expression of gratefulness to the creator for the generosity enjoyed during the previous year. The ceremony is one of reciprocity at many levels: between dancers and their instructors, between the participants and the dancers, and between the celebrants and the broader universe.

Justin Boots is a footwear brand founded in 1879 by H. J. Justin when he moved from Indiana to Texas. The company has expanded since then and is now owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, but it still specializes in cowboy boots.

A fictional main character in Toni Hillerman's Navajo mystery novel series. Jim Chee is one of two protagonists, both Navajo Tribal Police officers, invented by Hillerman. The surname Chee is a common Navajo name, and comes from the Navajo "Chii," meaning "red." Jim Chee makes his first appearance in the fourth novel in the series, People of Darkness. Unlike the other detective, Joe Leaphorn, who is more worldly, detached, and skeptical, Chee is deeply connected to his community on the eastern side of the Navajo reservation (also known as the Checkerboard Reservation). He is a firm believer in Native American tradition, and is studying to be a traditional Navajo healer.

A vernacular reference to the adoption of Christianity by Native Americans. In many, but not all, cases, the "road to Jesus" was long, heartbreaking, and ultimately a colonial expression of forced acculturation. Contemporary usage of the phrase does not necessarily refer to the term's colonial history of violence, but the valence of subjugation is doubly resonant in that the journey toward Christianity for both Jesus and Native Americans was a bloody one.