Cultural Reference

In many Native American cultures, dancing is a common part of spiritual, communal ceremonies. Dancing can be a form of supplication to spirits or deities, for purposes that includes seasonal festivities, celebratory events, healing rituals, or the blessing of certain feats such as important battles or hunting trips. While dance is a common practice among various Native American groups, the form these dances take changes between cultures, as do traditions regarding who is permitted to perform them.

Among the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, some of the most common dances are the masked kachina dances. Kachinas are guardian spirits, often associated with dead ancestors, who are believed to reside in a separate but parallel realm. According to traditional lore, kachinas return to the pueblo villages during special ceremonies. Ritual dances, in which the dancers don sacred kachina masks and embody the kachina spirit, are performed in order to invite and please the spirits. The dances often involve offerings and reverence for which the kachinas, in return, would guarantee protection and sustenance for the community, especially through bringing the rains needed for raising crops. In Puebloan cultures, both men and women can participate in ceremonial dances, although women are often excluded from surrounding spiritual practices, such as kiva societies' gatherings. Little boys who are initiated into kiva societies are often taught the dances before they have a chance to even learn the prayers.

Most likely a fictional title for a Navajo ceremonial invented by Tony Hillerman for his 1978 Navajo detective novel Listening Woman. According to the novel, the Calling Back Chant was passed down patrilineally through a single family and holds the answers to how the current world will end and become the next world as per the Navajo Origin story.

The back, open portion of a pickup truck, used for transporting cargo.

A famous novel written by the British author Lewis Carroll and illustrated by John Tenniel, first published in 1865 under the title Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The story tells of a young girl who falls asleep while resting in a meadow, and dreams a fantastical adventure in which she travels to wonderous underground places and encounters many strange creatures on the way. The novel is characterized by its illogical unfoldings, its highly imaginative narration, its inventive language, and its hallucinatory atmosphere.

More commonly spelled "crazy quilt." A crazy quilt is a patchwork quilt made with swatches fabric of varying sizes, shapes, and colors. Crazy quilts may be "crazy" colorful, but they are also an effective way to re-purpose clothing or other textiles that can no longer be usefully mended.

A long-legged, long-necked bird that lives in swampy, shallow water areas. The sandhill crane follows seasonal migration routes along the Southwest region's water corridors, such as the Rio Grand, bringing the bird into contact with many of the extensive and disparate cultural landscapes of the Southwest. The crane is also one of the spiritual beings in the Navajo creation story within the present world.

Crane (or First Crane) volunteered to help Frog spread water to put out the fire in the world started by Coyote when he stole fire from Fire Man to bring the People warmth. The Navajo believe that because of this teamwork between frog and crane, this is why these animals live closely to one another in their water environments.

The name given to an individual who tends to and manages livestock on ranches in North America, and sometimes transports them from one place to another. The American cowboy is a descendant from the colonial Spanish vaquero, who performed a similar function in the northern provinces of New Spain. Although cowboys gained notoriety in the "wild west" of the nineteenth century, there are still modern day cowboys, who manage large numbers of livestock on ranches or compete in rodeos.

The figure of the cowboy became very popular in the first half of the twentieth century, due in large part to the prevalence of the Western genre in pulp fiction as well as in cinema. The Western usually portrayed the cowboy as a tough, rough, unwilling and unexpected hero, an outsider who protected women and fought for justice, albeit sometimes in unjust ways. In these fictional portrayals, the cowboy tended to prevail over Native Americans, Mexicans, and other dark-skinned characters in an implicit re-imagining of the colonizing mythos perpetuated by the U.S.'s belief in its Manifest Destiny to push ever further West toward a receding frontier. "Cowboys" did, in fact, along with the American government, kill many Native Americans, making their portrayal as "heroic" loners controversial. Moreover, the persistent representation of the "dying Indian," defeated at the hands of the iconic cowboy,within the Western genre dimishes the significance of the resistance efforts of numerous indigenous peoples across the continent as they attempted to protect their people and their traditional homelands.

A forgery of an object; a fake intended to be perceived as authentic. To counterfeit something is to operate with the intention to deceive.

In the Zuni tradition, the Council of the Gods consists of a dynamic grouping of significant deities, each representing a powerful natural phenomenon or a cardinal direction and the characteristics associated with that direction. During the winter ceremony of Shalako, it is believed that the Council enters the Zuni pueblo to visit and to celebrate the turn of the year with the people. During this ceremony, only five members of the Council actually participate, personified by men who train carefully for the event. The Gods who pass through the pueblo are Saiyatasha, or Longhorn, Rain God of the North, Hu-tu-tu, deputy to Saiyatasha and Rain God of the South, two Yamuhakto (wood gatherers), one from the East, and the other from the West, and lastly the Fire God, a deputy to the Sun Father, usually personified by a young boy. These figures are the primary Council members and lead the dancing processional through the pueblo, but they are also accompanied by two Salamobia warrior figures and a group of Mudhead dancers, or Koyemsi, who work together to oversee the procedures and maintain order during the ceremony.

Corpse powder, also known as corpse poison, is reputedly derived from the remains of a dead human body and used by Navajo witches to produce sickness in intended victims. According to some versions of traditional Navajo beliefs, people who come into contact with a human corpse are likely to become ill physically, mentally, or both, which is why even today there remains a reticence toward dealing with or even speaking about the dead. Witches who intend to cause harm to another person can secretly feed corpse powder to their enemies or blow it in their faces. By infecting victims with this powder, the witch effectively contaminates them by literally exposing them to death.