As I was not in class and thus do not feel that I can comment on the actual discussion, I will take this blog post to go a bit more in-depth with my group’s reading, Lisa Nakamura’s Ingenious Circuits.
In an attempt to understand further things that occurred surrounding the Fairchild plant on the Navajo Shiprock Reservation, I went to the internet and looked at images, twitter posts, and YouTube videos, along with articles. I was even more surprised, though, given how expansive the internet can be, that there were not many resources on this subject.
When I typed in “Navajo weavers Fairchild,” almost all of the first page was a link to Nakamura’s article. On YouTube, I only could find videos on how Navajo women weave and one TEDx video titled “What it means to be a Navajo Woman.”
One Twitter user, Kyle McDonald, tweeted, “how did I not know this story about Navajo weavers providing the backbone for Fairchild semiconductor in the 60s and 70s?” I am not particularly surprised at the fact that nobody seems to know, as there are very few sources of information for the history itself. Lisa Nakamura appears to be one of the only easily findable people talking about this to a broader audience.
The most helpful image I found on Google Images was an image found initially from Kyle McDonald ’s tweet. The picture was from what I assume to either be an art museum or a book of art that featured a piece by Navajo weaver Marilou Schultz titled “Replica of a Chip.” The work was a woven in 1994 and featured the design of a computer chip; she also had previously been commissioned by Intel to create a circuit board weaving years earlier. If I am reading the text on this image correctly, however, Schultz was unaware of the ties to Fairchild’s history of using Navajo women to produce circuit boards in the decade between 1965 and 1975.
Thus, further exploration of this subject has further amplified my previous understanding through this course of how history is told and the differences when different people are telling the story.
I found this post particularly revealing because it underscores a problem that we discussed at length in class this past week: certain stories are not told by virtue of their ‘irrelevance’ to the broader narrative. I was surprised by Kate’s research yielding few other results aside from the article which we read in class. Even Navajo woman Marilou Schultz was unaware of Fairchild’s conscription of Navajo women for circuit construction. This disparity between historical fact and what actually gets recorded as the standard historical narrative demonstrates the preponderant issue of exclusivity in history. No one will forget the efforts of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce to develop the integrated circuit; however,the nameless workers who actually labored to build them are swept aside. Unfortunately, this issue is almost impossible to avoid because telling a certain narrative of history intrinsically excludes others. Thankfully, people like Lisa Nakamura are taking strides to ensure that all stories get told the way they should be.