Title: Navajo trading : the end of an era /
Authors: Powers, Willow Roberts, 1943-
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press,
Year: 2001
Subjects: Navajo Indians Commerce.; Trading posts Southwest, New History.
Abstract: "Beginning in the 1870s, peddlers began to travel by wagon onto the Navajo Reservation to barter their wares for wool, a few sheep, a rug, or a piece of silver jewelry. By the early years of the twentieth century, barter developed into an exchange of culture and services: in addition to serving as a place where Navajo jewelry and rugs changed hands, trading posts acted as grocery stores, banks, post offices, railroad hiring offices. Traders were the link between Anglo-American culture and the Navajo people. At first agents of change, by 1950 they had become maintainers of tradition and hence obstacles to modernization. Today, at the dawn of the twentieth-first century, trading posts are obsolete.".
Contents: The way trading was. Traders ; Navajos ; The way trading was ; Trading in arts and crafts ; The war years on the reservation -- The end of an era. Cash money ; Radical change on the reservation ; Target - traders ; The dust settles ; Trading at the end of the twentieth century ; A few final words.