MESA, Ariz. — In 1964, encouraged by subsidies from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Navajo Nation leadership, the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation opened a large manufacturing plant in the northeastern corner of the reservation. The facility primarily employed Diné women to assemble microchips. These laborers were often characterized as being particularly adept at this kind of work due to “nimble fingers” and a history of producing intricate jewelry and weaving, racialized claims illuminated by contemporary scholars like Lisa Nakamura.
By the mid-1970s, the Fairfield plant had become the largest employer on the reservation, but it was also plagued by poor working conditions, low wages, and little job security. These issues came to a head when the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the plant in protest of a wave of layoffs. The plant eventually shut down.
A few years later, Intel began producing microchips in a new plant a couple of hours’ drive from the Navajo Nation. While the company’s negative environmental and social impact on the region has been extensively documented, Intel made a notable cultural contribution by commissioning fourth-generation Diné weaver and math teacher Marilou Schultz to create a weaving of a Pentium microchip in 1994. The project was technically demanding, requiring significant experimentation, and spurred Schultz to embark on a 30-year path of exploring new technologies through weavings, creating Diné textiles of digital graphs, QR codes, and four other microchips. Works in her microchip series were included by curator Candice Hopkins in Documenta 14 in 2017. Since then, she’s been featured in multiple international exhibitions, including Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through September 13…