Navajo Women’s Impact on One of the World’s Greatest Technological Advancements
The world’s most significant technological advancements have been achieved by brave, innovative citizens, greatly admired for their contributions. Other innovators from underrepresented backgrounds have made equally important contributions, yet they do not receive the same recognition. In the 1960s and 1970s, Navajo women played a critical role in technological achievements key to the successes of the Apollo missions and computer chip design. Their work as electrical weavers was crucial to these performances, yet they receive very little credit or historical acknowledgment. Even when Navajo women are recognized for their work, these portrayals descend into common indigenous stereotypes, rather than representing their tremendous accomplishments.
In desperate need to make a living, Navajo women worked at electrical plants assembling intricate electrical components of small chips, a task that required intense focus on minute details. The women’s work on electrical chips is comparable to traditional Navajo rug weaving, which contains similar patterns. While the design in their electrical work does resemble that of their work in rug weaving, this comparison dismisses Navajo women’s creations as “women’s work,” separating their work from typically masculine engineering and depriving the women of their well-deserved credit as master electrical technicians. Fairchild Semiconductor, frequently hired young women of color in particular for characteristics such as their “docility” and for having “nimble fingers.” Navajo women’s work was initially unrecognized, but this changed in 1969 when Fairchild released a brochure commemorating indigenous Navajo circuit makers.
Navajo women’s technological skills were not limited to their work at Fairchild Semiconductor. These women were also major contributors to programming the Apollo Guidance Computer in the late 1960s. NASA utilized the Navajo women’s circuits from Fairchild and had Navajo women employees from Raytheon assemble the computer. The Apollo program consisted of a series of missions meant to send humans to the moon and return them safely to Earth. The Apollo Guidance Computer program written by Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who oversaw the majority of Apollo software, was essential to the completion of every mission. Moreover, Navajo women wove the Apollo computer’s core memory, working in perfect harmony with Hamilton’s code. These women wove the core memory by hand, threading metal wires in circular patterns called “cores” to represent ones and zeros. This process was critical since the Apollo missions relied on a stable way of organizing computing instructions to ensure that the astronauts stayed alive throughout the mission. The Navajo women’s work was so crucial that representatives from the federal government frequently performed quality inspections on each component.
Yet at the time, their work with both Fairchild and Raytheon was brushed off as women’s work that came as naturally to them as “tender loving care,” rather than recognized as complex electrical work. Their method of core weaving was nicknamed the “Little Old Lady” method, and journalists often represented core memory weaving as requiring no thinking or skill. The Core Memory Project combats this stereotypical view of the Navajo women’s work and provides them with the proper recognition they deserve. The project hosts workshops across the West Coast that provide participants with materials to weave their own core memory patches that were assembled into an electronic quilt. The quilt celebrates both the artistic and technological intricacy of the Navajo women’s work, thus granting these women of color their well-deserved and long overdue recognition.
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