Regional Differences

Search: "pottery"

Prior to analysis, I had assumed that different regions were going to have various depictions of Native Americans. After all, Thanksgiving traditions vary throughout the country and different regions may possess specific terminology to describe the holiday and Native Americans. However, on a broader scale, this does not seem to be the case. As mentioned in prior sections, there are many cases in which newspapers from different regions have nearly identical news articles, featuring the same language. This seems to be a general theme: although different regions in the United States have different variations of Thanksgiving celebrations, words, and content about Native Americans and Thanksgiving do not seem to vary by region.

However, there is an interesting trend I picked up when looking at the collocates for the search term “indian”. Pottery and baskets had the highest Stat values. Looking at the contexts, these terms appeared in advertisements. Since newspapers do not feature one isolated story, these ads can serve as useful indications of regional influences at play. I hypothesize that a significant percentage of advertisements related to Native American crafts will be from newspapers from the West since these regions are the closest to reservations.

Looking at the 26 contexts in which the word “pottery” is mentioned, the word is frequently preceded by the mention of a specific tribe or descriptions of the pottery. This is consistent with the collocates for the word “pottery.” All Stat values are rounded to the hundredth place.

Although not many of these terms appear that frequently, the high Stat values indicate that these words are extremely likely to be associated with the word “pottery.” The names of tribes such as the Navajo and Zuni in addition to cities such as Cochiti, Papago, and Pima are all located in the U.S. Southwest, with Guadalajara, Mexico being an exception. In fact, Guadalajara is mentioned 3 times in newspapers from El Paso, Texas, and Savannah, Georgia. This is logical since these are states that are closer to the U.S/Mexico border and as such, trading items would travel through these regions more frequently. It is also interesting to see direct references to international indigenous populations and determining whether or not there are any more examples is worthy of additional research.

Looking at the overall geographic location of the newspapers that feature the word “pottery”:

The majority of the newspapers that contain advertisements about Native American pottery are located in the West, close to reservations and concentrated indigenous populations. I did not expect as many non-Western cities to feature ads about Native American pottery. However, in context, most of these cities have dense urban populations and as such, extensive trade networks would reach these areas. In addition, Native Americans did not live solely on reservations and many live in cities all over the United States. As such, the pottery described in advertisements could have been made by tribal members in any one of the cities that are not located in the West. This highlights the diversity of circumstances in which indigenous people were able to take advantage of economic opportunities that were available to them. It also opens up the possibility of the extent of forgeries of Native American pottery in the U.S.

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