230 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



The above was written primarily to describe the great public rituals 

 of Navaho life, but travelers as well as readers of popular accounts 

 will recognize its entire applicability to the social atmosphere of the 

 trading post. 



Both Whites and Navahos have long recognized the essential 

 function of the store as a community center and assembly point, and 

 have utilized it accordingly. As noted earlier, the Bureau of Indian 

 Affairs chose a series of sites immediately adjoining the trading 

 j)Ost for various of its own installations, and in 1955 the Shonto mis- 

 sionary completed the little settlement. Community meetings, called 

 by the tribal councilman or the grazing committee, are always held 

 imder the cottonwood trees on the store grounds. The store is also 

 important as an informal meeting place where individual Navahos 

 often arrange to meet, and sometimes leave messages or money for 

 one another. 



Finally, as a community center and as a communicative agency, 

 the trading post and its bulletin board serve as the newspaper of 

 the community (cf. Coolidge and Coolidge, 1930, p. 68). 



SUMMARY 



The day is long gone when the trading post alone represented the 

 farthest frontier of American life in Navaholand and was its only 

 source of contact with the outside world (see, e.g., Kluckhohn and 

 Leighton, 1946, p. 79; Sanders et al., 1953, p. 233). Modern Shonto 

 Trading Post must share this role with a school and a national monu- 

 ment (also a missionary in 1955) within the community, and with 

 some 40 other contact institutions of all varieties in the general north- 

 western Navaho area (cf. map 2, p. 31). ISTevertheless, in the number 

 and variety of its functions, the predominant position of the trading 

 post as the representative of modern American culture in Shonto 

 community remains largely unchallenged. Perhaps 90 percent of 

 all contact and communication between Navaho and Wliite socio- 

 cultural systems still passes tlirough the trading post. It is still 

 largely true, also, that Navahos rely on the store to interpret Amer- 

 ican culture for them; to forestall their potential conflicts with it; 

 and to guide and advise their dealings with it in every phase of life 

 from recording births to building coffins. The sources as well as the 

 results of this position of paramount "cross-cultural i]ifluence" will 

 be the subject of Part 3. 



