Diné Weaver Venancio Aragón

"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”

Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."

The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.

If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.

You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?

...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.

Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.

I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.

The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.

The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.

Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.

Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.

I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.

If you’re excited to share knowledge, then you can politely reach out your hand to share, rather than instantly assuming the other person is in need of correction or lecturing.

everything needs a disclaimer. everybody needs to set up buffers, all the time, against other people making silly or dangerous mistakes. its not necessarily directed at the OP and I think its even well meant most of the time.

like the mushroom example above, the Less Knowledgeable Corrector isn't only telling OP about the hazards of mushroom foraging but also all their own followers who see their reblog, and anyone who spots the reblog in the notes.

i think some of that is performative, ie people feel they need to demonstrate that Don't Worry, I Know The Risks, Don't @ Me. which is born from this practice becoming a norm - if you don't add the disclaimer ppl think you didn't know, bc the norm especially here on Tumblr is to tack on a bunch of disclaimers to Protect Your Naive Followers From Their Own Mistakes.

GAMBLING IS NEVER PROFITABLE

DVDs

VHS tapes

Vinyl (before it became cool again)

Rotary phones

Whale oil lamps

Magic lantern shows

Gutenberg press

Horses

Antikythera mechanism

Fire