ABSTRACT
This chapter presents case studies of "new" media-making among Navajo community members. First, it looks at the documentary potentials of the groundbreaking Navajo Film Project, and explores how its publics and contexts have changed since newfound film technologies were deployed to study filmic language. Then the chapter turns to more contemporary Navajo filmmakers and examines the language ideologies embedded in the process of entextualization. It also explores Navajo "tweets", 140-character social media messages, and looks at the ways in which users imagine their publics and negotiate identities. Tweets are both a means of immediate communication and documentations of contemporary native language use whose future publics are unknowable. As cultural productions and ethnographic objects, indigenous-language media texts dialogically emergent through media, and the internet are linguistic representations inherently geared for multiple publics. Due to transition of media objects from interactions and community building to objects of scrutiny, time-mode expectations are de-linked, and future iterations and recontextualizations of mediated forms become unknowable.
