This lecture examines the emergence, operation, and transformation of trading posts in Dinétah following the Diné return from forced confinement at Bosque Redondo in 1868. It traces how trading posts connected livestock production, weaving, and silversmithing to expanding capitalist markets, reshaping economies grounded in subsistence, kinship, and exchange. Through relationships among Diné communities, traders, wholesalers, and federal authorities, the lecture explores how access to goods and services became entangled with unequal pricing, credit dependency, and assimilation policies. Attention to Diné artisans, workers, and trading-post owners foregrounds their contributions and agency within these unequal economic relationships. The discussion situates trading posts within broader changes in land use, livestock management, transportation, tourism, and regulation, while examining how their materials, spatial organization, and multiple functions accommodated commercial and community life. It concludes by considering the system’s decline and adaptation, from abandoned buildings to community stores, historic sites, and arts markets. Together, these histories reveal trading posts as consequential places where colonial governance, commercial interests, and Diné cultural and economic life intersected.