‘Power relationship’ with Navajos is subject of book by UNM anthropologist
Über-trader J.L. Hubbell played magician to the striking colors and designs that became the Navajo rugs we see today.
Or so goes the Southwestern legend that has been propagated by books and pamphlets professing to delve into the origins of Navajo weaving.
As is usually the case, the truth is much more complex than the myth would allow, author Teresa Wilkins argues in her book “Patterns of Exchange: Navajo Weavers and Traders,” (2008, University of Oklahoma Press).
“Certainly the traders played a role in that, but the weavers did as well. Families developed their own distinctive styles,” Wilkins said in a telephone interview from her office at the University of New Mexico/Gallup, where she is an associate professor of anthropology.
Wilkins’ fascination with Navajo rugs started when she was working at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1987. She curated the university museum’s textile collection with Joe Ben Wheat, then considered the foremost authority on Navajo textiles.
The Navajos valued their relationships with Hubbell and other trading post operators working across New Mexico and Arizona, so they never saw themselves as the exploited victims of a capitalist system, Wilkins writes.
“Of course, it was a power relationship,” she said. “Traders could decide what to buy and not to buy. But the weavers could make their own decisions.”
The artists slowly adapted some of the patterns and colors the traders requested into their own designs. By the 1890s, Hubbell had commissioned paintings of specific styles and encouraged the artists to copy the designs, reinforcing the public perception of what “traditional” Navajo weaving looked like. But many weavers balked — in part, from the universal desire to create something unique.
But for very traditional weavers, creating an exact copy was something forbidden because they saw the rugs as living beings, Wilkins said.
The vaunted Navajo chief’s blanket existed as a trade item well before the tribe’s infamous 1863 Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. Weavers produced the pattern in blankets, serapes and in twopiece women’s dresses.
“The aesthetic tended to be a horizontal layout,” Wilkins said. “Then when the blankets were worn around people’s shoulders it became vertical.”
During the incarceration, weavers copied Spanish weavings containing vertical composition, she added.
During the 1860s, weavers switched to cotton warps — the back of the weaving — a change historians have often wrongly blamed on the traders, Wilkins said. The flimsier cotton string was issued by the government.
“Weavers worked with what they had,” she explained.
Also during this period, the artists unraveled the red wool they found in Spanish cloth and incorporated it into their pieces. By the 20th century, Hubbell was encouraging a return to the Long Walk period through the production of what became known as Ganado red.
Hailed for some of the most intricate patterns, Two Grey Hills in western New Mexico emerged largely because the weavers living there didn’t like bright colors, Wilkins said. At Crystal Trading Post, in the northwestern part of the state, John B. Moore encouraged weavers to draw from Middle Eastern carpets featuring two areas of design motifs.
Pictorial designs date as far back as 1863. By the late 19th to the early 20th century, weavers depicted life on the reservation, including livestock. Their imagery sometimes served as historical documents; by the 1880s, they were adding locomotives. During the 20th century, they emphasized spiritual imagery like birds, corn and flowers, as well as yei figures from sand paintings.
“They are controversial,” Wilkins said of the yei rugs. “They rarely if ever are complete copies. The sand painting itself is not meant to exist in a permanent form.”
Rug weaving flourished between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wealthy Victorians set aside their own “Indian rooms,” which they filled with textiles, pottery and artifacts. They imagined and romanticized a kind of spirituality sprung from a difficult life. In a cruel kind of irony, this occurred when the government was trying to squelch Native beliefs by forcing their children into boarding schools.
Today, computer-savvy weavers develop their own Web sites. Many artists avoid the middle man route and sell directly to galleries and collectors. Contrary to an oftrepeated misconception, the art form isn’t dying.
“I think there are fewer people weaving,” Wilkins said. “But I don’t see it as a dying art. I see it as an evolving art. Culture doesn’t die. We couldn’t be human beings without culture. Traditions change.”
