Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom which Spider Man told them how to make. The crosspoles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the heddles of rock crystal and sheet lightning. The batten was a sun halo; white shells made the comb. There were four spindles: one a stick of zigzag lightening with a whorl of cannel coal; one a stick of flash lightening with a whorl of turquoise; a third had a stick of sheet lightning with a whorl of abalone; a rain streamer formed a stick or the fourth, and its whorl was white shell. -Traditional Navajo Story

Traditional Navajos believe that Spiderwoman taught them to weave. Historians believe it was the Navajos’ neighbors, the Pueblo Indians, who were already settled in what is now the American Southwest when the Navajos arrived between 800 and 1400. To the Navajos, these wealthy farmers, some of who lived in huge cities of stone and adobe (circa 1100, it is believed at least 10,000 Anasazi, thought to be the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, lived at Chaco Canyon) became role models.

Like the Pueblo Indians, the Navajos took up farming, but they never gave up the hunting skills they brought with them from the Northern Canadian and Alaskan forests. And when they learned to weave, again using Pueblo Indians as their teachers, they kept their loom and the techniques, but instead of weaving with cotton as Pueblo farmers did, they used wool, shorn from their own sheep, flocks they acquired from the Spanish.

Juanita, wife of Manuelito, a Navajo Warrior c.1901

Photograph courtesy National Archives

 

Although early Navajo blankets were striped like Pueblo blankets, over the centuries, new design elements began to invade and finally dominate the old striped patterns. By the 1800s, the Classic blanket era, some of the splendidly vibrant and beautiful blankets Navajo women created ( Pueblo weavers were men) were looked upon then and now as works of art. To Andy Warhol, Navajo weaving is ”yet another proof that women are the world’s major artists.”

Navajo Warriors at Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo), New Mexico, 1864-1868

Photograph courtesy National Archives

But all this creativity came to an abrupt and premature end when the U.S. Army’s campaign to end the “Indian Wars” resulted in a round-up of the entire Navajo tribe and their subsequent internment at Bosque Redondo, an Army camp in eastern New Mexico, from 1863-1868. Those who survived took what Navajos call “the Long Walk” back to their homeland, but the Classic blanket era was over. Within a few years of their return to their deserts and mesas, Navajo weavers found themselves weaving rugs with designs adapted from Oriental rugs for the American market instead of magnificent Navajo-inspired garments meant for Indian America.

Treaty of 1868. Navajo leaders traveling to Washington, D.C. to sign the treaty allowing them

to return to their homeland.  Photograph courtesy of National Archives

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