The Rug Weavers

“Over the years, there's probably been a small decrease in the number of weavers, but quality rugs are still being made and in demand,” says Malone No longer a novelty, as they were viewed years ago, many buyers today prize Navajo rugs as art, and prices have risen accordingly.

A 3-foot-by-5-foot Navajo weaving in the popular Two Grey Hills design could easily fetch $3,000. Larger rugs can bring $10,000 and much more, depending on craftsmanship and buyer preference.

Some want rugs with traditional designs, such as the storm pattern. But the market has also driven innovation, creating a blending of styles that incorporates different regional elements into one rug.

Traditional colors-red, brown, gray, black and white - have come back into vogue, pushing aside soft pastels, and imports, especially from Mexico, have become more prevalent, crowding some Navajo weavers out.

Mexican workers produce knockoff rugs on the cheap with designs that mimic Navajo designs. And in some cases, confusing situations arise.

A tourist shop on the interstate might advertise a Mexican rug by saying Indians of the Americas produced it. Or they might have a Navajo woman who doesn't speak English weaving in the shop; unwary customers may assume she makes the rugs.

No one browsing the high-end collector market, populated exclusively by expert buyers, is likely to confuse a Mexican rug for an authentic Navajo.

“Years ago we had to do a lot more explaining of the differences between Mexican and Navajo rugs,” says Dan Garland, owner of Garland's Navajo Rug Co. of Sedona. “Most buyers today know that Mexican rugs are made on a different type loom and with a different weaving style. They just don't make good floor rugs. They're not 100 percent wool, either.” But novice tourists might get tricked into buying a low-end rug-say, around $300 - that they've been led to believe is a Navajo original.

Also, shoppers hunting for a certain look sometimes buy a Mexican piece, knowing full well what it is, because of the low price, due primarily to low wages paid south of the border. A 3-foot-by-5-foot Mexican rug might cost $90, while the same-sized Navajo rug, in the identical pattern, might cost $2,000 or more.

“If someone is decorating and just wants a design style, we can't compete with imports,” says Malone. “I think they've hurt Navajo weavers.” Surprisingly, several traders said they don't particularly mind the imports. Bruce Burnham, who operates a trading post in Sanders and does not sell Mexican rugs, says they fill a market niche and even boost the Navajo market by bringing Southwestern designs to a wider audience.

“The people buying those Mexican rugs, if they weren't available, wouldn't spend extra for a Navajo rug,” explains Burnham. “They'd decorate with something else. To me, the imports keep the Southwest look alive.” For those interested in authentic Navajo, Kent McManis, owner of Tucson's Grey Dog Trading Co., advises buyers to make sure the rug has a tight weave, is as square or rectangular as possible, and evenly shaped. The same is true of the patterning, which can tilt slightly left or right in a poorly woven copy.

He also suggests asking what part of the reservation the rug comes from. What kind of loom was used? Who's the weaver? “If they get vague or don't know, go someplace else,” says McManis.

Longtime trader Ferron McGee recommends the feel and smell tests. A Mexican rug has a coarse feel, like sandpaper, and smells like acrylic yarn. “A Navajo rug has household smells because it's been in the house for months while it was made,” he says.

Competition aside, weaving is still deeply embedded in the Navajo heartland, and in Navajo hearts.

In 1986, when Mae Clark's father got sick, she left college in Flagstaff and returned home to help the family. She became a weaver. And even though she'd never worked dad was a medicine man, and he taught me to do a Blessingway ceremony every four years as protection, and to bring my thoughts back to me.” Among the Navajos, the Blessingway is probably the most deeply held of traditional healing chants.

Many weavers see their creations this way -as living things that must be approached with humility.

Before she weaves, 54-year-old Jennie Slick, of Querino Canyon, says a few special prayers to put her in balance. Slick then describes the design getting hold of her and pulling her through the rug, and at finishing time she's as eager to see what it looks like as the buyer.

Here's a master weaver giving credit to an

Many weavers see their creations . . . as living things that must be approached with humility.

“Weaving was inside me all along,” says the 38-year-old, now living in New Lands outside Sanders.

Today, Clark puts so much of herself into her rugs that she sometimes gets emotional talking about them. She explains that each of her rugs picks up dust from her hands, hairs from her head, and even her thoughts before being sent to customers worldwide. “I don't know where my rugs will end up or how they'll be treated,” she says. “My unseen power for the beauty in her work. “Maybe that power comes from the design or the loom, I don't know,” says Slick. “But it's there.” Clark tries to work quickly so that her rug “doesn't get restless on the loom.” She might do a 3-foot-by-4-foot rug in three weeks.

To beat a show deadline, Rena Begay once did a 6-foot-by-8-foot Ganado in 42 days. Normally she works three rugs at once, either in a room off her kitchen in winter, or, in summer, inside a dirt-floored hogan beside her home, 5 miles east of Pinon.

When preparing for a show, Rena's days begin early and end late. She and her hus-band rise at 4 A.M. and wait for the sun to peek over the ridge to the east. At its first appearance, they sprinkle white cornmeal and pray, then Rena gets to work, staying at it, except for lunch and dinner, until 11 P.M.

Like Clark, Rena began weaving after coming home from school in Utah in the summer of 1957. Her parents informed her that she wouldn't be returning because they'd arranged a marriage for her.

But Rena refused, never pausing long enough to learn the boy's identity. She was 17 and began weaving.

After several weeks had passed, she met Ben Henry Begay at the Pinon Trading Post, unaware that he was the boy originally cho-sen for her.

Rena was more interested in going back to school than in boys, and paid him little attention. Several months later, when they met again, Ben explained that he was the one their elders had picked. Still she was unimpressed. But over the next months, Ben's persistence paid off, and Rena and Ben became a couple.

“Ben drove up one day and told me to get into his pickup truck,” says Rena, now 62, laughing at the memory. “I still wanted to go back to school, but I went with him.” That was all the ceremony they had. They never did formally marry. Forty-seven years later, after raising seven kids, they have 26 grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren.

Today, Ben serves as Rena's assistant throughout the weaving process, and their son Leroy, a silversmith, advises her about

Which colors work best in her designs. When the time comes to do a show, Ben and Rena, along with Leroy and his wife, Rochelle, and another son, Larry, also a silversmith, often ride together in their van. They provide each other support in a family enterprise that includes a Web site. Technology pushes one way, tradition another.

Few weavers use Web sites. Most don't engage in that kind of modern marketing, and would prefer not to wait, perhaps for months, to make an Internet sale.

Instead they deal with the old-fashioned Indian arts trader, who, in addition to providing a crucial link between artist and marketplace, offers weavers quick cash for their work.

Dan Garland says that if he wants a large rug made-say, 6 by 9-he sometimes pays a trusted weaver a monthly stipend of $600 to pay bills while she's working.

The rug might take up to nine months, during which Garland pays the artist $5,400. When she brings the rug in, she'll receive the final payment, the amount depending on quality and whether she put extra pattern in it.

"You want the weaver to get as much as she can," says Garland. "At least 50 percent of the women pay their bills from weaving."

Traders sometimes spark weaving trends. In 1995, Burnham convinced a Pennsylvania mill operator to produce a three-ply yarn-similar to the Germantown yarn, also produced in Pennsylvania - Navajos used following their defeat by the Army in 1864. Soldiers marched the conquered Navajos, on foot, to a prison Camp At bosque redondo, new mexiko, where they remained until 1868.

Burnham gave this yarn to weavers with a book about that march, known as the Long Walk. It described how Navajo women, in spite of living in miserable captivity far from home, used Germantown yarn to produce a new and dazzling style of weaving.

Burnham's idea was to empower weavers to recapture the spirit of that era. It worked. "Seeing how these weavers have responded is the most exciting thing I've done in more than 40 years as a trader," he says.

When Clark talks about her Germantown rugs, she swells with pride at how Navajos endured the darkest time in their history, and still produced something vibrant and beautiful.

"The people endured hardship, starvation and cold, but never gave up," she says. "They still made rugs. To me, Germantown rugs represent freedom and the hope that something better will come along."

The Germantown revival that Burnham created, now nine years running, has produced a burgeoning market for these colorful, fringed rugs made with three-ply yarn.

The old becomes new again. That trend also is evident in the come-back of churro sheep, a breed first brought to the New World by the conquistadores. Their numbers diminished greatly during the 1860s war, and again amid a federally enforced livestock reduction in the 1930s.

But in the early 1980s, the sheep began returning to the reservation, thanks in large part to the Navajo Sheep Project, founded by Lyle G. McNeal, an animal science professor at Utah State University.

McNeal trucked his first large load of churro sheep back to the reservation in 1982, and knew by the reaction that this hearty breed hadn't been forgotten.

"I'd pull my truck up to a trading post and older Navajos would gather around the sheep," says McNeal. "They'd say these are the real sheep, the mother sheep. Some even cried. The churros are to the Navajo what the buffaloes are to Plains Indians."

Since then, McNeal estimates the reservation's churro population has risen to 4,000, and some 750 artisans use their wool, which is long, lustrous, not greasy and makes an especially strong yarn.

"A rug made with churro wool has a lot more body," says weaver D.Y. Begay, who lives in the Phoenix area, but maintains a churro herd near her birth home on the reservation in Tselani, southwest of Chinle. "The look is livelier and smoother, and there's a sheen on the rug."

As a girl, she heard her family talking about the long-haired sheep, and how important they were. So when D.Y. first heard of the churros' return, she jumped at the chance to start her own herd. In a way, her history and her ancestry demanded it.

"When you talk about weaving, you're not just talking about making a rug," she says. "Weaving is about family and life. Weaving is the way you live."

BISBEE'S LUNCHBOX ROCKS Old-time Miners Secreted Away the Glowing, Collectible Campbellite

THE OLD MINERS tend to smile a bit sheepishly when they talk about the lunchbox rocks of Bisbee. Or they laugh or lean into the conversation with a sparkle in their eyes at the mention of those little pieces of pretty they hid away in their lunch buckets to take home for themselves. That gleam matches the one in the eyes of collectors interested in one particular rock that may have made the ignoble ride to the top, the one called campbellite.

"It's not very impressive when you see it," Verlyn Mason said, stating the obvious as he put a gray rock the size of a small cantaloupe down on the table outside Dot's Diner in Bisbee. Mason, who spent his life not in the mines but in the military and computer science, began collecting campbellite in 1984.

"I can only equate it with gold fever," he said of his love for the rock.

Albert Sheldon worked two years in the mines before making the military his career. He put out his own display, including a few slices of the rock polished to reveal red, green and blue marbled interiors.

"Nobody knows how much they threw away," he said about the days when copper ran this town.

Bisbee mines supplied the world with more than 7.5 billion pounds of copper between 1877 and 1975. Gold, silver, lead and zinc came out of the red hills of Bisbee. Great chunks of Bisbee minerals like the vivid green malachite and neon-blue azurite made their way into museums, private collections and jewelry shops. But campbellite? Nobody ever heard of it until the late 1940s.

That's when Ray Wright brought a hunk of the rock home from his work overseeing the powder magazine in the Campbell Mine's shaft. The Campbell was the richest and the deepest mine in the district, bottoming out at 3,600 feet straight down. Wright had taken a black light into the mine with him and discovered what the experts were going to say was darned near impossible. The rock-the one that would be named after the shaft in which it was found-glowed. No, the rock burned, pulsated with the fire of the innards of the earth. This rock, this gray hunk of nothing much, fluoresced, and that seemed wrong.

More than half a century later, Wright's daughter, Clara Finn, remembered a geologist's reaction to Wright's claim. "Uh-uh," he had said. "It seldom ever happens."

"I would have said the same thing," agreed Ken Phillips, chief engineer with Arizona's Department of Mines and Mineral Resources. Fluorescent specimens aren't found in copper deposits, he explained. As it turned out, Bisbee would prove the notable exception.

Phillips, himself a collector of fluorescent minerals, seemed duly impressed with his first view of campbellite. "Boy," he exclaimed, as he examined the slice under a black light. "Exceptionally interesting," he commented on closer examination with an eyepiece.

He saw not only a fluorescent quality provided by the mineral calcite within the specimen but also a number of other minerals, including copper. Collectors claim as many as 16 minerals can be found in