Three Centuries of Navajo Weaving

Editor's Note: There are no machine made Navajo rugs, blankets or tapestries. Mechanical weaving cannot successfully imitate that done by the Navajo method because weft color cannot be dropped in as in the hand loom. Every thread of weft must be carried wholly across the fabric on one side or the other. Handwork, no matter how meticulously executed will produce a distinguishing quality of irregularities. Many Navajo designs are reproduced on foreign looms but the quality of the fibers, different looms and techniques do not measure to the Navajo standard.

The Navajo weaver and the Navajo loom survive unchanged in the midst of a civilization whose mechanical ingenuity is unparalleled in history. The Navajo accepts television, instant coffee, automobiles and Italian silk suits but his loom he will not change in the least detail. The weaver shears, scours, dyes, cards, and spins the wool into yarn. There has never been a change in either the loom (a structure of poles to hold the warp at an even tension) or the hand weaving technique.

When Coronado's men drove herds of sheep northward in 1540, into what is now Arizona and New Mexico, they changed the lives of the Indians living there. To the Spaniards, sheep were a mobile commissary. To the Indians, they became, in time, the foundation of a weaving industry that still persists.

The Pueblo Indians of Coronado's day were weavers of cotton. They used the "belt" loom for narrow fabrics, but they also had a wide, upright loom for larger garments which were decorated by dyeing, painting, and embroidery.

Most likely, these first Spanish sheep were eaten, as they were intended to be; but after 1600, when the Spanish began permanent settlement of the Rio Grande Valley, sheep wool became as important as the meat, for the Pueblos soon began to spin and weave wool as they previously had woven cotton. Colonial New Mexico has been described as a small, troubled island in a desolate sea of hostile, nomadic Indians.

Most of these nomadic tribes belonged to the great Athapaskan stock, which the Spaniards named Apache. One of these tribes lived in the mountainous country northwest of Santa Fé, where, because of their farms, they were called Apaches de Navajú Apaches of the great fields. Later, they became known simply as Navajo.

When the Navajo first come into view, we find them trading tanned skins and finely wrought baskets to the neighboring Pueblos in exchange for corn and woven blankets. Throughout the 1600s, the Navajo expanded westward and southward. As they occupied new regions, the Navajo incorporated other peoples into their tribe, becoming ever more numerous and powerful.

It is not certainly known when the Navajo learned to weave, but it is clear that they learned from the Pueblos. They took over the Pueblo vertical loom, and, according to the Spanish documents, it is clear that during the early 1700s