Weaving …Alive and Well

By Keith Leafdale Dean of Student Personnel Services Navajo Community College Each semester Mable Burnside Myers takes her place among the instructors of chemistry and psychology at Navajo Community College. She can be found in the College's modern classroom complex on the northern reaches of the Ft. Defiance plateau at the foot of the Lukachukai Mountains. Mrs. Myers offers her rug weaving skills to as many as sixty students per regular semester and as many as forty in summer sessions.

The Navajo College is open to students from all cultures. Classes in rug weaving have included students from New York, Alaska and Latin America.

Interviewed during registration day for the college's 1974 Summer Session, Mabel Myers discussed her classes. She described how her students card the wool, make the dyes, spin their own yarn, string the warf and mount their weaving tools.

"From 1939 to 1945 I taught my rug weaving at the Shiprock Boarding School. I started there. Then they abolished it. I don't know why they abolished it," she continued, gently chopping her syllables with the Navajo accent, "but now it's coming back."

From 1947 to 1955, Mrs. Myers was a teacher's aide at the Tuba City Boarding School. There she demonstrated her weaving techniques during the summers.

"Most of the Navajo ladies in today's afternoon class can do plain weave. They want to learn how to do a double or two face weave like the one in the Read Mullan collection." (This issue page 14).

Mrs. Myer's reputation is not confined to the Navajo Reservation. After the current summer session, she will demonstrate her skills at the Museum of Natural History in Denver. She said "I think it is the fourth time I've gone there to do that." After Denver, she will demonstrate her weaving techniques at a shop in Washington, D.C. "I have a daughter who lives there. Her husband is in law school around there in Washington." In August, she will return to her position with Navajo Community College.

Asked what she would most like to emphasize for readers of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, Mrs. Myers said "The dyes (colors) and the gathering of the plants like sage and berries and fruit and the roots... some are used for medicine too. The students want to know all about the use of the plants for dyes and medicine." The subtle natural colors of Navajo rugs testify to the complexity and importance of the preparation of the dyes. Mrs. Myers has designed a popular plant and dye display chart which is available through the Navajo Arts and Crafts Enterprise as well as at selected dealers of Navajo crafts.

A small cluster of enrolling students entered the room. "They said to get another slip like this. I have only four credit hours and can take more." After a brief discussion with the students in Navajo, Mrs. Myers moved to her desk to phone the Admissions Office and learn what new twist had been introduced into the paper work. It is very much like College registration anywhere. One gains the impression from the classroom of Mable Burnside Myers, and from her gentle dignity, that the art of rug weaving is very much alive.

Navajo Community College, chartered by the Navajo Tribe in 1968, was the first college to be established on an Indian reservation by an Indian Tribe. The new campus is located at Tsaile Lake, Arizona. IN-198 The Lukachukai Mountains, home of the Navajo Community College. WILLIS PETERSON