Trading Posts

On Sunday, NPR featured a story about Lyle McNeal’s effort to save the Churro, a sheep breed sacred to the Navajo. McNeal, a professor of animal science at Utah State University, told how the work over 30 years expanded into an effort to save the weaving traditions and customs of the Navajo, who call themselves Diné.

The late Mae Jim at her loom with the largest weaving to ever be awarded Best of Show at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial. The weaving, valued at more than $100,000, will be on display at the Autry auction. Photos courtesy Jackson Clark.

“When I had sheep in the truck and … I’d stop to get some gas, some of the elders would be attracted to the truck,” McNeal told NPR. “They would say, ‘These are the real sheep. Where did you get them?’ That’s when I started getting the signal that these are more than just a sheep … .”

Jackson Clark, owner of the Toh-Atin Gallery in Durango Colorado, can relate to that sense of mission. Since 1957, his family has been working to keep Diné/Navajo weavers in business for themselves.

Jackson Clark

“In 1860, every Navajo woman could weave a rug,” Clark said. “If she didn’t, she’d never have a family. In 2010, there are maybe two thousand Navajo rug weavers out of a population of half a million. This is very demanding work and it doesn’t pay very well. The number of weavers is constantly declining.”

Clark will be at the Autry on Friday and Saturday to auction off more than 100 Diné/Navajo rugs. He’ll give a talk on Friday to Autry members about the tradition and technique, as well as advise rug owners on their care.

Clark explains that what we now call “rugs” began as clothing. Diné women wove blankets for themselves, their husbands and children to wear over their shoulders to keep the cold at bay. They also traded them.

“They always wove for an outside market, but not necessarily an Anglo market,” Clark said. “They

Lucy Simpson from Two Grey Hills with a weaving she will have in the Autry auction

sold to the Plains Indians and to the Spanish. After making the clothes for their families, anything else, they could sell.”

The actual trade in Navajo throw rugs began around the turn of the 20th Century, with encouragement from the men and women who ran trading posts and were aware of the weaving skills of the Diné/Navajo.

“They were trying to sell needle, thread, supplies, they sold all kinds of things,” Clark said. “They wanted to find something the Navajo could create and they could sell. They knew the Navajo were terrific weavers. The fact that they were no longer weaving blankets could perhaps open them up to selling throw rugs.”

In the past, weaving was exclusively the province of women, but not because it was considered “beneath” a man to weave.

In fact, in this matrilineal society, it was the women who owned the wealth, measured in the size of a family’s sheep herd; names passed down through the female line, and when a couple married, the man went to live with the woman’s family, Clark said.

Rather, it was a simple division of labor.

“To walk ten miles and kill a deer was a lot easier for the guy to do,” Clark said. Women, who stayed close to home and cared for the children, also had the wherewithal to sit at a stationary loom.

Louise Yazzie and her grandson with her Klagatoh Navajo weaving to be featured in the Autry auction

Nowadays, Clark said, there are some male weavers, and women still learn to weave, but it’s not what brings in their primary income. Navajo/Diné families, like others, want young girls to reach for wider horizons.

“There are very few Navajo women who make as much as $20,000 a year as weavers,” he said. “I’m not seeing a great future for the Navajo woman who wants to make a living as a weaver. Even the most beautiful of weavings the woman is grossly underpaid for.”

Still, Clark, as well as the Diné/Navajo themselves, realize there is a trade-off to these ambitions: the decline of an entire way of life.

That is what McNeal and others are working to beat back. This week in Tsailé, Ariz., the Diné/Navajo are holding the 14th Annual Sheep Is Life Celebration, to keep alive Diné/Navajo weaving and sheepherding.

Clark says there is no way to overestimate the importance of these customs to the Diné/Navajo.

“You get to know these people and their whole lives,” he said. “Weaving is such an important part of these women. It’s played a major part in the development of the Navajo economy. For a lot of these women, their whole identity is weaving. This is what they do.”