The most enduring popular image of the Navajo is probably that of solitary woman sitting outdoors, surrounded by the towering mountains, sun-baked plateaus, and snaking canyons of the Four Corners Country - where the borders or Arizona New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet - weaving a blanket or rug or her vertical loom.
Navajos trace the standard of excellence exemplified by their finest textiles to the time of legends, when Changing Woman, their patron and protector, met Spider Woman, the first weaver.
Underground, in Spider Woman's subterranean abode, Changing Woman beheld the loom used by her master-weaver host, a fabulous creation with cross pole of sky and earth, warp sticks made of sun rays, and heddles formed from rock crystal and lightning. When weaving, Spider Woman used a batten stick made of a sun halo and a comb of white shell; the sticks of her four spindles were made from four different kinds of lightning, their whorls cut from black cannel coal, blue-green turquoise, marbly white shell, and iridescent abalone shell.
Thus was Spider Woman's legacy passed on to Changing Woman, who taught Navajos how to weave. A wonderful explanation, that slice of legend bringing the matriarchal Navajo tribe's archetypical mother figure into contact with the personified arachnidan spirit, nature's weaver of intricate webs.
Most historians and anthropologists, however, view matters in a more prosaic light. For them, the Navajos, who may have entered the Southwest from the north about A.D. 1400, learned how to weave from neighboring Pueblo Indians around the mid-to-late seventeenth century.
The Pueblos - northeastern Arizona's Hopis, New Mexico's Zunis and Rio Grande tribes - and their Anasazi ancestors wove blankets, everyday clothes, and ceremonial attire for at least a millennium before the Spanish, fresh from Mexican conquests, came on the scene in the sixteen century. The Spanish lost little time making themselves unwelcome and in 1680 the Pueblo Revolt rocked the region. Although the Spanish withdrew, they came back with a vengeance twelve years later. Many Pueblos escaped this turmoil by seeking refuge among the Navajos, and it was likely during this era that they taught their hosts the art of weaving. One obvious difference between Pueblo and Navajo weaving - for Pueblos, it is typically a male art; for Navajos, a female form of expression - is at least partly explained by Pueblo husbands' passing this knowledge to their Navajo wives.
The Pueblos' role as cultural donors may be what is acknowledged in a Navajo account of a visit that the sons of Changing Woman - the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Born for Water - paid upon Spider Woman. Here, the Twins see smoke drifting upward from Spider Woman's underground home and enter by descending a four-step ladder. Does this ladder leading to the weaver's dwelling below ground represent the ladders that Pueblo men climb down when entering kivas - subterranean and semisubterranean ceremonial chambers - where, warmed by smoky fires, they customarily do their weaving?
‘Think forward’
Watching today's Navajo weavers, one encounters many signs of the developmental roots of this
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