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Navajo weaving has evolved from producing cloth that clothed the Dina, to the wall hangings and rugs that decorate the Santa Fe-style homes of eastern stockbrokers and art collectors. The character of Dina or Navajo weaving has adjusted and adapted to varied and sometimes painful forces over the last century and a half.
At the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Ganado, many Navajos still sell their art work, including weavings and blankets. There, historians and local people familiar with the old days offer visitors a look at the past and how it shaped Navajo art.
"In the old days, they were all simple designs," Kathy Tabaha, museum technician at Hubbell, said, referring to patterns in the weavings. At that time, the Navajo wove the wool into cloth to make garments. They wove cloth from the fleece of churro sheep received from the Spanish in the 1700s, Teresa Wilkins, an anthropologist from the University of Colorado at Boulder, said.
The loss of this breed of sheep resulted in a dramatic change in Navajo weaving.
"In 1864, the Navajo were rounded up and interred at Bosque Redondo," said Wilkins, who was in Ganado to study trading.
"Kit Carson burned down homes and chopped down peach trees. He burned their wheat fields," Geno Bahe, park ranger at Hubbell, said.
"Then many, many sheep were killed," said Wilkins. "The churro were hardy little animals which could easily survive the desert environment, and they had a fleece that we call a long staple. It was a long, kind of hairy fleece, and it didn't have a lot of grease in it, so it was ideal for the hand carding and hand spinning techniques that the Navajo weavers used," she said. "The blankets that were woven around the time of the Long Walk were very fine pieces of work," she said.
"Kit Carson destroyed the subsistence in order to make the people surrender," she added.
In the winter time, the Navajos tried to hide out in the canyons, but they gave up and were forced to walk to Fort Defiance and then Hweeldi, also called Fort Sumner or Bosque Redondo, explained Bahe.
"In Redondo, there is nothing but flat planes, and the vegetation is all different. Here they know the plants," he said referring to the land the Navajos now occupy.
"From 1864 to 1868 the soil was so bad, you couldn't grow anything on it," Bahe said.
What little crops the Navajos planted died or was eaten by grasshoppers. Harsh weather, the absence of wood and the subsequent starvation brought extreme suffering to the people. "They were saying that even their gods were against them," Bahe said.
"There were some sheep at Bosque Redondo," Wilkins said, "but there also was a huge shortage of food, so sheep were eaten."
"The government wanted to get them to go to Arkansas to get them off this land, because they believed there was gold on the land," said Bahe.
But the U.S. government never found any gold on the Navajo's homeland.
After negotiations between Navajo chiefs, such as Ganado Mucho, and the U.S. government, the Navajos went west to return to their land in accordance with a treaty signed April of 1868, said Bahe.
After the U.S. government released the Navajos from Fort Sumner, the government sought to rebuild the Navajo herds. However, the government viewed the sheep as a source of food only, Wilkins explained.
"The breeds that they chose were merino ranbula. These were brought in, and they were cross bred with the churros," she said.
While the merino may have produced sufficient food, the wool they produced differed significantly from that of the churro.
"What we think of as fine wool from merino sheep has gone through a lot of processing by the time it gets to us in a sweater," explained Wilkins. "The staple is very short. It's a very kinky wool and it's very greasy. It just wasn't the most suitable for the dying and the hand carding and spinning techniques that the weavers used. So, the blankets became heavier. The yarns became thicker."
The Navajo could not card out and spin this new wool to the fine level of the Churro wool, said Wilkins. And, because the wool contained so much grease, it did not take up dyes evenly, even after cleaning and washing.
"In the 1880s, the quality of the yarn was deteriorating because of the different breed of sheep," Wilkins said. "That's the scene that the traders came onto. When you read about the traders trying to improve the quality of the weaving, what they saw especially needed done was to improve the materials the weavers had available to them."
Some traders would buy the wool and ship it back east to have it cleaned, as did John Lorenzo Hubbell.
Hubbell, who established the Hubbell Trading Post, wanted to revive Navajo weaving as it was done at the time of the Long Walk.
"He had paintings done of designs for potential customers so they could select rug styles they liked," she said.
He tried to shape rug designs to resemble those of the 1860s, designs Wilkins said Hubbell believed reflected a more authentic type of Navajo weaving. She said Hubbell believed he could best market such a style of weaving in his trading business, most active from 1900 to 1930.
He also encouraged the Navajo "to try to use a heavier weave so they (the weavings) could be used on floors. He marketed to buyers back east," Wilkins said.
In 1900, Hubbell arranged for weavers and silversmiths to do demonstrations through the Fred Harvey Company. Hubbell arranged for them to travel to places like Chicago, Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon and San Francisco.
"Beginning in the 1930s, quite a few other traders got into the business of trying to influence weaving designs and tried to revive vegetable dyes. A lot of styles came out of that, like the Wide Ruins and Chinle (styles)," said Wilkins.
In the 1970s, the Navajo began using wool in what Wilkins calls, "home decorator colors," that included a variety of pastel shades. This introduced yet another variable to the evolution of Navajo weaving, which Wilkins said stimulated the inclusion of pictured images into the rug designs.
Work is underway to revive the churro breed of sheep in hopes of producing wool like that produced before the Long Walk. Should breeding efforts that attempt to select out churro characteristics from today's herds create a change in the wool used now, the character of today's weaving may again change.
And so, the evolution of Navajo weaving continues.
