The Spider Women

The Navajo blanket--mostly in the form of machine-made imitations--has long been a popular product for the tourist trade. Brightly colored, durable, it will serve to cover a grand piano or enliven a teen-ager's den. Only in recent years has it become apparent that the Navajos are a tribe of unusual vitality, and that the blankets they made during the 19th century express a remarkable artistic spirit.

To illustrate that spirit, Los Angeles Sculptor Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, curator of textiles and costumes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have brought together 81 strikingly beautiful Navajo blankets from public and private collections--including those of such artists as Jasper Johns, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frank Stella. This comprehensive exhibit of Navajo weaving has spent most of the summer in Los Angeles and will open later this month at the Brooklyn Museum, then moving on to Rice University, Kansas City and Hamburg, West Germany.

Magic. A nomadic tribe of warriors, the Navajos called themselves the Dineh ("People of the Earth"). In the middle of the 16th century, they migrated from what is now northwestern Canada to the American Southwest. There they first encountered horses and sheep--both brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadors. While the Navajo men hunted and raided, the women learned weaving from the tribe's more peaceful neighbors--and frequent victims--the Pueblos. At first they copied Pueblo styles, but they soon developed their own. As early as 1795, Governor Fernando Chacon observed that "they work their wool with more delicacy and taste than the Spaniards."

Weaving was partly a religious ritual, accompanied by solemn chants. "Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom that Spider Man told them how to make," according to a Navajo legend. "The crosspoles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the healds of crystal and lightning..."

At the birth of a baby girl, a Navajo woman was supposed to find a spider web and to rub it on the child's arm so that her fingers would never tire of weaving. When the girl grew of age, she began weaving between two upright trees, and she created her patterns without any kind of preliminary design. The magic tradition, according to Spider Man's message, "is yours to work with and to use following your own wishes."

To the Navajo, a blanket was a second skin. He wore it, slept under it and hung it across the door of his hogan, both as a defense against wind and rain and as an object of delight. Its geometric patterns, rarely repeated, expressed the individuality of the creator and also, according to how it was draped, that of the wearer. Cumulatively, in a strange way, the blankets tell a whole history of the tribe and of its conflicts with the white man.

The earliest blankets that survive date from the late 18th century, mostly coarsely woven fragments that are striped in the natural sheep's wool colors of brown and white. Some of these were found by anthropologists in Canon del Muerto ("Massacre Cave"), where a number of Navajo families were slaughtered by Spanish soldiers in 1805. The relics lay undisturbed for years because the Navajos feared spiritual contamination by the dead.

Hunger. As the Navajos came increasingly in contact with roving traders, from whom they first acquired flannel-like red bayeta cloth in the 1830s, they began to weave more complex textiles known as "chief pattern blankets." To their traditional stripes they added squares, diamonds and zigzags. They worked proudly and boldly. "Even in early plain stripe blankets," say Berlant and Kahlenberg, "Navajo weaving had an aggressiveness that set it apart from its Pueblo model. [These blankets] have a force and color that is full and exuberant but always under control."

In 1863, Colonel Kit Carson led his New Mexico Volunteers against the still warlike Navajos. Vastly outnumbered by the 10,000 Indians, Carson avoided open battle and waged war by burning crops and homes. The Navajos surrendered. Then their conquerors marched them 300 miles to a desolate encampment at Fort Sumner, N. Mex., where many of them died of hunger and disease. Only after they vowed never to fight again were they permitted to return to a reservation on their former lands. The weavers resumed their work, but as Berlant and Kahlenberg put it, "the pride with which a blanket was woven and worn lessened."

With the coming of the railroad in 1880, trading posts sprang up throughout the Navajo territory. Traders supplied German-made Saxony yarns and synthetic dyes, and the Indians developed a series of new designs in which intense colors were juxtaposed against one another. The primary motif became a radiating diamond pattern of such bright colors that the blankets were called "eye-dazzlers." Pictorial representations--figures of horses and cows, bows and arrows, houses and trains--also came into fairly general use, thus breaking the long tradition of pure abstraction.

Toward the end of the century, as the Navajos' culture became increasingly dominated by that of the white man, the quality and originality of their blankets inexorably declined. The weaving became looser, the patterns standardized. More and more, blankets were produced solely for sale--often woven to order for merchants who specified the designs that were most in demand among their Eastern customers. Since whites had little interest in wearing blankets, the Navajos began to turn out living-room carpets and even pillow cases. Eventually, the trade in what had once been works of art became so commercialized that many Indians themselves wore blankets mass-produced by the white man. The message of Spider Man and Spider Woman had been largely forgotten.

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