A History of Navajo Weaving

Navajo teachings contain descriptions of Navajo weaving whose thrust is that weaving was a skill the Navajo learned from Spider Woman while still in the underworld. By contrast, the majority of ethnographic, historic, and aesthetic studies propose that weaving is a skill the Navajo acquired after they arrived in the American Southwest. Much of these latter studies are inundated with recycled romantic stereotypes about Navajo weaving and weavers, and the relations between weavers and traders. Still, since such studies received broad circulation they inevitably influenced the formation of ideas and standards about Navajo weaving and culture. With few exceptions, these ideas have been Euro-American-centered. Kathy M'Closkey's Swept Under the Rugsets out to deconstruct the cultural history of Navajo weaving; provide a more emic information about the aesthetic and cultural context of Navajo weaving; and critique the art world that functions within confines that span between trading posts, auction houses, museums, art dealers, ethnographers, and historians, but overlooks the weavers and their cultural milieu.

Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 5 examine the effects of the imposed economic relations on Navajos. M'Closkey describes how, since the formation of the Navajo reservation, Navajo resources and labor were exploited by non-Navajos that, in so doing, turned the reservation into an internal colony, a satellite, vis-à-vis the centers of regional and national political and economic powers. Chapter 6 scrutinizes the transformation of historic Navajo weavings from craft to art. This chapter examines the profits the lucrative art market offered those who collect and invest in Navajo rugs at the expense of the Navajo people who weave them. As market demand for historic Navajo rugs augmented their value, it simultaneously deprived Navajo people of their own cultural heritage because historic weavings were rendered out of reach for the Navajo Nation's own museum. Chapter 7 re-examines Navajo weaving and aesthetics from a Navajo perspective, and chapter 8 provides a fresh look at Navajo weaving as an art form and explores its meaning to Navajos weavers.

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