This blanket represents the third and final stage in the development of Navajo chief’s blankets. The blanket is finely woven in bright red, blue, black, and white. The design relies on a central diamond shape, partially repeated as triangles on the sides, top, and bottom, and overlying horizontal stripes. These blankets were not made for chiefs, but since they are so finely woven, they are associated with the power and affluence of chiefs.
The blanket’s pattern varies considerably, depending on how it is viewed. When seen displayed flat on a wall, as in a museum, the composition focuses on the balanced arrangement of triangles, diamonds, and horizontal stripes. When the blanket is worn, the design responds to the body. The central diamond falls in the middle of a wearer’s back, and the edges of the blanket wrap around to the front so that the triangles in the middle of the edges join to make a second diamond of the same shape and position. Thus the symmetry of the design is completed by wearing the garment.
The Navajo peoples of the Southwest have been weaving cotton and animal fibers for over 1000 years.¹ By circa A.D. 800, the development of a true loom led to the production of large carrying and storage bags and wearing blankets whose principal decorative pattern was based on the horizontal stripe. Weaving with wool began when the Spaniards introduced sheep-raising in New Mexico about 1600.
The Navajos came to the Southwest as hunters and raiders between 1400 and 1500. During the seventeenth century, they learned weaving from the neighboring Pueblo farmers. In the Navajo culture, weaving became established as a women’s art, because women were engaged in more sedentary, home-based occupations. When the Navajo began to raise sheep as a source of food, they probably began using the wool for weaving. In the mid 1800s the Navajo began to use commercial yarns, acquired through trade, in order to obtain certain favorite colors, notably red. Throughout this period, blankets were important as the Navajo expanded their trade with the Pueblos, Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and Spaniards.
The Navajo tradition of blanket-weaving survived the nineteenth-century conflicts with the United States government, the removal of the Navajo from their native lands, and their return to a small reservation in their homeland in 1868. There they reconstructed their way of life, built up their sheep herds, and continued their weaving traditions.
- Kate Peck Kent, Navajo Weaving: Three Centuries of Change (Santa Fee: School of American Research Press, 1985).
