We use the bed frames as makeshift looms, as we have no other way to construct our garments. We struggle to make beauty in this less than ideal situation in which we are entrapped. We have little control. It is 1887, and we are Navajo women.

In the mornings, we are forced to march; we march to breakfast, to our workshops, to our sleeping quarters. We march until our feet ache but speaking out would be fruitless. We know that rebellion will lead to punishment.

We are holding one red, black, and blue panel, woven through our hands. Our job is not to dye the wool, but to weave it together to make a dress that the White people will buy. This fact discourages some of us, but does not stop the rhythmic pacing of our looms.

We did not learn this method through our mothers, but instead, we listened to the woman (formerly Navajo) instruct us in a way our mothers never would have dared. These ways are

 foundationally simple, and devoid of any emotional attachment between woman and garment.

For some of us, our mothers didn’t have time to explain the Navajo ways of making such garments. The White woman simply explained that at the Institute, we would be able to learn “from another Navajo.” We feel betrayed.

Some of us were admittedly eager at first. We made the makeshift looms, we worked until our hands bled from the accidental pricking of needles, we tried to learn the quasi-Navajo ways of working with the White fabrics.

For some of us, fitting in, assimilating, was not only a goal but a driving focus. Thus, we worked, smiled, and struggled to grasp to the incomprehensible English letters. It would take time, but eventually, we would be one of them.

And yet some of us wanted freedom, wanted our Navajo homes, families, sisters, brothers, friends. There were others of us who did not even know what they wanted, less than food and a night of dreamless sleep.

There were others amongst us who rebelled. One accidentally broke a leg of our bed frame-spool, another injured a pinky to avoid spinning for a couple hours. These acts were severely punished, so most of us held in our rebellion—saving our energy and biding our time.

Echoing in this factory are the words of Henry Richard Pratt, apparent villain and savior, whose ideals (we are told) influenced the development of the Haskell Institute. Some of us have heard that Dudley Haskell was more of a “good man” than Pratt, but there is little evidence of this (un)truth. Only time will tell if his legacy is of that of a hero or a villain; we cannot see into the future, but we know how easily history can be misconstrued.

Sighing, we take the second panel, and join it in union with the first. The “Navajo” instructor would not have seen this as a spiritual connection, but some of us still do. Though they cut our hair and gave us uniforms to wear, we try not to let go of our home—or our culture.

We hold on, and we give away. The Whites at this place seem to both want us to simultaneously erase our Navajo core and mass-produce our spirit. It’s tricky, because a couple of us have heard whispers of the byproducts of our labors; we hear that “Indian Corners,” places where the White man would display our culture for his own benefit, were the locations where our dress would end up. Not on a Navajo girl for a spiritual blessing, but instead, a shelf in the corner of a private establishment. Some of us realize that these “Indian Corners” are nothing more than ways white men collect our culture as if it’s something they can barter. However, culture cannot be traded, sold, or acquired, because culture is internal. Culture cannot be mass produced.

But one of us creates a spirit line in our dress, and by employing this Navajo weaving technique we show that our technique will never be completely stifled. After this act, we go back to work; the days continue blurring together, as we weave yet another terraced edge design onto yet another dress…

This particular narrative style is called a “collective narrative” or a “we narrative,” coined by Lisa Lowe in her 1996 book Immigrant Acts. In this text, she illustrates the power of telling a collective narrative in order to fully describe the situations faced by people of a minority party. Thus, when writing the narrative, I was playing off of Lowe and authors who employ the collective narrative, such as Julie Otsuka with her 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic.

Otsuka employs this particular narrative style to avoid telling a limiting narrative of the Japanese mail order brides; in the same vein as fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (famous for writing the critically-acclaimed novel, Americanah, and her TED Talk on “The Dangers of a Single Story”), Otsuka yearns to construct a compelling narrative that encompasses the people’s experience as a whole, while offering glimpses at the differences in each individual experience. In her TED Talk, Adichie argues that if you view a particular minority experience as a “single story” you are in danger of only seeing one aspect of their narrative and will be ignoring the nuances to their lived experiences. The use of a collective narrative is one solution to the problem of a “single story,” and I chose to utilize a similar style of narrative in order to tell the tale of the Navajo women forced to mass produce clothing in their workshops.

While I have simply given you a glimpse into what the collective Navajo experience may have been like, I strive throughout this argument to be mindful of the “single story” while presenting the facts of Navajo weaving.

Reading The Dress

For the Navajo (also known as the Diné or the Naabeehó), weaving was not just a mechanical construction of clothing. On the contrary, many Navajo weavers sewing their individual masterpieces “envisioned an entity with a life of its own” (Thomas 33). Their woven art was, the Navajo knew, imbued with “healing power[s]”—an innate aspect of every piece of Native art (Walters 29). Weavers believed they were giving life to their product, and a deep connection was formed between the Navajo and their garment—a connection of “love and desire” (Thomas 33). “Love” describes the passionate affect the Navajo had with the clothing. “Desire” encompasses the weaver’s want to create, forgoing the simple need to make a profit. Wesley Thomas describes this desire as a “continuous craving and longing for weaving to continue endlessly” in her life (35). What happens, then, when such “cravings” must become pragmatic and disciplined choices, where the creation of a live, love-filled object is no longer possible? This is the case of a particular Navajo dress that was likely constructed in a Native American Boarding School.

Under the regiment of Native American Boarding Schools, such as the early Haskell Institute, the Navajo were forced to separate organic spirituality from craftsmanship. Picture the following: It is 1884, and you are a Navajo woman. You are isolated from your tribe, forced to cut your hair (a symbolic tie to your culture), required to wear Western clothing, and ultimately, still sew dresses in the way your grandmother taught you. These female weavers undoubtedly experienced conflicting emotions: they were placed in a situation where they were forced to simultaneously erase their culture while still mass producing representative Native objects.

This dichotomous position creates a tension between the Navajo art and Western mass production. But despite such tension, the product still came into existence. So, what can we untangle about certain Navajo objects created in the boarding school system?

Take for example the Navajo wearing dress. This two-piece, Navajo-style wearing dress (ca. 1850-1860) is constructed from two separate rectangular, hand-woven panels; as already described, the dress was most likely created by a Navajo woman in the boarding school system. The warp material is a 3-ply wool yard, in a dark green or dull green color. Additionally, there are four different woof materials: hand spun blue (indigo dye) wool, hand spun black (native dye) wool, three-ply commercial blue 

(indigo dye) yarn, and bayeta-style red (cochineal dye) wool. 

Bayeta is a style of weaving where the sewer utilizes a spool of yarn that has been sewn and undone from a prior garment; thus, for a Navajo woman working in the limited conditions given to her in the boarding school system, this style was likely to have been used.

Often in the Navajo style of sewing, a “spirit line” is created so that the object would “not be perfect” (Walters 31). This could be created as a literal line through the garment that disrupts the linear flow of the item, or more generally, the spirit line could be any sort of imperfection. At first glance, our Navajo dress appears symmetrical; however, under closer inspection of the reoccurring terraced-edge pattern, we can see such a spirit line.

Throughout the wearing dress, the terraced edge pattern appears eight times—four on each panel of the dress. Six of the occurrences contain thirteen “box pyramids” (which appear as black, box-like pyramids) and two of the occurrences contain fourteen instances of this pattern.  Although this may have been unintentional, it is more likely that this was the woman’s attempt to create a spirit line, an imperfection in her art.

What does this imperfection tell us? One possible explanation could be the sheer number of garments women had to produce while in the workshop; this option does not reflect the Native tradition of creating a spirit line, but rather, the living situation these women endured. An alternate answer could indeed be that the weaver intentionally made imperfections to create a spirit line. This particular explanation contains a layer of intrigue: Could this woman have been resisting the system of oppression to which she was forced to endure? As this particular aspect to weaving was most likely not taught to the women in the workshop setting, a spirit line could indicate a tie between the woman and her culture—a tie not broken by her entrance into the boarding school. Regardless of the nature of its occurrence, this imperfection either indicates the weaver was in an unjust situation or perhaps, attempted to push against the Western system in which she was placed.

Cultural Context

The Spirituality of Weaving

The deep connection between woman and her weaving in the Navajo culture is a connection integrally related to the construction of these garments, or Tłʼaakał in the Navajo tongue that translates loosely to “garment” (“Tłʼaakał”).

According to Navajo oral histories, Spider Woman is a crucial figure within the realm of weaving. Thomas relates that her family taught her how “Spider woman…constructed the first loom in the third underworld;” she further explains that these “stories or parables explain the construction of [her] loom” as well as gave a methodology for teaching weaving to future generations of Navajo weavers (35). These stories are repeatedly told throughout every stage of a weaver’s development, because, for the Navajo, these stories are their “mothers,” or of utmost importance.

Thus, to separate spirituality from weaving is to separate mother and child, blood from blood. The history of Spider Woman and the practices that the parables teach are not simply “legends” or “stories,” but instead, ways of practicing the techniques of the craft. Therefore, spirituality is integral to the understanding of the Navajo workshop experience, as the spiritual and the art of sewing are intrinsically linked for the Navajo people.

Conclusions: The Persistence of Spider Woman, Against All Odds

This particular dress was probably one of many dresses that the weaver created throughout her time in the boarding school; the design was highly sought after by its White consumers, and thus, many dresses of this pattern and color scheme appear in museums around the United States. For example, an almost identical dress was on display at Kansas State University’s Beach Museum of Art during its exhibition on Native art; thus, two similar dresses have been displayed throughout the past three months—in the same city. Imagine how widespread this design may be at the state level, or furthermore, across the United States. 

Ultimately, this wearing dress speaks of a fraught history of oppression and marginalization. It also articulates resistance. Many women in the boarding school workshops may have been forced to produce items for Western demand and taste (meaning placement in an “Indian Corner”), but the creation of a “spirit line” may suggest holding true to a culture that struggled to remain in their grasp. Hopefully, Spider Woman maintained her hold on the weaving of our Navajo dress, despite every other factor that was determined to tear her away from her people.

Works Cited

Adichi, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Online video clip. TED. TED, Oct. 2009. Web.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print.

Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Print.

“Tłʼaakał.” Glosbe. Glosbe, n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Thomas, Wesley. “Personification of Navajo Weaving.” Woven by the Grandmothers. Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1996. 33-42. Print.

Walters, Harry. “The Navajo Concept of Art.” Woven by the Grandmothers. Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1996. 29-32. Print.