Ecology

These bundles of sheep wool were collected in the 1890s by the ethnologist and archaeologist George H. Pepper to represent three stages of the treatment necessary to prepare wool for weaving. Shearing knives were used from approximately the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and many Diné (Navajo) herders still use hand shears to remove the fleece in one piece today (see featured video below), although some prefer to use electric shears.¹ The stages required to convert wool into yarn can include sorting, cleaning, and washing to remove impurities, carding to align the fibers, spinning, and rolling.² Employment of these labor-intensive preparations varies according to the breed of sheep and the personal preferences of the weaver.

Rhus aromatica, or “Chiilchin,” is both a dye and a pillar of Diné traditional foodways. We harvest the red berries of the plant in early summer and grind the dried fruit into flour, which we use to make pudding.

The limbs of the plant are the main weaving material in Diné-style coil baskets. The root and leaves are also combined with rendered piñon pitch to create a black dye primarily used in basket designs.

—Tyrrell Tapaha (Diné), fiber artist and sixth-generation weaver

To create a blue-black dye, Diné (Navajo) makers boil bundles of k’įį’ (sumac), like this sample, for several hours before adding a mixture of roasted yellow ochre and piñon pitch.¹ The ecological knowledge associated with natural dye recipes includes minerals such as ochre and clay as well as plant materials (see, for example, those in the Dye Chart) <link to dye chart interactive>, requiring a holistic understanding of the local landscape in order to gather these materials at the optimal seasons and locations and produce strong dyes.²

Two varieties of sumac native to New Mexico and Arizona, Rhus aromatica and Rhus trilobata, are nearly identical; the surest way to distinguish between the two is to inhale their respective fragrant and malodorous scents, an example of the multisensory and experiential aspect of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).³ Diné weavers enrich the processes of collecting materials and mixing dyes with prayers and thanks in order to maintain harmony and ensure the survival of plants for future harvests.⁴ As with shepherding, these mindful gathering practices reflect Diné conceptions of reciprocity and stewardship in relation to plant and animal life.⁵

Diné (Navajo) weavers and dyers add wool to a pot of boiling dye mixture and leave it to absorb overnight, sometimes adding a mordant, which ensures that the color binds to the fiber. To prepare black dye, chunks of ochre are ground and toasted over flames, then combined with piñon pitch; next, the mixture is added to a pot of water in which a bundle of sumac twigs have been boiled.¹ The weaver can dye the wool after washing or later in the process, after spinning it into yarn.² While this dye recipe is recorded in texts dating from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each account is slightly different, reflecting the personalized and ever-changing nature of artistic and ecological knowledge.³

Although both Navajo-Churro and commercial sheep varieties can produce naturally black wool, the fiber often includes red and brown tints that must be dyed to achieve a uniform color.⁴ Undyed black wool will attain a more reddish-brown hue over time, while white wool that has been dyed black will become gray.⁵ This sample remains deep black more than a century after its dyeing, demonstrating the longevity of the dye (and perhaps the protective conditions of the glass jar in museum storage).

The natural hues of wool influence its color after dyeing, and a variety is desirable in order for weavers to create a varied palette of yarn. Churro wool is particularly valuable due to its range of natural hues, including a unique and now-uncommon shade of blue that Navajo weavers value for its symbolic association with rain.6 Weavers can also achieve color, such as “combed grays,” by combing raw wool of different hues together in varying proportions with a carding tool.⁷

—Natalie de Quarto

This textile features a Navajo technique and style called “wedge weave,” which is now uncommon and difficult to master. Diné weavers developed it around 1870 to 1890, a period in which they moved away from blanket weaving and toward rug production to serve the market.¹ Kevin Aspaas (Diné) is an award-winning entrepreneur, weaver, and fiber artist from Shiprock, New Mexico. Aspaas utilizes the traditional Navajo sheep-to-loom weaving process. He is also best known for producing the old style of Navajo wedge weaving, alongside producing other Navajo traditional and contemporary textiles. Additionally, Aspaas serves as the president of the Diné-led nonprofit organization Diné Be’iiná (founded in 1991), which focuses on promoting and preserving Navajo lifeways through weaving, fiber arts, sheepherding, food, and community outreach. This technique is notable for its distinct, scalloped edges and visually striking zigzag patterns, which are achieved by shifting the textile on the loom and weaving at an angle instead of on a straight horizontal plane.²

According to Kevin Aspaas, the actual weaving is the “easiest part” of the process after conceptualizing the design and the labor-intensive wool preparation, including spinning and dyeing.³ He prefers to use customary materials like Navajo-Churro wool and techniques that he learned from his mother and his mentor, master weaver Roy Kady. For Wolachii’, he used natural dyes made from cochineal and logwood to achieve a variety of red and pink hues (for more information on this topic, see Dyeing and Coloring).⁴ Aspaas learned weaving techniques through the Diné Youth Fiber Apprentices program founded by Kady, which demonstrates the importance of intergenerational knowledge exchange between Diné weavers.⁵ By participating in events such as the annual Sheep Is Life festival and serving as the vice president of Diné Be’iiná, a nonprofit organization that celebrates traditional Navajo sheepherding and weaving culture, Aspaas plays an active role in disseminating knowledge to weavers and non-weavers alike.⁶

Although women are often understood by non-Navajo to be the primary weavers in Diné culture, Aspaas supports and maintains Diné male weaving practices through his work.⁷ He is at the forefront of a current resurgence of male weavers who work against these assumptions.⁸ Aspaas connects aspects of gendered weaving practices and tools to the creation story of Spider Man and Spider Woman, who first taught Diné ancestors to weave.⁹ This gendered division of labor reflects a wider duality found in Diné philosophy, cosmology, and weaving.¹⁰

—Natalie de Quarto

Churro sheep play an important role in the ecosystems and cultural practices that sustain Diné (Navajo) lifeways, serving as a local food source for meat and dairy-based products, as well as supplying the raw materials used in customary methods of textile production. 

Historically, Diné shepherds maintained breeding practices that preserved the unique qualities of the Navajo-Churro breed’s fleece, which is a double coat consisting of a long, coarse outer layer and an inner coat of short, fine wool, mixed with a variable amount of hair fibers (kemp). While the finer, more uniform fleece of commercial sheep breeds is well-suited for commercial textile production, Churro wool is often preferred for use in hand-produced Navajo textiles. Diné weavers are able to generate a rich variety of yarn shades from the breed’s diversely colored fleece, which absorbs natural dye better than the greasier fleece of most domestic sheep breeds, and requires fewer water resources to clean and process the wool into yarn.

“If you reestablish [sheep herding] the land does get healthier . . . [I]f the grass [doesn’t] get chewed . . . it doesn’t grow. And the older plants, if they don’t get stomped in, you know, . . .[they] just [go] dormant . . . . So the sheep and you as a sheep herder, that’s what you’re doing [: restoring the health of the land].”

—Roy Kady

Roy Kady’s explanation of the reciprocal relationships connecting sheep with the health of plants and the land is one example of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), defined as a cumulative body of knowledge regarding relationships between humans, animals, and the environment, which Indigenous communities maintain and pass down through generations of knowledge holders. The acquired knowledge derives from longstanding systematic observations of and interactions with local ecosystems. In general, this knowledge decenters humans, focusing instead on the importance of reciprocal and kincentric relations, of which a human is just one of many equal participants. The category of TEK describes Diné (Navajo) people’s knowledge about dye plants, including where certain plants grow, how to identify them, when they can be gathered, their potential medicinal qualities, and the proper way to harvest them in order to ensure continued vegetation for other animals and future weavers. As indicated in Kady’s statement, TEK also guides understanding of how the sheep affect and are affected by the landscape and vegetation, as well as how to best provide for one’s sheep through medicinal practices, ceremonies, and herding activities.

In the late nineteenth century, ethnologist and archaeologist George H. Pepper collected wool, hide, dye samples, and plant specimens to demonstrate Navajo wool processing and dyeing practices for an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Pepper collected the wool and natural dye samples from Diné weavers in New Mexico, which are now preserved in the AMNH’s Anthropology collections. They show the processing stages that transform raw wool into a dyed skein of yarn using the flowering tops of a subspecies of Ericameria nauseosa (rabbitbrush), which Pepper identifies in Navajo as “Key-el-soey.” In a 1903 article on Navajo dyes, Pepper wrote that the weaver’s

dyes were beautiful and lasting, and his dye-work an industry to be admired. Laboriously and skillfully, worked the old Navajo chemist, and no pains were spared to obtain the proper materials. No toil too great in tempting the secret combinations from the earths and herbs that were to enhance the beauty of future textiles.

Pepper’s writing indicates his own subjective interpretations of the perceived degeneration of Indigenous arts due to contact with Westerners and the need to “salvage” older materials and practices before they disappeared, ideas popular among anthropologists at the time. His detailed descriptions of dyeing practices, however, highlight his appreciation of Diné people’s vast knowledge of plants, their properties, and dye-processing techniques.

—Emily Hayflick