Over my forty-five-plus years of being a professional weaver, I have seen many different museum weaving collections. I get very inspired by them. Once, in 1999, I took my children to visit an exhibition of old Navajo weavings at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. They were arranged to show the three phases of weaving that collectors use to categorize our artforms. But I noticed: no names, no histories, just dates, sizes, and materials.
Who were these weavers? Where did they live? Were they some of the ones who were captured and sent to Bosque Redondo? Did they survive because of their weavings?
So I started telling my children about the weavers, imagining who they might have been, and I made up this story about a mom with two young children. She wakes up very early, walks to the cliffs to say her morning prayers, gets water from the well and feeds her small lambs. She comes back to her hogan to make breakfast for her family, making sure they are in balance for the day. She sits in front of her loom. With her kids by her side, she starts to sing her weaving songs. When she feels in balance, she starts to weave. The kids are hearing the thump of the comb against the warps. She tells them, that’s the sound of your family’s heartbeat. When you learn to weave, you will carry your family’s heartbeat forward. The sounds of her singing and weaving bring harmony to their lives and home.
As we were leaving, I asked: How many weavings are on display? They told me seventy-five. Seventy-five silent weavers. I thought of my great grandmother, my two grandmothers, my mom, my two aunts, my sisters, my daughter, my son, and my granddaughter. I thought of how their names are now attached to their work and people know their history. We’ve come a long way and it’s been a long struggle. But it’s wonderful to be a part of the change.
So, in honor of them:
We Will Be Silent No More!
—Barbara Teller Ornelas (Diné), fifth-generation textile artist
Barbara Teller Ornelas’s set of miniature tapestry weavings re-creates the three “phases” of Chief blankets as designated by Euro-American collectors. Historically, each phase points to a progression of different colors, patterns, and designs in these banded blankets. According to collectors, the three phases trace the transformation of Diné (Navajo) weavers’ own ideas and practices, a change that corresponds to Diné participation in larger-scale interregional commercial markets.1
Blankets were, and continue to be, an important source of income for women weavers. Over time, Chief blankets in particular became highly valued and often fetishized by collectors. The unintended consequence of this trend is that works often went uncredited or were valued only in as much as they represented “authentic” Diné culture. Works from earlier phases were often claimed by dealers and collectors to be superior in quality, materials, and technique; their social value and internal use seemed to lend them an aura of rarity and nostalgia.2 There is also a long history of intertribal trade for Chief blankets, revealing their significance and value as trade items both within and beyond the Southwest.
In addition to requiring immense skill to produce, this set could also serve as a commentary on the ways in which Diné weavings have been perceived as authorless—positioned as valuable cultural belongings and highly prized tourist/collector commodities rather than as works by individual artists. Their small size recalls the miniaturization so common in the souvenir arts, where cultural items are often reproduced as collectable curios that can be transported back home with ease (a process that is also evidenced by the two Child’s blankets in this section. Through an expertly crafted rendering of a classic weaving style, Ornelas’s set of miniatures confronts these differing, and sometimes conflicting, regimes of value to reveal their cultural legacy and contemporary vibrancy.
—Tova Kadish