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Indian Blankets and Their Makers

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Copyright 1914 By EDITH E. FARNSWORTH Published September, 1914 SEP -b 1914 PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO )ci.A:i7n4i3 : INTRODUCTION THE art development of the human race is a fascinating study, and one that has long engaged the attention of some of our most pro- found philosophers. Whence springs the love of beauty, and the desire for its reproduction or imitation in the work of human hands? The answer seems obvious, whether it is regarded from a standpoint interior or exterior to man. If interior, man is a spiritual being with power to dis- cern all beauty, and Nature, with her multiform manifestations of beauty, is but the complement of that spiritual nature, given to him to afford exercise for the faculties of his soul. On the other hand if the subject is regarded as exterior to man then the beauty of Nature must be regarded as the exterior objects that develop within him a love for the beautiful. Once a sunrise, a sunset, a flower, strikes man's inner vision and awakens a love for its rare appearance, he experiences the dawn of the art instinct, and its development is merely a question of time. The instinct once aroused and development begun it becomes as natural to seek to imitate as it is to observe. The power of the artist transfixes the beauty of the moment and makes it a permanent joy. He "carries over" the glory of today into all the tomorrows. But it is essential that the artist be a good and faithful worshiper at the shrine of Nature. Morning, noon, evening, and through the silent watches of the night he must reverently remain at his post. The aboriginal man was perforce a keen observer of Nature. He could be no other. Upon his observing powers his very existence depended. As I once elsewhere wrote In the days of his dawning intelligence, living in free and unrestrained contact v.ith Nature, his perceptive faculties were aroused and highly developed by the very struggle for existence. He was compelled to watch the animals, in order that he might avoid those that were dangerous and catch those that were good for food ; to follow the flying birds that he might know when and where to trap them ; the fishes as they spawned and hatched ; the insects as they bored and burrowed ; the plants and trees as they grew and budded, blossomed and seeded. He became familiar, not only with such simple things as the movements of the polar constellations and the retrograde and forward motions of the planets, but also with the less known spiral movements of the whirlwind as they took up the sand of the desert ; and the zigzags of the lightning were burned into his consciousness and memory in the fierce storms that, again and again, in darkest night, swept over the exposed area in which he roamed. With the flying of the birds, the graceful movements of the snakes, the peculiar wrigglings of the insects, the tracks of insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, whether upon the sand, the snow, the mud, or more solid earth he soon became V vi INTRODUCTION familiar. The rise and fall of the mountains and valleys, the soaring spires and wide spreading branches of the trees, the shadows they cast, and the changes they underwent as the seasons progressed ; the scudding or anchored clouds in their infinitude of form and color, the graceful arch of the rainbow, the peculiar formation and dissipation of the fogs, the triumphant lancings of the night by the gorgeous fire weapons of the morning sun, the stately retreat of the Day King as each day came to its close, all these and a thousand and one other things in Nature he soon learned to know in his simple and primitive manner, and, when the imitative faculty was once aroused, and the art faculty demanded expression, what more natural than that he should attempt, crudely at first, more perfectly later on, the reproduction of that which he was constantly observing, and which was forcefully impressed upon his plastic mind.* Here then, we have the origin of the art motifs of the aborigines. The North American Indians — the Amerinds, as Major J. W. Powell called them — became experts in several arts and crafts, chief of which were those of pottery, basketry, and blanket weaving. This book deals entirely with the latter. While several tribes have engaged in rude and primitive weaving, the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico weaving their cotton gar- ments exquisitely and artistically long prior to the coming of the Spaniards in 1540, it was left for the Navaho of our historic time to develop the art to a high degree, so that we find writers of note, and authorities, declar- ing that his is the best blanket in the world — neither Ottoman fingers nor British machines have ever produced its peer. The Franciscan Fathers of St. Michaels, Arizona, than whom no one has studied the Navaho more, assert that the modern Navaho blanket is not one whit behind its predecessors of sixty or seventy years ago. They say, in addition: "The Navaho blanket is today the only thing of its kind in the world. No other people, white, red, black, brown, or yellow, turn out a textile fabric that can be placed beside it. It is true, Oriental rugs are woven in much richer patterns than the Navaho blanket, but, while the former bewilder the eye by their over-rich and over-crowded designs, the latter, by their very barbaric simplicity of design and well chosen colors, please and rest the eye at the same time." Hence it will be seen that Navaho blanket-weaving is not " a lost art," nor are the weavers a vanishing race. In these pages I shall show, and with a thousand blankets selected from those made this year it can be demonstrated, that as good blankets are being woven today by the Navahos as were ever fashioned in their history, and the fact that there are over thirty thousand of these Indians on their reservation in this year of grace 19 14, where twenty years ago there were less than twenty thousand, is proof that they are not decreasing. Yet the Indian — the Navaho, as well as all others — as an Indian, is rapidly disappearing from the land. He is slowly changing; not into a civilized being comparable with ourselves, but into a peculiar nondescript, * Indian Basketry, Chap. XII, p. 198. INTRODUCTION Vll in whose life aboriginal superstitions linger side by side with white men's follies, vices, habits, customs, and conventional ideas. Hence it is well to gather together all that we possibly can of his aboriginal modes of thought and life, his social and tribal customs, religious ceremonies, dances, and legends ere it is too late. In the doing of this the thoughtful mind soon discovers how large a debt we owe to the aborigine, and how far along the path of civilization his inventive genius and indefatigable industry thrust us. For we learn, not that "we" taught the Indian how to weave, but that "he" taught "us." In the far-away dim ages of the past when the aboriginal man was seeking for some means of carrying in one receptacle the several articles of his hunting-craft — such as flint arrow-points, lance-heads, skinning knives, gut for his bow, sinew for his arrows, his fetich to make his hunt- ing sure — and his wife desired a similar "hold-all" for her treasures, the basket was a necessity. The bird's nest, possibly, was the first sug- gestion of the basket, and bark, twigs, flexible roots, and fibre of shrubs and plants were woven together in rude imitation of the nest, and llic an of basketry zvas horn. Once created, imitation, experience, and rivalry soon developed the art until the Amerind became the greatest exponent of basket-making the world has ever known. Indeed, experts assert that there is not a known stitch now produced by the deft fingers of Parisian, London, Berlin, or Italian fingers, or warp and weft, no matter how cun- ning, sent forth to delight the eye from the most complicated weaving- machine of modern time that cannot be duplicated in the fragments of baskets, matting, and cloth exhumed from graves that were centuries old in this American land long before Columbus sailed from the harbor of Palos. Is it not somewhat humbling to our haughty pride to know that these "savage, dirty, loathsome, filthy, disgusting" people — with a score other rude epithets which I have heard applied to them — gave us the weaving art in such high perfection, and that we are indebted to them for all the useful, beautiful, and luxurious products of our modern looms? Prior to 1892 the modern Navaho blanket was almost unknown.
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