navajovintage.com

NavajoVintage.com is your premier source for Vintage Navajo Rugs, Silver, Turquoise, Baskets, Beading, Vintage Native American Hand crafts, tribal collectibles and artifacts.

Navajo rugs and blankets are textiles produced by Navajo people (Navajo: Diné) of the Four Corners area of the United States. Navajo textiles are highly regarded and have been sought after as trade items for over 150 years. Commercial production of handwoven blankets and rugs have been an important element of the Navajo economy. As one expert expresses it, "Classic Navajo serapes at their finest equal the delicacy and sophistication of any pre-mechanical loom-woven textile in the world."

Navajo textiles were originally utilitarian blankets for use as cloaks, dresses, saddle blankets, and similar purposes. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, weavers began to make rugs for tourism and export. Typical Navajo textiles have strong geometric patterns. They are a flat tapestry-woven textile produced in a fashion similar to kilims of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Traders from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century encouraged adoption of some kilim motifs into Navajo designs.

 

Silversmithing is said to have been introduced to the Navajo while in captivity at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico in 1864. At that time Atsidi Saani learned the silversmithing and began teaching others the craft as well. By 1880 Navajo silversmiths were creating handmade jewelry including bracelets, tobacco flasks, necklaces, bow guards and eventually evolved into earrings, buckles, bolos, hair ornaments and pins. Turquoise had been used with jewelry by the Navajo for hundreds of years, but they did not use turquoise inlay.

 

Though some people say the Navajo learned the art of weaving from the Ute Tribe, the origins of Navajo weaving may never be known. The first Spaniards to visit the region wrote about seeing Navajo blankets. By the 18th century the Navajo had begun to import yarn with their favorite color, Bayeta red. Using an upright loom the Navajos made almost exclusively utilitarian blankets. Little patterning and few colors on almost all blankets, except for the much sought after Chief's Blanket, which evolved from the 1st Phase, few wide bands, to the 2nd phase, wide bands with squares on the corners, to the 3rd Phase, which made more and more use of patterns and colors. Around the same time the Navajo people, who had long started traded for commercial wool, often from the uniforms of soldiers, rewove these into intricate multicolored blankets called Germantown.

 

Some early European settlers moved in and set up trading posts, often buying Navajo Rugs by the pound and selling them back east by the bale. Still these traders encouraged the locals to weave blankets and rugs into distinct styles. They included "Two Gray Hills" (predominantly black and white, with traditional patterns), "Teec Nos Pos" (colorful, with very extensive patterns), "Ganado" (founded by Don Lorenzo Hubbell), red dominated patterns with black and white, "Crystal" (founded by J. B. Moore), oriental and Persian styles (almost always with natural dyes), "Wide Ruins", "Chinlee", banded geometric patterns, "Klagetoh", diamond type patterns, "Red Mesa" and bold diamond patterns. Many of these patterns exhibit a fourfold symmetry, which is thought by Gary Witherspoon to embody traditional ideas about harmony or Hozh.