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Spider Woman:
A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters
by Gladys Reichard
If You would fully enter another time and place and people, take an anthropologist as your guide. An anthropologist observes and records everything - food, people, landscape, ritual, prayers, paintings, relationships, work. Gladys Reicherd was such a guide to the Navajo world in the 1930's. Trained as an anthropologist under F Boaz, she went to Arizona to learn to weave with the Navajo. This was a new approach, to become part of the community and to learn a skill and to describe all that happened in the exchange.
She became known as Weaving Woman. The book, Spider Woman: A story of Navajo weavers and chanters, tells of her four summers spent with Red Point's family in White Sands near Ganado. The women of the family: Maria Antonia, wife of Red Point and theer daughters, Marie and Atlnaba, teach Gladys. Besides learning to weave, Gladys went to council meetings, attended sings, participated in sheep dips and weddings. In the end she mourned, with the family, the loss of Maria Antonia, the wife of Red Point and Yikadezba, their grandchild.
Gladys learned to weave, sitting at an upright loom. She became proficient at spinning. And she worked to understand how to dye with natural materials. And as an author, she brought me with her. I longed to be with her as she described life with a Navajo family. I felt more and more drawn into the world she described until I became reluctant to leave.
Time and again she was called upon to drive people in her vehicle which she has named Jonathan. Thus she was able to help in several medical emergencies. But she and her vehicle also have great adventures.
It is decided to go to Polacca, a Hopi village for the Fourth of July. She wrote of the evening campfire, "And so we settle comfortably with cigarettes. I have a feeling that this is adventure. A full stomach, quenched thirst, the warmth and brightness of the burning stump, the cool softness of the air, the friendliness of the man who lives in the hogan, the presence of a friend, too overcome to speak her joy, John's beaming face, the smiling timidity of Molly - it cannot be that these simple components can define such a will-o-the wisp! Yet for me they do." p. 143
Gladys began to weave as a novice. And laughed and cried at her first two attempts. It was the third weaving that finally brings her some success. She wrote, "We need have no doubts about this one. It is a beautiful conception (not my own), the idea is caried out, not perfectly, but reasonably well. When the rug is thrown on the floor and it stays there. It is worth its corner tassel." p. 131.
Gladys described the state of being a student and her desire for this knowledge. She stated, "One of my principle ideals is to attain the nonchalance of the Navajo about weaving. The goal means the acme of skill." p. 130. Another time she said, "I am convinced that what I have learned is a mere drip in the bucket of what there is to know." p. 113. She analyzed what she had learned and what she still needed to learn. She said, " I have no trouble with coordinating materials and implements and muscles now, but I realize the need for coordinating vision, the vision of the complete design." p. 130
Gladys attempted to learn how to use natural materials to dye the wool. And so she determined to learn dying. She travelled about with a young woman and her baby, digging roots and gathering leaves and twigs. They found that it was impossible to control conditions and replication was almost impossible. The bottom line was that most weeds yield yellow and weavers use plants closest to home.
The men helped in all phases of weaving. As an anthropologist, she saw a relationship between the materials the men used in religious activities and the materials the women used for weaving. Medicine men concoct and brew and burn the stuff they have collected; as do the women.
Near the end of her stay, she and Marie summed up their life together for the past four summers. Marie had learned new weaves from Gladys, her pupil. Marie remembered how she was afraid in the beginning that she would not be able to teach weaving to Gladys. Gladys responded, "You can never really learn to weave unless you stay with it."
The two women gossiped about another Navajo woman who was afraid to teach Gladys for fear she would become a rival in selling weavings. Then Marie laughed and said, "There is no fear of white women becoming rivals. They are too slow. They could not earn a living at it."
This book is a great adventure into the women's world of weaving. With this as an entry point, all of Navajo culture and relationships as spread out before us, as beautiful as a fine weaving.
Copyright©1999 Mary Jo Kelly Wilhelm
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