Where does Navajo wearing blanket come from?
The Navajo wearing blanket comes from the Navajo homeland around the Four Corners, in today's Arizona and New Mexico. Long before Navajo weavers made floor rugs, they wove striped wool blankets to wear, and peoples of the Great Plains prized them.
Wool, looms and stripes
The Navajo may have learned to weave from their Pueblo neighbours. Spanish records show that from the late 17th century they herded sheep and wove wool blankets, and hand-spun wool from their Churro sheep was the main yarn until the 1860s. Weavers, almost all of them women, worked on simple upright looms. Before the mid-1800s the colours were mostly natural brown, white and indigo blue. The most important early blankets to survive come from a cave at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, and most of them have plain stripes.
Prized on the Plains
By the mid-1800s Navajo wearing blankets were trade goods prized by peoples of the Great Plains and their neighbours. Trade grew after the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1822, and in 1850 a blanket sold for $50 in gold, a huge sum at the time. Until 1880 every such textile was a blanket, not a rug. Then the railway reached Navajo lands in the early 1880s. Traders built a market for hand-woven rugs, and by 1900 factory-made blankets had cut the demand for woven ones.
Why people think of Mexico
Spanish influence runs through the story. The Spanish pushed north from Mexico into the region from 1540 and brought Churro sheep in 1598, and the first written praise of Navajo weaving comes from Spanish colonial records of the early 1700s. From 1864 the US government confined the Navajo at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, where weavers met Spanish American textiles from the Rio Grande area and took up new designs. But the wearing blanket was woven by Navajo women in their own homeland.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · lowe.miami.edu ↗
