Aboriginal American Weaving

by Mary Lois Kissell

FIGURE 6.—OLD CHILKAT BLANKET.

FIGURE 7.—SQUAW WEAVING CHILKAT BLANKET.

Lieut. G. T. Emmons tells us that the goat of this region abounds in the rugged coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook's Inlet, but is unknown on the outlying islands. Its preference is the glacial belt and snow-fields of the most broken country and the terraced sides of the precipitous cliffs. It is gregarious in habit being found in bands of from ten to fifty or more. From September until April the skin is in prime condition with an abundance of soft wool under a heavy covering of long coarse hair; but the hunting is only done in the autumn. To prepare for the plucking, the skin must be kept wet on the underside so it is moistened and rolled up for several days, thus loosening the hold of the fleece. With thumb and fingers of both hands the squaw, seated upon the ground, pushes the fleece from her, procuring by this process great patches of wool and hair. Then the hairs are plucked out and thrown away and the wool is ready to be spun. During the spinning the woman also sits upon the ground with legs outstretched, with the crude wool by her left side within easy reach. This she draws out with her left hand and feeds to her right, in the amount necessary to form the required size of thread. As it is received between the palm of the right hand and the right thigh, it is rolled from the body and falls to the side in loose, connected thread. This soft thread is next spun between the palm of the hand and the thigh to form a single tightly twisted strand; and by the same process two of these strands are rolled together to form the weft thread for the blanket. In technic the blanket is related to the last one described for it is a twine weaving, but a twilled twine as the two strand weft encloses two warps at a move and with each succeeding line of weft advances one warp giving the surface a twilled effect. It is interesting that the small blocks of design are woven separately something as a tapestry, and later the blocks are sewed together with a thread of sinew from the caribou or whale.

FIGURE 8.—A THIRD TYPE OF LOOM.

FIGURE 9.—NAVAJO LOOM.

The weaving from this region which most nearly approaches machine work in process of making is the dog-hair and goat's wool blanket. It is woven upon a loom of two revolving cylindrical beams, supported by upright posts at either end ([Figure 8]). The end of the warp thread is attached to a staying cord stretched from post to post about midway between the revolving beams. The warp then encircles the loom, catches under the staying cord, then turns and travels back to its starting point, there to catch under the staying cord and repeat the operation. The weft moves across the warps as in twilled cloth, over two, under two, with an advance of one warp at each line of weft. Dog's hair, duck down and goat's wool are the materials used, especially the latter. These materials are spun in two-ply thread twisted partly upon the thigh of the weaver and finished on a spindle.

Leaving this weaving area in western British Columbia we pass to the other locality of note in North America where primitive weaving is practised,—in southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Here the loom work is at a more advanced stage of development than that of the northern area, the weavers making use of a loom frame, sheds, healds, batten and an improvised shuttle. The Navajo Indians are the most skilled weavers north of Mexico and a description of their weaving is fairly typical of this area. As the warps are of soft pliable threads they must of necessity be stretched between two beams. These are suspended vertically if the weaving is to be of any great size, the distance between them being that of the proposed length of the blanket ([Figure 9]). The warp threads are not stretched across the beams with an oval movement but are laced over them, forming two sheds, the upper of which is held intact by means of the shed-rod, and the lower by a set of healds passing over a heald-rod. A wooden fork serves as a reed and a slender twig as a shuttle. Upon this twig is loosely wound from end to end the weft thread. The shuttle at one move crosses less than half of the warps as the batten—a flat stick of hard oak—is too short to open more than that length of the shed for the passage of the shuttle.

FIGURE 10.—HOPI BLANKET.

FIGURE 11.—HOPI WEAVING.

FIGURE 12.—MEXICAN SERAPE.

In [Figure 10] only a portion of a blanket from the Hopi Indians is shown, that the delicate design may be better seen. A number of Hopi patterns have this fine white line of tracery upon the dark background and it is this play of the fine line pattern on the fabric which is one of the chief beauties of Hopi weavings. The sparkle of white is even more brilliant in [Figure 11], another smaller weaving from the same people. They make constant use of the diagonal or twilled technic, a weave which requires that the warps be divided into four sheds, the upper supplied with a shed stick, the three lower with healds. The sheds are shifted in a variety of orders for the construction of different patterns.