Rugs from the Four Corners

Keith Mulvihill has an article in The New York Times about the Diné:

According to Navajo creation stories, the first holy people passed through three worlds— Black, Blue, and Yellow— before settling here, in the White, or Glittering, World. They emerged through a giant reed and, shortly after, established the four sacred mountains that mark the boundaries of the Navajo homeland, an area that extends far beyond the present-day Navajo Nation. Driving on Route 12, just south of Window Rock, Arizona, the capital city of the Navajo Nation, I felt as if I was passing from one world into another. The Green World— a landscape carpeted with shimmering sage bushes and dotted with plump piñon and juniper trees— gave way to a Red World dominated by ruddy, sandy soil. The setting sun inflamed the rust-colored rock to a spellbinding intensity. A glittering world indeed.
The Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles (about the size of West Virginia) over a large chunk of Arizona, part of New Mexico and a swath of Utah. More than 250,000 Navajos, or Diné (the People), as they call themselves, live in Diné Bikéya, or the Navajo Land. For anyone seeking to learn more about this country’s largest native population, there are ample opportunities to spend time with the Navajo.
On a spring evening I relished just such a chance. I had made arrangements to spend the night at Mae Wallace’s family hogan, about seven miles east of the tiny town of Granada, Arizona. While most Navajos live in more modern dwellings, many also maintain a hogan, a traditional eight-sided log home.
I arrived late in the afternoon and before dinner I took a walk around the sprawling property with Mrs. Wallace’s daughter-in-law Joanne George, 48. We walked past gaping caves set in sandstone cliffs before reaching a tiny cluster of ancient ruins. When we finished, we strolled over to a small house to meet members of the family. “Do you know how to make fry bread?” Mrs. Wallace, 73, asked me as she and her sister Isabel Mitchell, 74, prepared dinner for the family. She stretched a dinner-plate-size disk of dough in her hands and placed it in a cast-iron skillet filled with hot oil. Sitting around a large table, we ate Navajo tacos: fry bread piled high with pinto beans, chopped lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and shredded cheese. After a couple of hours of chatting, I retired to the hogan. Inside the fifty-year-old structure, which has no electricity or running water, I found two twin beds, a small couch, and an upholstered rocking chair all draped with colorful blankets. I was kept company by a battery-powered radio tuned to KTNN (“The Voice of the Navajo Nation”). The announcer spoke Navajo, and the tunes varied between country and western and traditional American Indian songs.
The next day, to see how the Navajo have adapted traditional crafts to modern commerce, I visited the Toadlena Trading Post, which is celebrating its centennial this year. The post sits at the end of a dirt road on the eastern slope of the Chuska Mountains, which straddle the Arizona-New Mexico border. Trading posts have a longstanding history in the Navajo Nation, gaining prominence in the 1880s after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which served as a resource for all types of goods. Many of the posts, integral to the Navajo economy for decades, continue to play a vital role in the lives of the locals. “When we tell people we are a trading post, they get this vision of a roadside stand that sells rubber tomahawks,” said Mark Winter, who has owned the Toadlena store since 1997. Inside, a small grocery market adjoins rooms overflowing with Navajo rugs— mesmerizing geometric designs made with undyed, hand-spun wool in shades of brown, white, black and gray in what is known as the Two Grey Hills style. Small rugs start around $125; larger rugs around $1,800.
Residents stop by the post daily, which is a community center as much as a convenience store. There is also a museum displaying local works as well as rugs dating to the early 20th century.
A wider variety of textiles is on display at the monthly Crownpoint Rug Auction, which started in 1968. On the night I visited, more than one hundred people filled the cafeteria at the Crownpoint Elementary School. The auction gets about two hundred or more rugs each month, said Christina Ellsworth, the event organizer. Sales moved at a swift clip, punctuated by cheers for high-selling items. Prices were $300 to $2,000.
Interested in learning more about the craft, I arranged for a weaving lesson with a master weaver, Jennie Slick, 58, who lives near Houck, Arizona near the New Mexico border. Inside her home, Ms. Slick, who has been weaving for more than thirty years, had four looms with rugs in various stages of completion. She demonstrated her technique on a three-foot-wide-by-five-foot-high loom. Her fingers plucked at vertical strands of the warp, moving quickly as she threaded colored lengths of tightly spun wool. Her weaving fork gently tapped at the tapestry as she went, a familiar heartbeat in many Navajo homes. My fingerwork was considerably less nimble, but after an hour or so I fell into a slow rhythm, producing a few inches of stripes of dark brown and white.
Hiking trails and ancient footpaths are everywhere here, but the Navajo Nation requires that hikers trek in the company of a guide. In Canyon de Chelly, I hiked to the base of Spider Rock, named for Spider Woman, one of the holy people, who taught the Navajo how to weave. My guide, Kalvin Watchman, 44, lived in the canyon as a youngster and filled my head with tales during our half day together. Likewise, the two-and-a-half-mile walk down to the spectacular ruins of Betatakin in the Navajo National Monument was enhanced by the stories and history we heard from our guide, Cassandra Parrish. “I think hearing stories from people who grew up here gives a much clearer perspective about how the Navajo lived and survived here,” Mr. Watchman said. “Everything I know I learned from our elders. A lot of this stuff you really can’t read about in a book.”

Rico says he got to see a lot of this stuff first hand when his then-wife got seriously into weaving; there was this Navajo rug in the Two Grey Hills style he should have bought, years ago, but foolishly didn't, and he has regretted it ever since...