Gladys A. Reichard - Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters

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title	:	Spider Woman : A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters
author	:	Reichard, Gladys Amanda.
publisher	:	University of New Mexico
isbn10 | asin	:	0826317936
print isbn13	:	9780826317933
ebook isbn13	:	9780585211404
language	:	English
subject	Navajo Indians, Navajo textile fabrics.
publication date	:	1997
lcc	:	E99.N3R4 1997eb
ddc	:	746.1/089/972
subject	:	Navajo Indians, Navajo textile fabrics.

Page i Spider Woman

Page ii A Loom Stands

Page iii Spider Woman A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters Gladys A. Reichard Introduction by Louise Lamphere "Spider Woman instructed the Navajo women how to weave on a loom which Spider Man told them how to make. The crosspoles were made of sky and earth cords, the warp sticks of sun rays, the healds of rock crystal and sheet lightning. The batten was a sun halo, white shell made the comb. There were four spindles; one a stick of zigzag lightning with a whorl of cannel coal; one a stick of flash lightning with a whorl of turquoise; a third had a stick of sheet lightning with a whorl of abalone; a rain streamer formed the stick of the fourth, and its whorl was withe shell." (Navajo Legend) University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

Page iv 1934 by Gladys A. Reichard. Introduction 1997 by the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. Second printing, 1998. Reichard, Gladys Amanda 18931955. Spider woman : a story of Navajo weavers and chanters / Gladys A. Reichard. p. cm. Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1934. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8263-1793-6 1. Navajo Indians. 2. Navajo textile fabrics. I. Title. E99.N3R41997 746-1'089'972dc20 96-43353 CIP

Page v Introduction Gladys Reichard opens Spider Woman, her ethnography of Navajo family life in the 1930s, with an account of her first visit to White-Sands (S ligai*). She has come with Roman Hubbell, the trader at Hubbell's Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona, known in her book by his Navajo name, Old Mexican's Son [Naakaii sn biye'], to locate a family to help her learn to weave. The picture she paints of the extended family residence is that of an outsider, allowing the reader to view Navajo life through "white eyes." There is the cluck of a hen giving herself a "dust bath," a horde of mongrel dogs, and a description of a large dome-shaped "hut" with a closed door and a lock hanging loose in its hasp. Hubbell and Reichard find a woman sitting at her loom weaving "a dull thump thump, the sound of the comb pounding firmly, regularly, and rapidly the yarn which is becoming a Navajo rug" (p. 2). Hubbell and Reichard know that they should "stand respectfully at the doorway for a time" while the woman continues to weave, "thumping her comb, as if we did not exist, her way of greeting us respectfully." This is the first indication of a different set of culturally prescribed behaviors that Reichard will introduce to us, Anglo-American readers of the book, who begin as unfamiliar with Navajo culture as Reichard presumably is. As this chapter and the next continue, we are introduced to the members of the familyRed Point or Miguelito who is a Navajo chanter or singer (hataalii*), and his wife, Maria Antonia, and their married

Page vi daughters, Atlnaba (the weaver described earlier), Marie (who is to be Reichard's teacher), and a third daughter known as "Yikadezba's mother" (who does not live in the White Sands residence group). The next Monday morning Reichard moves into the family storage dugout, which provides a cool room with enough light for weaving and a place for her bedroll and trunk. Soon we learn that Atlnaba is married to Curley's Son, and Marie is married to his brother Tom. Both sons-in-law avoid and never "see" their mother-in-law, a custom which some Navajo continued to practice until the 1960s, but which is beginning to change in the 1930s as Reichard describes in her book (see pp. 13536). During the afternoon, Tom constructs a loom for Reichard, and Marie helps her to string the warp threads. By the end of the day, Reichard sits back to enjoy her surroundings, an Easterner who never loses her enthusiasm for the beauty of the Navajo Reservation. A letter to Elsie Clews Parsons echoes her feelings for the Southwest as described on that first day at Red Point's residence group (pp. 1314): "I want you to know that there is a kind of unexplainable balm about the Southwestyou doubtless know it already. I found it last summer and needed it even more this. There is a peace which comes to us at evening when the air is cool and the sun sets, the mountains become purple rose and bluewe are high in cedar and pinon country, a most comfortable settingand night settles down with the sheep in the corral and the stars and the moon and the air. Most people would hate the quietit is quietbut I love it. It is the sort of thing some writers (a few) have gotten across, but somehow needs experiencing" (ECP: GR to ECP, 7/6/30). From her early contacts with these Navajo, we see Reichard's relation with Red Point's family change, and with it our knowledge of Navajo daily life. By the end of the book we have shared the ceremonies that Red Point has performed for family members, trips to the trading post, Na-

Page vii vajo tribal council meetings, sheep dips, and the deaths of Red Point's wife and youngest daughter.

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