Word: navajoized
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...birth of a baby girl, a Navajo woman was supposed to find a spider web and to rub it on the child's arm so that her fingers would never tire of weaving. When the girl grew of age, she began weaving between two upright trees, and she created her patterns without any kind of preliminary design. The magic tradition, according to Spider Man's message, "is yours to work with and to use following your own wishes...
...Navajo, a blanket was a second skin. He wore it, slept under it and hung it across the door of his hogan, both as a defense against wind and rain and as an object of delight. Its geometric patterns, rarely repeated, expressed the individuality of the creator and also, according to how it was draped, that of the wearer. Cumulatively, in a strange way, the blankets tell a whole history of the tribe and of its conflicts with the white...
...earliest blankets that survive date from the late 18th century, mostly coarsely woven fragments that are striped in the natural sheep's wool colors of brown and white. Some of these were found by anthropologists in Canon del Muerto ("Massacre Cave"), where a number of Navajo families were slaughtered by Spanish soldiers in 1805. The relics lay undisturbed for years because the Navajos feared spiritual contamination by the dead...
Hunger. As the Navajos came increasingly in contact with roving traders, from whom they first acquired flannel-like red bayeta cloth in the 1830s, they began to weave more complex textiles known as "chief pattern blankets." To their traditional stripes they added squares, diamonds and zigzags. They worked proudly and boldly. "Even in early plain stripe blankets," say Berlant and Kahlenberg, "Navajo weaving had an aggressiveness that set it apart from its Pueblo model. [These blankets] have a force and color that is full and exuberant but always under control...
With the coming of the railroad in 1880, trading posts sprang up throughout the Navajo territory. Traders supplied German-made Saxony yarns and synthetic dyes, and the Indians developed a series of new designs in which intense colors were juxtaposed against one another. The primary motif became a radiating diamond pattern of such bright colors that the blankets were called "eye-dazzlers." Pictorial representations-figures of horses and cows, bows and arrows, houses and trains-also came into fairly general use, thus breaking the long tradition of pure abstraction...