Name Marie Begay
Age Late 60s
Vocation Traditional hand-weaving
Number of sheep owned 80
Where Marie gets her wool Most of her wool comes
from her own sheep, though she trades wool with family members to
broaden her color choices.
Yarn needed for a
typical rug Marie’s rugs approach “tapestry” quality,
running 50 to 60 weft threads per inch. The rug now on her loom,
roughly 3 by 5 feet, could well use a quarter-mile of yarn.
Favorite flour “Blooms in Your Oven”
and “White as Snow” say the sturdy cotton sacks of White Rose flour
lying around Marie’s house. Marie and other weavers re-use the
sacks to store wool or deliver rugs.
It’s a small sign in
a big landscape. “Burnham” is all it says. On a gray morning of
ground blizzards, a casual traveler could easily miss it.
Not that casual travelers are frequent in January on U.S. 491 north
out of Gallup, N.M. — and not that Mary Jane and Jackson Clark are
casual travelers. The two, mother and son, have traveled this
northeastern corner of the Navajo Nation for decades buying rugs
for Toh-Atin, their Indian arts gallery in Durango, Colo.
Today, they are visiting Marie Begay, a particular favorite of
theirs because of her fine work. Marie follows the old ways of
shearing, carding, spinning and weaving wool from her own sheep. To
reach her home requires a long drive on rutted roads past the
roofless ruins of the old Burnham trading post, past a Navajo
chapter house, through miles of treeless winter landscape. Finally,
there on the left is the icy track to the small gray house Marie’s
husband, Matthew, built for her and their six children.
Heat radiates from the Begays’ new pot-bellied coal stove this cold
morning. Marie’s daughter, Shawnda, wears jeans, but her mother,
dark hair pulled back from her plump face, wears a long skirt, and
her plaid shirt is fastened with a fine turquoise pin. “I lack the
patience for weaving,” admits Shawnda. But she patiently
translates, helping questions in English make their way into Navajo
and bringing the answers back again in English.
Marie
brings out an album of family photographs, and explains that her
mother died young, so her grandmother taught her to weave. Her
grandmother was a strong and striking woman, judging by a sepia
photograph labeled “born 1870, died 1976.” When she finished a rug,
she’d ride off to the trading post on horseback and bring home
gunnysacks full of supplies.
Marie
began to weave when she was 9, her first piece no bigger than the
photo album. Though she never went to school, she made sure to send
all her children. Daughters Theresa and Julia both learned to
weave, but now Theresa is an accountant and Julia is a teacher.
Granddaughter Brandy has an artistic streak but, 13 years old and
living in Albuquerque, is less interested in weaving than in
playing soccer.
Marie demonstrates the laborious stages
of making a rug. In a small concrete-block building east of her
house, warmed by another pot-bellied stove, stands a traditional
vertical Navajo loom. Marie has begun a large piece in her
trademark browns, grays, deep black, and the snowy white she gets
by washing wool with alkali. Sacks of wool sheared from the Begays’
sheep, rough and dirty, are stacked near sacks of cleaned wool,
carded wool and handspun yarn. Marie uses wood-handled carders to
transform unruly curls into airy fiber she can spin. She spins on
her right side, one hand turning the long wooden spindle against
her leg as the other hand draws out thin strands of wool.
The piece now on the loom is one Marie began around Christmas. Its
design was entirely complete in her head before she sat down to
weave. It will take her about a month to finish and some days after
that for her hands to heal from the work.
Her weaving
sells for more now than when she began — but then again, she notes
wryly, $10 used to buy a lot more. “My mother loves Wal-Mart!” says
Shawnda, so they drive to the Wal-Mart in Farmington to buy the
White Rose flour, clothes, glasses and shoes Marie’s weaving earns.
Electricity arrived at Marie’s house just six years ago.
Today, community colleges teach Navajo weaving, and entrepreneurial
weavers sell their work on the Internet. But the beauty of Marie’s
work sets it apart. It continues a tradition of craftsmanship all
the more remarkable for the remote and rugged setting in which it
arose — and all the more rare in today’s world of computers and
crowded Wal-Marts.
The author is a freelance
writer based in Denver. This story was funded by a grant from the
McCune Charitable Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Warp, weft and Wal-Mart.
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