The Navaho And Hopi Blanket Weavers
What a marvelous art is that of weaving, and how much the human race of today owes to the patient endeavors of the "little brown woman" of the past for the perfection to which she brought this,--one of the most primitive of the arts.

Blanketry was a necessary outcome of basketry. The use of flexible twigs for baskets readily suggested the use of pliable fibres for textiles; and there is little question that almost simultaneously with the first rude baskets the first textile fabrics made their appearance.

Whence the art had its origin we do not know. But it is a matter of record that in this country, three hundred and fifty years ago, when the Spanish first came into what is now United States territory, they found the art of weaving in a well advanced stage among the domestic and sedentary Pueblo Indians, and the wild and nomadic Navahos. Scientists who have given the question careful study, hold that the cotton of these blankets was grown by these Arizona Indians from time immemorial, and they also used the tough fibres of the yucca and agave leaves and the hairs of various wild animals, either separately or with the cotton. Their processes of weaving were exactly the same then as they are today, there being but slight difference between the methods followed before the advent of the whites and afterward. Hence, in a study of the Indian blanket, as it is made today, we are approximately nearly to the pure aboriginal method of pre-Columbian times.