essays:

A Chilkat Weaving Adventure

Tlingit Textiles

The Essence of Chilkat Weaving
 

poetry:

Five Weavers Gathered

 Follow the Dream

Emmons, an amateur historian and avid collector of Northwest Art and ceremonial objects, wrote in the late 1800's that within a generation, Chilkat weaving would be dead because none of the younger people wished to learn.

I took Emmons' opinion as a personal challenge. It was in the summer of 1992.  Chilkat weaving was not dead yet, and I knew several people who wanted to learn Chilkat weaving as much as I did.  Four of us --- myself from Sutton, Alaska, Ann Smith from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Donna Cranmer from Alert Bay, British Columbia, and Darlene Bezezakoff from Juneau, Alaska, were about to prove Emmons wrong. We gathered for a month-long Chilkat weaving apprenticeship under Master weaver Clarissa Hudson in Juneau, Alaska.  We had quite an adventure...
 
 

The looms at night are discreetly covered to keep them safe from stray and wandering influences.  At daylight, they are uncovered, a new awakening for babies slowly growing under our careful attention.
Working on the weaving, trying to capture with our body/spirits the rhythm of Jennie Thlunaut's fingering, hours slip by as we twine soft wool into eyebrows and eyes, noses and mouths.  Slowly the ghost life of the sketches comes alive under our fingers.

We think of the chain of weavers that led to us, and we solemnly accept the challenge to become the links of this generation to bring new weavings to life.  We wonder at the joining of rough textured bark with the soft wool.  we marvel at the fluidity of the technique.  We realize that the designs we are weaving are echoes of the designs carved in wood --- totem poles and house screens and rattles and staffs.  The designs are blends of these three-dimensional designs and paintings --- like the ones on leather dance aprons and bentwood boxes.  But these designs have a character and life of their own --- supple and drapeable, a melding of dimensions.  We think of the future and the past, and both are distilled by the form and theory of Chilkat weaving.

The actual weaving flows like the tide.  It has an internal logic, a rightness of its own.  There is a transference of life force energy --- moment by moment --- as we breathe a portion of our essence into the weavings.  It has been said that Chilkat weaving holds the heart of Tlingit culture.  As a weaver, I can agree that my weavings do hold my heart.  Our weavings will go to those we love and we weave dreams of power for them as our fingers follow the patterns of our culture, flowing through our fingers from the past.
 

Chilkat weavers live in a different time-warp from the mainstream of reality.  The entire process, from gathering and preparing the bark of the cedar tree to the laborious task of removing the soft under-down of the mountain goat wool and then spinning the two together, an inch by inch, takes time.  Time when we travel back to the past and our fingers become the fingers of all the spinners that preceded us.   We find that there is no way to hurry the process.  There is no way to improve it.  The long-ago spinners brought the technique to the peak of perfection and we strive to do as well as they.  We had all spent months preparing our wool for weaving, riding the time-tide into the past.

Then the tide turned and we gathered together to begin the weaving.  Designing our patterns, measuring and lashing header cords to the loom bar, hanging warps --- our insides a flutter of excitement as we anticipate the next time-warp shift.  As we begin to weave, the sounds of the city fade away, the awareness of the third floor apartment we are crowded into fades away.  The only link to solid reality is the raucous conversation of the ravens across the street in the graveyard, and the wool under our fingers.

Unfettered, our spirits travel through time thinking of Raven, of Mink, Of Sisiutl.  We entertain in our minds the clans from ages past, and the nieces and grandchildren of clans to come.  Our minds travel to our far away homes and to those we love, that we have left behind, and those that have gone before us across the sea of death.  We carefully clear our mind of all that is painful, all that is negative.  We only want to weave love and strength into our weavings.  Sometimes we grin foolishly at the intersection of threads that form a shape --- just so.  Delighting in the logic that discovered how to weave a perfect circle on the surface of right-angled threads.

Focusing too tightly, a sharp pain in the back of the neck tells us to look out and gaze at the far distance for a moment.  Then we flow back into the present like small rippling waves in the tide.  The enduring stateliness of the mountain peaks in the distance seep into our beings.  We have a drink of water or a cup of tea.  We won't eat till after noonday.  A full belly distracts the body from the time-tide.  A few stretches and wiggles, rubbing our eyes, then back to the weaving.  Sometimes, overnight, our vision of the designs we are birthing clarifies, and we spend hours doing backwards weaving -- undoing what we did the day before.  Sometimes we lose ourselves in the flow of rightness, and we forget to stop.

We immerse ourselves totally and completely into our weaving.  Weaving our hearts.  Weaving our lives.  Weaving our culture.  Our fingers twining the tide and the seasons, darkness and light.  Twining the trees and the mountains.  Taking the spirit of the mountain goat --- freely traveling in seemingly inaccessible places --- and putting its power into our weaving.  Taking the spirit of the cedar tree --- aromatic and strong, enduring through the seasons, rooted in place for generations --- and putting that spirit in our weaving.  The colors we weave with are hand-dyed.  Black for the spirit, nourished in secret blue for the water that brings us life, bits of yellow scintillating through our weavings, like sunbeams.

We weave beyond the boundaries of time, dedicating ourselves to bring this weaving into the future.  Dedicating ourselves to not only learn, but teach.  We are happy.  We are weavers. l We lived generations of summers all in one month.
 

©1996 Suzi Vaara Williams