"The greatest charm, however, of these primitive fabrics, is the unrestrained freedom shown by the weaver in her treatment of primitive conventions. To the checkered emblem of the rainbow she adds sweeping rays of color, typifying sunbeams; below the many-angled cloud group, she inserts random pencil lines of rain; or she softens the rigid meander, signifying lightning, with graceful interlacing, and shaded tints. Not confining herself alone to these traditional devices, she invents her own methods to introduce curious, realistic figures of common objects,--her grass brush, wooden weaving fork, a stalk of corn, a bow, an arrow, or a plume of feathers from a dancer's mask. Thus, although the same characteristic styles of weaving and decoration are general, yet none of the larger designs are ever reproduced with mechanical exactness; each fabric carries some distinct variation, some suggestion of the occasion of its making, woven into form as the fancy arose."
I have thus quoted from an unpublished manuscript of one of the greatest Navaho authorities of the United States--Mr. A. M. Stephen--in order to confirm my own oft-repeated and sometimes challenged statements that the Navaho weaver finds in nature her designs, and that in most of her better blankets there is woven "some suggestion of the occasion of its making."
This imitative faculty is, _par excellence_, the controlling force in aboriginal decoration so far as I know the Amerind of the Southwest.
With many of the younger women, submission to the imitative faculty in weaving is becoming an injury instead of a blessing. Instead of looking to nature for their models, or finding pleasure in the religious symbolism of the older weavers, they have sunk into a lazy, apathetic disregard, and they slavishly and carelessly imitate the work of their elders. This is growingly true, I am sorry to say, with both basket makers and blanket weavers. On my recent trips I have come in contact with many fair specimens, both in basketry and blanketry, and when I have asked for an explanation of the design the reply has been: "Me no sabe! I make 'em all same old basket, or all same old Navaho blanket." Here is perversion of the true imitative faculty which sought its pure and original inspiration from nature.