Investing in the future of Navajo art - Brief Article

An Arizona trading post weaves history into the 21st century

* With beauty all around me, I walk. Words from the Navajo Night Chant, heart of an ancient healing ceremony, resonate in memory as I wander through Arizona's Hubbell Trading Post. All around me: Inch-long fetishes, exquisite microsculptures of bears and badgers. Squash-blossom necklaces, their turquoise pips exploding from silver shells. Hand-woven rugs with patterns so intricate that if you stare too long you could fall into the geometry and never find a way out.

The pine floor creaks with each step, reminding me how deep history runs here. The post has operated without interruption since John Lorenzo Hubbell opened it in 1878; it became a national historic site in 1967. In one room, Navajos buy everyday necessities: work gloves, ropes, cornflakes. In two others, visitors shop and jaws drop at both beauty and its price.

"Is this $75?" asks a tourist, squinting at a small Hopi pot. At the answer--"No, $750"--his eyes widen.

Bill Malone, a friendly 60-year-old in black cowboy boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt, runs the trading operation from a cubicle cluttered by paperwork, draped with rugs, and overseen by a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt--once a Hubbell guest. Malone stumbled onto the reservation 40 years ago, married a Navajo named Minnie Goodluck, and now negotiates with the artists in their language. He pays them two-thirds of the retail price up front.

A high school-age girl, beaming, comes in with her first rug, the size of a place mat. Malone buys it and snaps a Polaroid of the young weaver with her treasure. "Ideally everything you buy would be a masterpiece," he says. "But in a trading post, you have to cut back your expectations a bit. You have young girls just learning their trade and grandmothers who are maybe a little past their prime. But if you don't buy from them and keep them going, they won't be around to teach the next generation."

It is an investment in the future of beauty. Weaving, the diadem of Navajo art, is endangered. "When I was growing up, we didn't have electricity," weaver Brenda Spencer says. "Now all the kids have TV and Play-Stations. It's hard for them to develop the patience for weaving with all the modern entertainment and distractions."

A 4- by 6-foot woolen masterpiece requires three months of a patient artist's life and roughly $7,500 of the buyer. Do the math. It's a bargain.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Sunset Publishing Corp.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group