TOADLENA
It was amazing to Charles Bloom how tight the Navajo nation’s social connections were, even with 200,000 tribal members. It only took a half-hour walk down Gallup’s old main street and following the leads from two Indian arts-and-crafts stores before directions to Rachael’s family were located.
The weavers of the Yellowhorse family were well known and sought after by high-end textile collectors, so all the Indian art dealers knew where the family lived. Yellowhorse’s maternal side was Bear Clan, and those weavers had made fantastic chocolate-brown colored weavings in the tradition of the Toadlena/Two Grey Hills style for almost 100 years. Toadlena/Two Grey Hills weavings are unique to the reservation and have a very specific look. The rugs are almost always natural handspun wool from sheep the individual weaving families raise. The sheep that have the best wool and colors are highly prized by the weaving families. The colors can range from white to gray, brown, very dark brown, and camel color. The weavers spin and card their own wool to give each weaving a unique one-of-a-kind color composition, but always with natural colors. Sometime in the 1920s the Bear Clan started to use the darker colors in their weavings, even dyeing the brown with piñon pitch from local scrubby pines to give the color a very dark composition. The colors and patterns were passed down through the generations of Bear Clan weavers, making them very recognizable to dealers. This is important since the rugs were never signed and weavings that have an attribution bring more money, especially if they are as tight and well designed as the Bear Clan pieces. Unfortunately, in the last generation of the Bear Clan, none of the girls had taken up the art of Navajo rug weaving.
There was still one Bear Clan grandmother, Ethel Sherman, who wove, but she was in her late 80s and one rug trader had heard she had just passed. The last few rugs she had produced were small 2 X 3-foot rugs. Her granddaughter was Rachael Yellowhorse, who was very talented but, like her late brother Willard, chose a different form of art: for Rachael it was sculpture. Grandmother Ethel, as she was called by her grandkids, had hoped to improve Rachael’s spinning and weaving techniques but her granddaughter was too busy to work much on her skills. Rachael was a teacher and active in the politics of her people. She also had family responsibilities. This was a new phenomenon for women to be interested in the world of Navajo politics as, like in the bilagaana world, the Navajo were changing.
Rachael Yellowhorse taught art class at Newcomb High School near Toadlena and was still making her own art, according to the well-informed dealer at Turpins.
Toadlena is one of the two trading posts in the area known for Two Grey Hills weavings, a grand old post still actively buying and selling the finest of the Two Grey Hills weavings. Rachael had grown up at the post, coming to the old red-rock building almost every weekend with her grandmother Ethel. Ethel Sherman, who was Rachael’s maternal grandmother, lived very close to Toadlena so she decided to use the trading post as her base. Tourists would come and watch as Ethel spent hours at the old pine loom her husband of 60-plus years had made when they were first married. She would progress on the weaving an inch or so on a good day. Ethel would often get the rug sold before it was ever finished to some enchanted tourist. Half the money she received for the rug went to the owner of the trading post. For his half, he allowed Ethel free access to the post and his customers and he would handle the paper work and negotiation on price. Any tips were all Ethel’s.
Tourists often wanted a photo of Rachael and Ethel. “Get a photo of real Indian weaving rug,” Ethel would tell them in her broken English and then charge $1. There are hundreds of photos of Ethel Sherman and Rachael Yellowhorse and occasionally her brother Willard next to one of Ethel’s weavings floating around the world. Many times the tourist would send a photo back to Ethel, who was never shy to ask if she could get one. Ethel had better photographic records of her weavings and her two grandchildren growing up than any of the other weavers on the reservation. The Yellowhorses, like almost all traditional Navajos, didn’t own a camera.
Willard had told Charles about his early experiences as a “post kid” and how the interactions with international tourists who visited Toadlena changed his perspective. On some level, it allowed him to explore being a painter who didn’t just paint “Indian imagery.”
What Charles could gather from the Gallup storeowners was Rachael Yellowhorse had never married. She apparently had been serious with a white man, who had taught at the local high school, but her grandparents disapproved and she had ended it. All the traders in Gallup had hoped Rachael Yellowhorse would take up weaving like her ancestors. As a young girl she had made a few exceptional weavings and obviously had the talent.
Hearing she was still single and had at least considered one white guy gave Bloom hope. Tomorrow, Charles Bloom would be on a mission to find a girl whom he had originally seen in a 20-year-old faded color photograph of a great Two Grey Hills weaving made by the famous weaver Ethel Sherman. And he would begin delving deeper into the mystery of why Willard Yellowhorse had seemingly forsaken Navajoland, severing ties with his family, his culture, and the influences that had inspired his art.