STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

TahNibaa Naataanii was serving in the U.S. Navy in the Philippines when Spider Woman and Spider Man visited her.

“You are a weaver,” the Dine deities reminded her.

“We believe Spider Man and Spider Woman brought weaving as a gift to us. There in the Philippines,  they visited me and reminded me who I was,” she said. “I touched some mats there and realized ‘I am a weaver,’ and I took that as a sign that I should come home. I realized I needed to hear the sound of weaving, the clicking that reminds me of rain…I needed to hear the heartbeat.”

Naataanii returned to the United States and resumed the weaving that has stretched through five generations in her family. In 2022 her weavings earned her the 2022 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow award. And on Saturday she told her story for those attending the Trailing of the Sheep Festival’s Sheep Tales Gathering at the Argyros in Ketchum.

The Navajo weaver said it was her grandmother who marked her for a weaver. She was a toddler when her parents told her to stop playing with her grandmother’s brown wool.

But her grandmother said, “No, let her play. I’m going to name her TahNibaa Atlo hii gii,” which means “going into battle with weaving.”

“My grandmother massaged me with needle tools and sang weaving songs. I am here today because of the prayers of my grandmother,” Naataanii said.

Naataanii wove her first rug at 7 and soon she was selling weavings to purchase her school clothes.

She now lives in her ancestral homeland Table Mesa in the Shiprock, N.M., area where she weaves, using wool from the heritage Navajo Churro sheep she raises.

Navajo Churro sheep were almost wiped out during the Navajo Wars in 1863 when soldier Kit Carson instructed his troops to destroy the Navajo crops and livestock. But a few were hidden away in caves, enabling the sheep to continue to today.

The rams have four horns.  They come in as many as 16 colors, including cream. They’re small compared to many sheep and have a long-fleeced outer coat that can sometimes reach 12 inches in length.

They lamb in January so the lambs are mature enough by June that they won’t be flighty when they go to the mountains to escape the heat.

“The sheep know you, just as dogs know you,” Naataanii said. “They’re very lean, very tasty meat.”

Naataanii has 17 sheep. But she is feeling the effects of climate change, which is causing desertification. Logging and mining have also impacted the environment as, she says, they harvest massive ponderosa pine trees to build things in Hollywood and ash and smoke from smokestacks kill surrounding vegetation.

“They’ve destroyed the ecology. The rains don’t come as much,” she said. “Having sheep is hard work….but you hang onto your sheep despite all the hardships. Sheep are life and ceremonially essential.”

Navajo weaving is made with a lot of spirituality, Naataanii said. The top of weavings typically represents the sky; the bottom, the earth.

“The weaving has a spirit,” said Naataanii who shears her own sheep. “And the arts I make are very important to our culture.”

Naataanii weaves shawls, hats, ponchos and blankets. At home she works on a traditional 11-foot loom in her living room. When she’s traveling, she takes a smaller portable loom. In the mountains, she said,  women often make looms using the trees they find there.

“Once I sit at my loom, that’s the place I should be,” she said. “We have many weavers, but not so many that sit at the loom every day.”