Yeibichai Weavings Featuring Women Dancers
A look at the origins and early historical development of these secular Navajo weavings and their ceremonial themes.
A look at the origins and early historical development of these secular Navajo weavings and their ceremonial themes.
Yeibichai weavings constitute a small but highly collectible category of Navajo textiles. These weavings evoke scenes from the ninth and final night of the Nightway healing ceremony during which a succession of teams of masked dancers appear, impersonating male and female Yeis. In executing the carefully prescribed ritual dance movements, they call upon the Holy People to bestow good health on the patient and, by extension, on all those hundreds in attendance.
The Yeibichai dance is performed in front of a ceremonial hogan that has been built in a remote location near the patient’s home. At some distance away is a brush enclosure where the dancers don the sacred masks which have been ritually prepared by the medicine man. The ceremonially attired dance teams enter the firelit area in front of the hogan led by Talking God or Yeibichai, the grandfather of the Yeis, who carries his sacred Abert squirrel bag.
He is followed by six male and six female Yeis. The last participant is Water Sprinkler, who provides an element of comic relief by shaking a tattered fox pelt at the spectators.
In the 19th century, a Yeibichai dance team would consist entirely of men. The role of the female Yeis was assigned to teenage boys or young men of smaller stature who would let their down their hair and wear the appropriate rectangular female Yei masks, all the while dancing in their traditional male kilts. However, if there were not enough qualified younger men, one or more mature women might be invited to perform the female Yei roles. Today Yeibichai dance teams generally are made up of six men and six women.
To appreciate the origin of Yeibichai weavings, we need to step briefly back in history. At the time of the entrada into the Southwest, Spanish settlers observed that the Pueblo tribes had large numbers of seasonal ceremonial dances which were performed openly in the plazas of their adobe villages. The Navajo, by contrast, were a nomadic people who conducted their ceremonies in remote locations. Early ethnographers, in their ignorance, concluded that the Navajo had no religious practices.
The first person to observe and write about Navajo beliefs and ceremonies was Washington Matthews, a surgeon in the United States Army who was stationed at Fort Wingate near Gallup, New Mexico. His essay, The Mountain Chant (1887), was published in an annual report of the US Bureau of Ethnography and went relatively unnoticed. It was not until the publication of his book Navaho Legends (Houghton Mifflin, 1897) and more importantly his illustrated study of The Night Chant (Knickerbocker, 1902), that the broader American public became aware of the existence of Navajo healing rites and their corresponding sandpaintings.
This new awareness coincided with the “Indian Craze” which had emerged as an indirect result of the grandiose World Fairs held in Chicago in 1893 (400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World) and Saint Louis in 1904 (100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase) with their popular Native American exhibits. Americans began creating “Indian Rooms” in their homes to display their growing collections of Plains artifacts, Hopi katsina dolls, Pueblo pottery, Apache basketry and Navajo rugs.
With the appearance of Matthews’ books, some wealthy collectors became interested in acquiring Navajo weavings with sandpainting imagery, not realizing that the reproduction of sandpaintings in a permanent medium was strongly prohibited by tradition. In fact, the sandpaintings created during Navajo healing ceremonies were always ritually
destroyed before sunset.
Around 1910, an enterprising off-reservation trader near Farmington by the name of Dick Simpson was able to convince a talented local weaver to create a blanket featuring the Yei figure from Plate I of Matthews’ Navajo Legends. According to George Wharton James, in his book Indian Blankets & Their Makers (1914), this Yei blanket, when displayed on the trading post wall, created a tremendous uproar throughout the Navajo community. It was quickly removed and shipped to a Colorado collector who paid several hundred dollars for it; this occurred at a time when quality Navajo weavings of the same size (4 feet by 6 feet) were selling for $20. (In comparison: $100 in 1910 was about the equivalent of about $2,700 in 2020.)
Other traders, sensing great market opportunities, offered their best weavers significantly higher prices for blankets with ceremonial images. These women, however, were unwilling to incorporate Yeis in their weavings for fear of retribution, be it from the community or from the Holy People themselves. At the same time, eager to earn better money for their weavings, they developed an ingenious solution: to depict not the Yeis, but rather the Nightway dancers impersonating the Holy People.
Weaving a Yeibichai scene, or a portion thereof, was a true artistic challenge, since no photographs or drawings of the dance existed. Each weaver had to rely on her personal recollections of the ceremony and then try to re-create a corresponding image on her upright loom. As a result, the early Navajo Yeibichai weavings
demonstrate great diversity and a high degree of originality. The simplest and most easily replicable design consisted of a row of more or less identical male Yei dancers. However, the more talented weavers experimented with the inclusion of women performing as female Yeis.
Yeibichai weavings did not really make their appearance until after World War I. The ensuing two decades were the most creative and saw the emergence of a great variety of designs, as is evidenced in the illustrations accompanying this article. For more examples, see Valette and Valette, Navajo Weavings with Ceremonial Themes (Schiffer, 2017).
Weaving 1 is one of the few known early Yeibichai textiles featuring more than one team of dancers. Each of the two rows of alternating male and female Yeis is headed by Talking God, recognizable by his multi-feathered headdress. In spite of their relatively small stature, the dancers are portrayed in fine detail. The weaver has alternated the color of their attire, so that they stand out clearly against the brilliant red background. Feathers similar to those held by the female dancers are repeated in the top and bottom borders.
Weaving 2 depicts a Yeibichai dance team led by Talking God with his multi-feathered headdress; a diminutive Water Sprinkler brings up the rear. Given the constraints of her loom, the weaver was able to include only seven dancers: four male Yeis and three female Yeis. The scene is enclosed in a geometric border and decorated with numerous eagle feathers.
Weaving 3 presents the dance from a much more limited perspective. This small early Yeibichai weaving is unusual for its compact, detailed and generally accurate portrayal of both male and female dancers. The male Yeis are wearing the heavy first-phase concha belts made by Navajo silversmiths since the 1880s. The female Yei is wearing her traditional double manta dress and white sheepskin leggings. The star above the dancers and the darker rectangular background serve as a reminder that the ceremony takes place at night. In the early 20th century, swastikas, like those at the top of the weaving, were understood by American
collectors as symbols of good fortune; Navajos today interpreted them as the “Whirling Logs” central to one of the Nightway sandpaintings.
Weaving 4 also features a woman dancer in traditional attire with uplifted arms. The weaver has skillfully conveyed the serpentine movement of the line of dancers by presenting the individual members from different angles: Talking God and the first two dancers are facing forward, the next three dancers are in profile, and the last figure is again facing forward. The border features a geometric design found on prehistoric Pueblo pottery.
Weaving 5 is unique in that it shows all the male participants, including Water Sprinkler on the right and Talking God on the left, in white body paint. By portraying the first two dancers sideways with fox pelts hanging from their belts and representing all the men with raised feet, bent knees and with different arm positions, the weaver has created an impression of dynamic movement.
Very interestingly, weaving 6 includes two small girls holding onto the skirts of the women dancers, perhaps their mothers. This is a reminder that the Nightway includes an initiation ceremony where Navajo youngsters are introduced to the sacredness of the masks.
In almost all Yeibichai weavings, the dancers are depicted in a straight line as they are entering the dance area. Weaving 7 is extremely rare in that it
evokes the dancers performing in pairs. In addition, she has placed a fifth dancer sideways at the top of the weaving, possibly to focus on the moment when the lead dancer turns to take his position at the end of the line.
In weaving 8, all the male figures are wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts. This attire is unusual and would only be acceptable on especially cold winter nights.
Weaving 9 is a rare, if not unique, Yeibichai textile in that it depicts a traditional dance team where female Yeis are impersonated by men. As in the Clitso Dedman carving, the male and female Yei dancers, all in white body paint, hold their arms close to their chests. The only differentiating feature lies in their masks. The figure at the end of the line is not Water Sprinkler, but seldom seen Calling God with his multifeathered headdress.
Navajo weavings almost never contain symbols from both the spiritual (Navajo) world and the material (Anglo) world. In weaving 10, these elements have been combined to evoke two cultures with radically different concepts of life. The upper part of the textile, consisting of four female Yeis impersonated by men in white body paint and separated by otter guardians, symbolizes the Navajo culture. The Anglo culture is evoked in the lower section by five buildings
representing the vocational Indian boarding schools to which Navajo children were sent. The two black cars with their protruding radiator caps and exterior spare tires resemble the “Indian Detour” cars that the Fred Harvey Company used in the 1920s to transport groups of tourists across the Navajo Reservation to the Hopi mesas.
In conclusion, it should be noted that all Yeibichai weavings were created as art objects for sale to Anglo collectors. Although they contain ceremonial imagery, the Navajos never considered them as sacred objects. However, as a sign of respect, they should not be placed on the floor, but rather displayed on a wall where they can be viewed and admired.