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A Literary Farewell

A Recipe for Good Policy

Sacred Treasures

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Behind the scenes Jennifer McLerran oversees the Native American collection at Ohio University’s Kennedy Museum of Art. Photo: Gary Kirksey

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Preserving Heritage Steven Begay of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department serves as a consultant to institutions and museums with Navajo collections, including the Kennedy Museum of Art. Photo: Monty Roessel

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Visitors to the Kennedy Museum of Art will have several chances to view the Navajo collection in the coming year. The museum currently features selections from the Native American collection in its educational gallery, an ongoing exhibit. This fall, the museum will host an exhibit on Navajo code talkers from September 3 to November 24, as well as the show Multiple Impressions: Native American Artists and the Print, which will run September 10 to December 1.

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Sacred Treasures
A curator connects a Native American collection to its cultural roots
By Andrea Gibson

For years, few scholars knew what had become of this rare and precious Native American artifact, but Jennifer McLerran unexpectedly discovered it last year in the collection of a fledgling art museum in rural Ohio. The gigantic textile, stretching 9 feet high by 10 feet wide, was the last creation of famous Navajo weaver and medicine man Hosteen Klah.

Klah was the first person to design wool textiles with the religious icons of sandpaintings, which are used in ceremonies performed to heal the sick. Though artisans have recorded such sacred images in weavings for the past 100 years, the practice continues to spark controversy in the Native American community.

Klah’s weaving, which depicts sky images from the Shooting Way chant, reflects a classic sandpainting textile design. Each quadrant of the massive brown piece is splashed with blocks of primary color to represent the sky at various seasons and times of day: the cerulean blue of a summer afternoon, a swatch of black night dappled with constellations. Figures representing the sun, moon, and wind appear in the center.

Klah had almost completed the weaving when he died in 1937. His nieces, whom he had taught to weave sandpainting textiles, completed the piece, selling it to pay for his funeral. Prolific Native American art collector Edwin L. Kennedy later purchased the rug, which became one of 2,000 artifacts and artworks he trusted to Ohio University. His alma mater created a museum to house the unique collection in 1996.

Of the 108 Navajo sandpainting textiles in Ohio University’s Kennedy Museum of Art, McLerran admits with a shy smile that the Klah is her favorite.

“It’s more the history of the piece itself — the fact that it’s the last one,” says McLerran, the museum’s curator.
McLerran, at the time a university scholar of women’s studies and Native American art, first stumbled upon the Klah piece during a visit to the museum. The museum staff were so impressed with her interest in this rare item that they invited her to guest curate a show about the weaver in early 2001. She then discovered the museum’s entire trove of more than 100 Navajo sandpainting textiles, possibly the largest such collection in the world, as well as a mysterious trunk of feathers, stones, and buckskins. McLerran did some digging, and found that debate still brewed in the Navajo community about the display of such textiles. And recent legislation on the possession of Native American remains and artifacts could require the museum to return the items in the trunk to the Navajo people. The contents, McLerran suspected, likely were sacred objects used in religious rituals.

McLerran struck a deal with the museum: She would serve as the new curator if the institution would fund her research into the origins and cultural issues related to the Native American collection. The museum agreed, and McLerran traveled to the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona, to make a connection between the collection and the people whose culture it represents.

Starting a Collection

On a business trip through the Southwest in 1954, Edwin L. Kennedy developed a love and fascination for Native American crafts. At the Red Rock Trading Post in Red Rock, Arizona, he bought a Navajo ye’ii rug, a weaving that features images of deities drawn from the medicinal sandpainting ceremonies. Over the next 40 years, Kennedy would commission and purchase an impressive collection of textiles representing the major styles and periods of Navajo weaving. His growing collection also included Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni jewelry, such as spangled silver and turquoise necklaces, bracelets, and pins, and other items such as belts and silver boxes. Some of these items have a similar theme: imagery from religious ceremonies.

Museums in the southwestern United States — arguably the seat of Native American art and artifacts, given their proximity to those communities — wooed Kennedy to donate his substantial collection. But in 1990, Kennedy chose to offer these objects to Ohio University, where they would serve as an educational oasis of Navajo culture for people who were largely unfamiliar with Native American art and life.

“I’ve found that in Ohio, there is a very romantic concept of Native Americans because there is so little daily contact with those who are Native American,” agrees McLerran, who studied American Indian art and lived in Washington, Colorado, and New Mexico before moving to Ohio. “I think the museum can play a very important role in that area.”

The university housed the collection in the main administrative building of the former Athens Mental Health Center, an imposing Victorian structure that overlooks the city of Athens. After extensive renovation, the Edwin L. and Ruth E. Kennedy Museum of Art opened to the public in 1996, just two years after the collector’s death at age 89. The museum has since featured several exhibitions of jewelry, Navajo chief blankets, tapestries, and the sandpainting textiles — also known as “chant weaves” — and has sponsored visits and lectures by weavers and textile experts.

But just as plans for the museum and the unprecedented display of Kennedy’s collection were under way, recently passed legislation granting Native American groups the right to repatriate items of religious significance was being enforced. And it was giving museums pause.

Reclaiming Cultural Heritage

In November 1990, the federal government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which gave Native Americans the legal right to obtain a listing of all human remains and cultural artifacts possessed by public institutions, including museums. The law also mandated the return of some items — especially human remains, but also objects used in religious rituals — to the tribes laying claim to them. The goal is to protect and preserve the culture and traditional religious practices of American Indians.

To comply with the act, the university submitted a general list of its holdings in 1994. No native tribes inquired about or laid claims to any of the items. But when McLerran became curator and started conducting research on the collection, she discovered that a strange trunk of miscellaneous leather pouches, feathers, and sticks appeared to be tools used by Navajo medicine men, items collectively known as a jish. Records showed that a trader friend of Kennedy had donated the jish a few years before, in honor of the museum’s debut. The trader had acquired the jish before NAGPRA was established, McLerran says, and the museum staff had never examined or displayed the contents since receiving it.

Because the jish is considered to be a sacred object used in religious rituals, McLerran realized that it could be subject to repatriation. She sent a list of the trunk’s contents to the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department in Window Rock, Arizona, asking for advice. She recently had resumed discussions with the Navajo Nation about the vast collection of sandpainting textiles housed at the Kennedy Museum of Art, a conversation she had begun earlier that year as part of her research for her guest-curated show on Klah’s weavings. The textiles are not subject to repatriation under law, McLerran explains, because while they depict sandpaintings used in religious ceremonies, they are not used in the actual rituals. Still, some Navajo are uncomfortable with the display of these sacred images, so McLerran requested that members of the Navajo Nation consult with the museum on how it could address that issue. She wanted to learn, too, if any of the weavings in the collection were exact replicas of ceremonial sandpaintings or perhaps altered versions of them, as unaltered reproductions could be most objectionable to the Navajo. Regardless, McLerran reasoned that Navajo scholars and weavers might want to visit the collection for research or educational purposes.

The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American tribe in the United States, was interested, and four members agreed to travel the 1,700 miles to Athens in November to take a closer look at the textiles and jish and, McLerran hoped, offer some answers.

A Taste of Navajo Tradition

When the Kennedy Museum of Art is not displaying the sandpainting textiles, the staff store them on the second floor of the building in a climate-controlled room, each weaving rolled carefully on large rods and handled only with cotton gloves. (The oils on the hands can degrade the fabric over time.) But for two days in November, each textile was laid out on tissue paper on the floor throughout the galleries of the museum so the Navajo representatives could study them.

The delegation included Steven Begay and Timothy Begay of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department, which oversees national compliance with NAGPRA; Clarenda Begay, curator of the Navajo Nation Museum; and Ronald Largo, a medicine man from Coolidge, New Mexico. A number of teachers, community members, and Ohio University students and staff joined them throughout their two-day visit, eager for this rare view of the collection and for a chance to learn more from the Navajo people about the cultural significance of these pieces.

Raymond Tymas-Jones, dean of the College of Fine Arts and interim director of the Kennedy Museum of Art at the time of the visit, encouraged both McLerran’s research and the ensuing public discussions with the Navajo group.

“I consider it to be critical that dialogue is ongoing,” he says, “so that the museum, in an effort to educate the community about Navajo culture, is accurate.”

Largo and Steven Begay, both younger generation Navajo trained to conduct traditional ceremonies, provided much of that education, which McLerran recorded in detailed notes. Medicine men create sandpaintings as part of a larger ceremony to summon gods who can cure people of physical and mental ailments, Begay explains. They use sand of various colors to draw images of people, animals, and nature. Each sandpainting is developed for a certain medical condition (moths, for example, symbolize mental disorders) and are tailored to the individual patient as part of a larger cure.

The medicine men, known as “singers” in the Navajo culture, also chant phrases or sing bits of melody during the ceremony. As McLerran looked on, Largo, a slim man clad in blue jeans and a leather jacket, repeatedly chanted a blessing in Navajo and sang a piece of a traditional tune over one of the sandpainting textiles.

“It was interesting — he was making bird-like sounds,” she says. “People outside the gallery heard it and thought there were birds inside.”

The sandpainting textiles offer to people outside of the Navajo culture a rare glimpse of these ceremonies. The vast number of such chant weaves in the Kennedy collection suggests how varied the images can be. Several, such as the Hosteen Klah piece, have designs that are separated into quadrants, to represent the four seasons, the four compass directions, the four times of day, and/or four stages of life. Tokens of nature, such as lightning bolts, skyscapes, and corn stalks appear, as do a number of deities and human figures in traditional Navajo dress. Animals — ranging from coyote to bear to snake — are represented in bright golds and greens. Some textiles feature singular images, such as two figures depicting “Mother Earth and Father Sky.”

The tapestries range in size from 2 feet high and 2 feet wide, to 5 feet high and 6 feet wide, to the enormous Klah piece. Some are made from hand-spun wool and natural dyes, while others consist of commercial wool and artificial color.

The first time McLerran saw a series of Kennedy collection chant weaves displayed across the gallery walls was during her own guest-curated Klah exhibit in early 2001. Viewing so many unusual textiles in one place amazed and overwhelmed her.

“It’s incredible to see them in person — they’re very elegant, very beautiful,” says the curator, who notes that the show struck a chord with the public as well. “There’s also a beauty about the part of the culture they express that’s fascinating, neat to experience.”

But the fact that any non-Navajo audience would view such sacred images, rendered permanent in wool and dye, has been a point of debate in the Navajo community since the early 1900s, when Klah and his nieces first began to create chant weavings.

Sacred Images

Klah, who lived in Newcomb, New Mexico, sparked controversy in the Navajo community when he began to make a record of sacred sandpainting images by weaving them into textiles. The images are considered to be powerful tools of the gods and only meant for temporary, medicinal purposes: The paintings are wiped clean from the ground by the medicine men who create them. Some Navajo believe that viewing the images outside of the ceremonial context could bring harm — blindness, paralysis, or spontaneous abortion.

Despite those taboos, many Navajo artisans have recorded these images in weavings or on wooden boards, for artistic expression, cultural preservation, and for sale. But to avoid the danger many anticipated, some weavers purposely altered the designs, changing colors or other details. Kennedy, who first commissioned chant weavings some 40 years after Klah began producing them, took a step further. He hired a medicine man to sing a cleansing chant over the weavers who were creating his pieces, freeing them from the fear of damage.

“I think that’s incredibly sensitive and respectful of him, especially at a time when there wasn’t such awareness of these issues,” McLerran says. “He could have easily forgone that.”

Today, sandpainting textiles are one of 70 styles of weavings still created by Navajo artisans, says Wesley Thomas, a Navajo weaver and assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University. Some artisans produce the chant weaves for cultural preservation, he says, while others create them for purely economic purposes. But disagreement still exists, he adds, on whether it is ethical for weavers to record sandpainting images.

“There are some traditional weavers who are very uncomfortable seeing woven textiles depict sandpainting,” Thomas says. “On the other hand, they are still being produced on the reservation. They’re generally going to collectors.”

Both Thomas and Steven Begay point out that while some Navajo are upset by the creation and display of chant weaves, many of the critics aren’t familiar with the actual ceremonies or songs that accompany them — partly because only trained medicine men know them, but also because several of these rites are no longer performed. In fact, Largo was unfamiliar with some of the images represented in a set of Kennedy weavings that depict the Coyote Way chant.

“People making the most commotion don’t know the details of these paintings,” Begay says. “To a skilled sand painter, they know there are things not included and purposely changed (in the textiles).”

Because singers have exclusive authority to perform these powerful rites, the ceremonies are taught to only a select few. But throughout the past two centuries, as more people have assimilated into mainstream American culture, many of those rituals have been lost. In fact, creating a historical record of the sandpainting traditions and teaching European Americans about Native American culture was the reason Klah preserved these unique ceremonies in tapestry form, McLerran says.

Thomas of Indiana University also points to cultural preservation as a justification for producing chant weaves.

“We’re at a time period when we’re losing so much of our culture,” he says. “I see no major conflict in displaying them outside the seasonal affiliation.”

Today, however, a new, younger generation of Navajo men such as Steven and Timothy Begay are learning to conduct the ceremonies, which is a revival of a traditional practice. Historically, someone in the family would learn the ceremonies starting in childhood. Largo is an example of this custom, and now practices a number of Navajo ceremonies, including the Mountain Way and the Blessing Way. Steven Begay, who comes from a traditional family in which several members speak only Navajo, says he wanted to continue along the path of his grandfather, a seasoned singer who died last year at age 108. His interest in his native culture also prompted him to join the Navajo Nation’s Historic Preservation Department in 1997, a role that has allowed him to serve as consultant to institutions and museums around the country, including the Kennedy Museum of Art.

Culture on Display

When Begay’s examination of the more than 100
sandpainting textiles in the Kennedy collection ended, he and his colleagues offered encouraging news.

“These are not the actual images, but replicas of them out of context,” says Begay. Because these are weavings, he adds, and not the actual sandpaintings themselves, it’s acceptable for the museum to display them.

The Navajo Nation representatives did advise the museum, however, that some sandpaintings should be displayed only during certain seasons, in order to accurately represent the ceremonies they portray. They also requested that the museum reproduce textiles with great discretion, and only for educational purposes. While a number of these weavings have been reproduced in books over the years, and the images have been widely disseminated, some, such as the bygone Coyote Way ceremony, are rare. (Begay requested that photos of textiles representing images from the Coyote Way not be used for any publication. Perspectives will honor that request.)

“They are Navajo intellectual property, if you will. They belong to Navajo people and are used in very specific circumstances in our culture,” Begay says. “So in some instances we do want to safeguard that information.”
While they were impressed with the large collection of sandpainting textiles, the Navajo Nation representatives also were excited to find the jish. The trunk contained medicinal herbs and other instruments and items used in healing ceremonies. Because this is considered a sacred object that still can be used in rites today, the museum will return the jish to the Navajo Nation under NAGPRA rules.

“This is made for a purpose, and that’s to maintain the balance and harmony for all people and the universe that we live in,” Begay says about the jish. “It’s not meant to be stored, not meant to be displayed.”

Begay reports that since 1993, his office has made 30 such successful repatriations of three to 300 objects each. NAGPRA not only has allowed the tribe to reclaim items it believes rightfully should be in its possession, he says, but also has helped them locate resources for their own education and research of cultural issues.

Partnerships

Papers filed with the federal government will allow Begay to take the jish back into the possession of the Navajo Nation — but not until the filing process is complete, which could take several months. McLerran informed the trader who originally donated the trunk of religious objects, who had no objection to the museum returning the items.

The Navajo Nation isn’t the only tribe that could pursue repatriation under the NAGPRA act. As the Kennedy collection represents items from at least seven American Indian groups, McLerran expects the museum could go through this process again. Already, the Zuni tribe of New Mexico has expressed interest in traveling to Ohio to examine what may be one of their sacred objects in the museum’s vaults, and the curator would like to invite members of the Hopi tribe of Arizona as well.

Meanwhile, when McLerran traveled to the Southwest in March to conduct more research, she received a rare invitation to attend a traditional ceremony. The curator also met Despah Nez, the 98-year-old woman who wove a number of the textiles in the Kennedy collection, and made several connections that will help her establish a visiting artist program at the Kennedy Museum, so that southwestern weavers can share their talents with students and scholars in Ohio.

Developing a permanent exhibition of the Kennedy collection also is on the drawing board, says new director James Wyman, who joined the museum in April.

“Given the fact that it’s such a rare and wonderful collection, it makes it all the more important to pursue that,” says Wyman, who supports McLerran’s work with the Navajo. “But I also want to be careful that we’re doing it in a conscientious way.”

While willing to work with the Kennedy Museum of Art on these issues, Begay says the Navajo Nation will be discreet about what it shares.

“We don’t want to give a wholesale account of our culture and our rituals. That’s for our people, and our people alone,” he says. “We want to ensure that we share some information with the world about who we are, and how these textiles came about, and how we can share that information. But we’re trying to be careful because a lot of those images, a lot of that information, is still held very sacred by the Navajo people.”

As she gazes at a reproduction of the Klah weaving in her office, McLerran echoes a similar sentiment. She attempts to name the icons in the design, and confesses that she doesn’t know much about the ceremony or meaning behind the images on this weaving — her favorite. But that may be for the best.

“In some ways I feel it’s not my place to try to interpret and communicate to others that aspect because it’s not my culture,” she says. “I think that’s for the Navajo to do.”

For more information on the Kennedy Museum of Art, visit the Web at www.ohiou.edu/museum.