Spain and Indians in the American West

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2004 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trade routes across the American West became well established, ensuring frequent contact between Indians and their trading partners. Pueblo weavings, for example, could be purchased in the Midwest, and Arizona baskets found their way to California. An exhibition at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, examines a wide variety of Indian baskets and blankets made in the West. There are more than one dozen blankets and nearly thirty baskets, all drawn from the museum's permanent collection, which is strong in examples made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Indians and Spanish settlers. The show is entitled Blankets and Baskets: Weavings from the American West, and it is on view through November 7.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the Navajo had gained a reputation for weaving some of the finest blankets in the West. It is believed that they were taught by Pueblo Indians who were forced to move north by Spanish settlers along the Rio Grande. By the last decades of the nineteenth century these blankets became sought-after tourist souvenirs. They were offered for sale at shops specifically created to retail Indian arts and crafts, some of which were owned and operated by the railroads. Starting in the 1860s the serrated diamond motif of Mexican-made serapes began to appear on Navajo blankets.

Baskets, like blankets, were mostly woven by women. In each region of the West, Indian basket weavers relied on indigenous plants such as roots, grasses, ferns, and the like. These baskets were mostly used for storing, cooking, and serving food, although some were made for ceremonial purposes. At least one tribe, the Pomo, decorated their baskets with local seashells and feathers. Like blankets, baskets were initially made out of necessity, but the tourist market soon encouraged basketmakers to produce them for commercial sale.

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In the eighteenth century the Spanish clergy established missions in southern California in an attempt to convert the Indians to Catholicism. Basket weavers were encouraged to create an industry out of this craft. Certain motifs, such as crosses and four-legged animals, are found only on baskets produced for the tourist trade. Likewise miniature baskets were commercially successful.

Some of the objects on view in this show were donated in the first decades of the twentieth century around the time they were made. The blanket illustrated here is particularly interesting because it was owned by the wife of the American artist John Sloan. She had a shop in New York City in which she sold Indian objects. The Sloans were frequent visitors to the artists' colony in Santa Fe in the 1920s. In 1931 John Sloan was an organizer of an exhibition of American Indian artifacts that traveled for two years. Mrs. Sloan donated their collection of Navajo blankets to the museum in 1942. There is no catalogue of this exhibition.