Many of our regular readers will remember Mae Morgan. She is a remarkable woman from near Crown Point on the Navajo Reservation. She began weaving at the age of eight and learned from watching her mother.

If you haven’t been to Garland’s Navajo Rugs in Sedona, it is something to put on your list. At Toh-Atin, we specialize in quality Navajo weaving, as does Dan. Dan’s father, Bill, and my father shared a love for the art form of weaving and the culture of the Native people of the Southwest, and they passed that love down to us.

Prior to 1983, when we still operated our Navajo rug business out of the front office of our father’s Pepsi Cola business in Durango, it was a common sight to have a pickup truck pull up in front of the bottling plant and see an older Navajo woman emerge with a Navajo weaving rolled up in a Blue Bird flour sack.

When a weaver walked into my Dad’s office, everything else stopped. He would get everyone in the group a Pepsi and they would catch up on the family stories.

In 2000, a couple from Scottsdale, Arizona walked into Garland’s Navajo Rugs in Sedona, Arizona, one of the most respected dealers in Navajo Textiles in the country. As they were coming through the front door, a Navajo weaver was making her way out. 

“I stopped and held the door for her,” the man said. “She had a big smile on her face and said thank you. She seemed to be floating on air.

The Annual Navajo Weaving Sale and Silent Auction will be Saturday June 10, 2017 at the Museum of Natural History of Utah in Salt Lake City, Saturday.

One of the most interesting periods in the history of Navajo weaving began in the 1880s and went through the first decade of the 1900s. It is called the Transitional era because it marked the switch between the weaving of wearing blankets by Navajo women to weavings intended for sale.

The evolution to the commercial marketing of Navajo weaving actually began in 1882 when the railroad reached Gallup. For the first time there was a way to transport goods back to the East. The trading post owners were quick to realize the economic benefits that would accompany this potential new market for Navajo weaving.

The Harvey family lives north of Window Rock, Arizona, the Navajo Nation Capital. I don’t know when my Dad met them, but I don’t think I remember a time when he wasn’t buying weavings from Esther Harvey, the mother and head of the family.

One of my favorite events is when someone walks in the gallery and says something like, “Do you have any real Navajo rugs?”

We recently picked up a collection of weavings from the 1980s that were done by some very talented women. Most of them had tags on them so it was easy to identify the weavers. They came from a famous Indian Trading family in Gallup (by agreement I can share that name with the purchaser of the weavings but am not allowed to put it in print).

Many of you saw our Facebook posts, on May 23rd, about the two large Ganado Red weavings that were created by famed weaver, Mae Jim, in the 1980’s.

We took these two amazing weavings down to Ganado High School, where one of Mae Jim's nephews was graduating, and they were used as the backdrop for the graduation exercises.