Chuska Mountains, Navajo Churro Sheep, and TahNibaa the Weaver

As a versatile Textile Artist, TahNibaa Naataanii (Navajo) creates weavings and hand felted products between the earth and sky. She is a 2020 Jennifer Easton Community Spirit Award recipient. We are honoring our CSA recipients with stories each month through the end of the year.

Under the shade of an aspen tree, TahNibaa watched her sheep graze in a patch of lush green grass in the Chuska Mountains. She had taken them out at 8:00 am from the corral near the cabin where she and her family spend summers for traditional rotational grazing. TahNibaa herded them up the mountain, carrying her lunch, water, and gun in case of cougars or timberwolves. Sometimes she takes a knitting project, her journal, or an article to read. And sometimes, she sits and observes nature around her, the air scented with Ponderosa pines.

“It’s like a university, a wealth of knowledge when you get out into the environment,” TahNibaa says. “It’s another life up there.”

As a 5th generation Navajo weaver, TahNibaa received a 2020 Jennifer Easton Community Spirit Award (CSA) through First Peoples Fund. Dr. Robert Hill, Professor Emeritus of the University of Georgia, nominated her for the award.

“She is a community animator, art-practitioner, and cultural ambassador."

“Tahnibaa stands out as a quintessential model of someone who carries, and thus diffuses, cultural values and traits,” Robert says. “She is a community animator, art-practitioner, and cultural ambassador. Tahnibaa’s life dedication to weaving has taken her to the four corners of the globe. In 2014, she shared knowledge and exchanged practices in Laos in a project of Three Generations of Cultural Exchange. Her mother and her daughter were participants. In 2017, she participated in a Japanese Weaving Guild Workshop [in Japan] as an honored guest. In 2018, Tahnibaa was a guest in Croatia participating in a project, Woven Messages, sponsored by the Croatian-American Art Society.”

As a young girl, her paternal grandmother gave TahNibaa her Navajo name: TahNibaa Atlo’igii — ‘TahNibaa the Weaver.’

"I began experimenting with weaving patterns, each one liberating my creativity to step into another creative path. Today, I am exploring color and design elements.”

“When I was seven years of age, I came home from school and my mother, Sarah H. Natani, had a loom set up for me and said, ‘Today you are going to learn how to weave,’” TahNibaa recalls. “I started with simple designs and gradually began to do complex patterns. After high school, I joined the U.S. Navy, and my weaving ceased momentarily. After my active duty tour, I began weaving once again, but this time it was different. I began experimenting with weaving patterns, each one liberating my creativity to step into another creative path. Today, I am exploring color and design elements.”

Being a sheep rancher like her parents and grandparents is an art form itself — paying attention to the grass forage to ensure her heritage breed sheep, the Navajo Churro, eat well while learning their behaviors daily. Few people ranch the way TahNibaa does, following the traditional rotational pattern of taking the sheep away from the desert heat and into the mountains each summer. It’s challenging and consuming work, but the only way TahNibaa would do it.

It is how she is teaching her daughter, Winter Rose, who went up in the mountains with TahNibaa to search for what Winter Rose dubbed “patches of paradise.” Sometimes TahNibaa’s grandfather is with the sheep, sometimes her mother throughout the summer.

“As I started walking the Chuska Mountains more and more over the past ten years, I got familiar with the land,” TahNibaa says. “I take the sheep to different areas. Sometimes they get spooked by a fallen branch or a porcupine or a deer, and they’ll take off. If you know the mountain, you can take shortcuts to get to where they’re headed if they outrun you. As a pastoralist, you have to walk with your sheep and know them. That’s the part I like.”

Raising Navajo Churro sheep and shearing them is the first piece of TahNibaa’s process for weaving. She washes the wool, cards, hand spins, and dyes the wool if necessary. She does her weaving on a traditional upright vertical loom.

The warping is a figure-eight technique with designs created using vertical interlock, dovetail stacking, and diagonal stair-step. She explores “wrapping” around the warp technique, creating texture. The warp/weft material combines organic fibers: sheep, goat, buffalo, silk, hemp, rabbit fur, and feathers. She also spins novelty yarn that incorporates beads, feathers, assorted color wool, and silk.

“My fingers get sore when weaving, as does my wrist,” she says. “But my mind seems to be beautifully guided as I lay down the different strands of weft. I often weave a story that will educate our community. I wove a pictorial weaving based on the ‘Navajo Code Talker’ theme that now resides in the collection of the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe. This knowledge of knowing our military and U.S. history strengthens our community, providing pride in who we are as a people.”

TahNibaa selects a special Navajo Churro ram to breed her sheep every 2 to 3 years to ensure wool quality, and provides meat for her family, ensuring their food source even in a crisis. She manages a herd of 16 - 26, about a fifth of the size of herds from times past.

“Because the land is so barren, we have to manage them in that way,” she explains. “I believe I’ve become an example for my community that I can downsize my flock, yet still be very traditional and continue the weaving traditions.”

As Fall approaches, TahNibaa is bringing her sheep down from the mountain where they will enjoy sweet corn treats and winter at Table Mesa on ancestral lands in the Sanostee community where she has a house. Next summer, TahNibaa will make the trek again to the Chuska Mountains, a two and half hour drive.

“As a matriarch in my small community, and as a person having livestock as my grandmothers and my grandfathers did before me, the Community Spirit Award affirmed that I am walking a very sacred path,”

“As a matriarch in my small community, and as a person having livestock as my grandmothers and my grandfathers did before me, the Community Spirit Award affirmed that I am walking a very sacred path,” she says. “The responsibility I have as a sheep rancher has been a rough road. Even though this pandemic happened, we still have to keep going. I couldn’t say, ‘We can’t go to the mountains.’ When June came, we took the sheep up. I get so close to wanting to put my hat down and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ But being recognized and telling my story to First Peoples Fund helped affirm that this lifeway is important to keep.”