Navajo rugs, blankets and weavings
Navajo migration southwest - page 5 of 5

The Pueblito country lies at the heart of the Navajo Dinétah. The ancestors of today's Pueblo communities had once made this region their home as they moved across the Southwest. Today, this land is well remembered. Once blessed, the landmarks on this frontier remain forever part of the Pueblo and Navajo heritage.

Over the next two centuries, Spanish colonists and Pueblo communities would trade with Apaches and Navajos in some years and suffer raids in others. Foodstuffs, hides, livestock, woven blankets, tools, jewelry, people, and in time Navajo rugs, made their way back and forth across the frontier, along the canyons of the Gobernador. By 1608, Navajo and Apache raids on villages and towns across the region brought Spanish mounted soldiers across the border. By 1659, captive Navajo men, women and children were being sold along the Rio Grande and sent south to work in silver mines south in Zacatecas. Everyone was raided - Spanish, Apache and Navajo, Pueblo and Ute, all took captives and losses in turn. In 1680, after years of raids and retaliatory strikes, Native people united to drive the Spanish down the Rio Grande to El Paso del Norte. They would not return for a dozen years.

Between 1705 and 1716, Spanish troops and their Pueblo allies, hard pressed by raids from the frontier lands, marched into the Gobernador nearly every year. They killed and enslaved many Navajo, burned fields, captured horses, and took back Pueblo people who had sought refuge from the unrest along the Rio Grande. By 1720, though, the Navajo and the Spanish had a new common enemy in the Ute tribes pressing south along the San Juan River.

Because pottery from New Spain was so scarce, Native potters in the Southwest were expected to supply mission priests and acolytes with dishes. The Puebla majolica soup plate found at the Abo mission site is one of the few pieces manufactured in New Spain found in a Pueblo mission site. At the Jemez mission at Giusewa, now Jemez State Monument in New Mexico, and on the Hopi Mesas, soup plates followed Spanish forms but with indigenous designs. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the destruction of the missions, Jemez and Hopi stopped making soup plates. The Gobernador Polychrome soup plate is Navajo-made, a 17th-century copy of this once popular style.

When they first met, the Spanish armies and the warriors of the Southwest followed very different traditions. The Spanish brought horse-mounted troops, and foot soldiers, iron and steel-bladed lances and cross-bow bolts, chainmail, heavy armor, cannons, swords, pistols, muskets, gunships, oxen and mule-drawn supply wagons. The Southwestern tribes and Pueblos met them on foot, behind leather shields, deadly recurved or "Turkish" bows, simple long bows, stone-tipped spears and arrows, fire-hardened wooden lances, buckskin hunting shirts and feathered caps, and a single tactical edge - superior knowledge of the land and its resources.

Over the centuries, each learned about each other. By the mid 1600s, the Southwest peoples were becoming expert horsemen; by the mid 1700s, firearms were triggered by native hands. The Spanish were learning the land, and forging alliances with its people. Treaties and promises, and the inequalities these friendships fostered, made for quickly shifting advantages.

Speed and power gave the upper hand to each in turn - first to the horse-mounted militias of New Spain, then to the quick-firing, fast moving native bowmen, then to the Ute and Comanche against the Apache and Navajo, now on horseback, and armed with guns, bows, and lances. Only in the late 1800s would the battles set in motion nearly 300 years before, finally come to an end.

Navajo migration southwest - page 1

Taos Trading Post is an online store, offering a tasteful variety of authentic Native American Indian rugs. We have been buying rugs for over 20 years, are family owned and operated, and committed to providing our customers with quality rugs, coupled with unsurpassed service. Our store sells only those weavings that meet our superior standards; and will therefore provide you, the customer, with years of pleasure. We stock a choice selection of contemporary Native American rugs, including Navajo, Mexican Zapotec and Indian rugs. We offer an attractive selection of authentic hand spun Navajo wool rugs in regional rug styles, including the popular Ganado, Storm, Two Grey Hills, and Teec Nos Pos designs, and our pledge of authenticity. Whether you prefer an authentic Navajo weaving or replica, our Southwest rugs will introduce the Native American Indian atmosphere to your home. Navajo, Indian, Mexican Zapotec and Southwest rugs, blankets and weavings for sale online. Native American Indian and Southwest rug art.