Woven Beauty

Showplace Opens With World Class Exhibit

By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. -- Navajos have decades of experience seeing their history, crafts and culture interpreted by others in museums from Flagstaff to Manhattan.

RICHARD PIPES/JOURNAL

Ganado High School students Michelle Peterson, left, and Amanda Begay sketch old Navajo blanket designs.

RICHARD PIPES/JOURNAL

The lobby of the new museum is built around the hogan concept with a glassed in smoke hole design in the ceiling and the entrance facing east.

Now, inside 54,000 square feet of brick, wood and glass, Navajos have a chance to speak with their own voices about their past, present and future as a people.
The Navajo Museum, Library & Visitor's Center opened here last month after five years of fund-raising, construction and political dispute. The $7 million building stands along Arizona 264 just across the New Mexico border in the Navajo Nation's capital, buffeted by red sandstone cliffs.
The museum opened with fanfare and a world-class exhibit of Navajo textiles, "Woven by the Grandmothers," a display of 44 blankets, serapes and traditional dresses culled from the collection of the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The exhibit leaves the museum Oct. 17. The museum will host a number of traveling exhibits for the next year before installing a permanent exhibit from the tribe's collection, according to Alan Downer, director of the tribe's Historic Preservation Department.
Designing a permanent exhibit will be time consuming, Downer said, because the museum staff will work with traditional Navajos and healers to make sure the story of the Navajo is told in their words.
Even empty, the building says a lot about Navajo life. It is shaped like a hogan, the six-sided traditional dwelling of the Navajo, and its door opens to the East, as is custom. Visitors walk into a spacious atrium that reaches to a glass ceiling, a modern translation of the hogan's smoke hole.
Visitors first encounter a sand pit, symbolizing the underworlds Navajos made their way through before inhabiting earth. Then visitors make their way around the building clockwise in another Navajo tradition.
The building was designed by the Albuquerque architecture firm Design Collaborative Southwest with input from a team of Navajos, including teachers and medicine men.
In keeping with Navajo beliefs, museum curator Verna Francisco says, the building emphasizes the four cardinal directions: The 30,000-square-foot museum space is in the south side of the building, the place of learning; administrative offices are in the west, the place of work; and the library is in the north side, the place of knowledge.
The original Navajo Nation museum was established in 1961 in a small building on the tribal fairgrounds and it moved 15 years ago into a back room of an arts and crafts store. But most of the tribe's collection of artifacts and historical documents has been stored in government trailers, out of view of tribal members and visitors.
With the museum open but filled with the Smithsonian's exhibit, the tribe's collection, which includes Anasazi artifacts, weavings and jewelry, is still mostly under wraps.
The museum was conceived under the administration of President Peterson Zah and put on hold -- mostly built and unopened -- when Zah lost re-election to Albert Hale in 1994. At that time, a $3 million donation from energy companies that do business on the reservation had allowed a design to be completed and construction to begin. The project gained another $1.1 million in unused Housing and Urban Development funds and was counting on $3 million from the U.S. Office of Surface Mining.
But Hale recommitted the money to filling in abandoned uranium mines across the reservation. The museum foundation borrowed money to continue construction on the building, and last year the tribe agreed to use tribal funds to satisfy the loan and open the museum.
When the budget for the new fiscal year takes effect Oct. 1, the tribe will have $517,000 in operating funds to staff the museum permanently. It plans to hire a director, curators and technicians as well as a clerical staff.