Navajo weaver Venancio Aragon’s journey to revive and preserve Diné weaving amid modern challenges and cultural appropriation.
Where high desert rock formations meet a vast, open sky, past and present converge in the Four Corners region. Dinétah—the area also known today as the Navajo Nation—has been Indigenous land since time immemorial. Here, Diné history, at times, has been fraught with social and political tension between Euro-American settlers and, conversely, enhanced by the influence of surrounding Pueblo and Hopi communities. Furthermore, a Diné creative legacy—including the weaving record—can’t be separated from these histories.
Within this present-day landscape, nestled away in Farmington, New Mexico, is a studio filled with vibrantly colored textiles. Ornate weavings hang from the walls, first- and second-place award ribbons from various markets pinned to their surfaces. Several bins contain a rainbow-like organization of yarn alongside several other weaving tools: spindle, mortar and pestle, and naturally dried plants from which dye pigments are extracted. At the loom sits Venancio Aragon, Navajo weaver and cultural practitioner.
The culture of Diné peoples is oral, like many other Indigenous communities, transmitting knowledge through storytelling, song, and prayer. Likewise, to be a traditional Diné weaver in a contemporary moment is to impart reverence for the lessons and memories passed down by elders. In Aragon’s case, the influence of early weaving education by his mother, Irveta Aragon, can’t be overstated.
At the age of ten, Aragon received his first loom at school: a makeshift cardboard tile notched at the edges, interwoven with a cotton warp and equipped with acrylic yarn and popsicle sticks. Upon seeing his art project, Irveta Aragon, a lifelong weaver, started to skillfully thread yarn over and under the warp for her son. To his surprise, Aragon was unaware of his mother’s talent as well as the weaving histories in his own blood, stemming from his maternal grandmother’s line several generations back. A spark was ignited at that moment.
“My mother taught me what she could remember from her mother’s instruction,” Aragon explains. After years of being out of practice, a flood of memories came back to her. “I think this is a beautiful and useful testament to the power of remembering in our Native communities,” he says. “If my mother didn’t remember, the legacy of weaving in my family would have faded away.”
Inspired by an interest in human history via material culture, Aragon pursued degrees in cultural anthropology and Native American studies. For a time, he worked as an interpretive ranger at the National Park Service, helping visitors form their own connections to parks and monuments. Aragon’s intense curiosity for archaeology, anthropology, and art led him on a passage researching and reviving fragments of the Diné weaving repertoire.
Accessing museum collections is one approach Aragon takes to further educate himself on pre-historic designs and techniques.
“Going into collections, personally, I feel very honored to be among those pieces because I think the weavings carry on so much from the people who created them. The thoughts and the emotions they had while weaving are part of the pieces. Close examination, seeing dye types or yarn types, gives clues to the material conditions of people in those time periods,” Aragon says.
Some treasurable moments of study for Aragon include making acquaintance with Germantown yarns, rare and ever-elusive indigo and cochineal dyes, and bearing witness to infinite details contained within lesser-practiced techniques.
“Perishable items, such as textiles, usually don’t survive the archeological record,” Aragon says. For this reason, access to museum collections offers an important opportunity for contemporary Diné artists to enhance their knowledge of the weaving form, at times rediscovering approaches that may otherwise be lost to time.
Venancio Aragon, Spider Woman Cross, 2024, in progress. Photo: Joshua Mike-Bidtah.However, these spaces are also antithetical to Indigenous philosophies of impermanence.
“Weavings have a life cycle and are meant to go back to the earth, if they want to,” Aragon explains. He constantly reflects on the tenuous line walked between Indigenous paradigm and museum and archaeological collections.
Aragon coined the phrase “Expanded Rainbow Aesthetic” to describe his assemblage of more than 250 natural and synthetic dyes. This wide spectrum of highly saturated color paired with various pre-historic Diné weaving techniques has led to a signature, easily recognizable artistic style.
One piece that exemplifies his signature style is Rainbow Twill (2024), a variation of the Expanded Rainbow Aesthetic and a revival of an age-old technique called the Diamond Twill. To create this piece, the artist studied Diné textiles dating circa 1880 from the Indian Arts Research Center collection in Santa Fe.
Today, Aragon continues his mother’s legacy of conveying weaving histories by instructing Diné youth. On the weekend, you can find him at Diné College in Shiprock, New Mexico, hosting courses and teaching the basics step-by-step, from preparing an upright loom to wool processing and spinning.
Providing mentorship is especially important to Aragon as traditional Diné textile arts are less practiced by younger generations today, even though its techniques and designs are increasingly borrowed by non-Native weavers.
A recent surge of exhibitions, workshops, and lectures centered on Diné weaving has elevated the art form with respect and recognition rightly owed. Yet there is cause for concern over non-Native artists, instructors, and curators who gain access to culturally exclusive and sacred methods, techniques, and designs.
Aragon is wary of such developments. “We have no central authority that regulates information individual artists share,” he says. As a result, sensitive aspects of Diné textile arts become public knowledge and used by the mainstream. “Historically, Euro-American ethnographers and anthropologists collected and widely shared information about our textile arts without our consent. As we collectively move toward a decolonial paradigm, we need to address the continued harm enacted on Diné identities and culture by the misuse and commodification of our textile arts,” he says.
In that vein, Diné weaving is a reminder to us all of kinship and cultural fortitude against the odds. In many respects, it should not have survived today when we consider genocidal attempts of erasure enacted upon Indigenous peoples in the region—a sordid history of physical dislocation, cultural eradication, and commodification.
Yet, it persists through memory, evolving and thriving by a new generation of artists like Venancio Aragon—who is looking back to look forward.
