This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2024 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.
It’s a warm day in October 2023 in Shelton, Washington. The sky is blue with one or two wispy clouds. I’m sitting with my friend, my teacher, my matriarch Shu Gayna (Donna May Roberts). Tendrils of her short black hair curl around her ears and above the frames of her glasses. A few moments ago, we ate a small meal together, including dried salmon dipped in kawtsi or oolichan grease, melting and coating my whole mouth. I followed Shu Gayna’s example of dipping a moistened finger in sea salt and placing it on my tongue, enhancing the taste of both the ocean and the smoke in the dried fish. It’s the first time I’ve tasted these treasures. It’s also the first time I’ve tasted Sm’algyax words in Shu Gayna’s presence. “It tastes like home,” I tell her, “even though I have never been to our home.”
This is my first step on a research journey to gather our story. It is a story of choice, of prioritizing family and language, of hope and reconnection. Teedsa (“teacher”) sits at the desk where she’s met virtually with Sm’algyax language learners since 2020. I sit next to her and explain with words she taught me why I have come: “Hasagu dm algyack Sm’algyax dihl nuun. Hasagu dm wilaayu da dzabm gwishalaayt” — “I want to speak Sm’algyax with you. I want to know about making gwishalaayt, Chilkat dancing blankets.”
The sun streaming in the windows behind her that day in Washington, Teedsa tells me in Sm’algyax that she grew up not knowing anything about Chilkat blankets. She reminds me she is a fourth-generation pioneer Tsimshian, many of whom did not remember the ways of our ancestors. She did not feel a loss from releasing ceremonial crafts. She was raised in our language and in a firm testimony of Miyaanm, our leader, whose message was shared by late-1800s Anglican missionaries to our ancestors in Maxłaxaała.
At a gathering in British Columbia in the 1800s, she explains, our Tsimshian elders discussed concerns about the future of our people — many of our people were lost, and we were still losing them to the changes in the world since contact with European colonists. She tells me about our spokesmen chiefs, about their conversations and the decision to choose a new way of life.
In 1887, Tsimshian people from Maxłaxaała/Metlakatla in British Columbia divided. Whether they came to Alaska or remained in British Columbia, Tsimshian people released the practice of weaving Chilkat ceremonial dancing blankets, along with all our ceremonial arts, due to settler colonial restraints. Those who relocated to Annette Island and founded Metlakatla, Alaska, chose this release so they could preserve our language and keep our children with their families through primary school. Those who remained in British Columbia released our arts by force of law.
While Tsimshian people released ceremonial arts, Haida and Tlingit artists held the traditions with respect and honor. Carving and weaving knowledge passed from generation to generation, often secretly and at the risk of incarceration. Our dancing blankets joined art collections worldwide and the ceremonial craft of the Tsimshian people became known as Chilkat weaving.
Teedsa’s story that day in Washington spurred a lifelong research journey for me. Over 16 months, I have flown, ferried, and driven to traditional Tsimshian territory to learn more about Chilkat weaving — as well as continue to build my weaving skills and pass the knowledge I hold to new weavers. I have spoken with as many of the 58 living first-language Sm’algyax-speaking elders as I could reach. I have searched archives of knowledge held in the memories of our elders and heritage chiefs. I have studied the words and works of Lii Aam Laxhuu Willie White, a Tsimshian Chilkat weaver residing on our traditional lands in Canada. Though I found no direct protocols for crafting Chilkat blankets, those discussions reinforced the knowledge that weaving in a good way relies on honoring rights of ownership.
Like my teacher, I belong to the fourth generation of Tsimshian people who migrated to the United States in the 1880s. When my grandmother’s parents left Maxłaxaała, my great-grandmother was an infant in the bottom of a dugout canoe. By the time I was born, ceremonial carving and textile arts had been sleeping for more than a century.
I grew up here. Not far from Teedsa’s home, with the same golden rays and rich green and blue hues. I imagined walking a path to weaving as a five year old, but the way became overgrown long before I could begin. I often poured over a hand-drawn image of my great-grandfather — our last heritage chief wrapped in his Chilkat blanket — hanging above the fireplace where my auntie Ethel’s cedar baskets rested on the mantel. I dreamed I would grow up to weave like her. However, like so many other urban Tsimshian people, I did not have access to training or knowledge transfer. By the time I reached elementary school, my dreams had fallen into a deep slumber alongside our ceremonial crafts.
In the relative safety of the 20th and 21st centuries, Tsimshian people on both sides of the colonial border between the United States and Canada have sought to reawaken and return to our ceremonial crafts. My relatives learned carving by studying historical examples and collaborating with our Northwest Coastal neighbors, gaining technical skills along with Tlingit and Haida nations’ historical context and cultural significance. Some learned to make button blankets, weave cedar, and sew skins.
I overcame the many barriers to learning our heritable arts when communities of Northwest Coastal People adapted knowledge sharing for online support. In the early months of the pandemic, I joined community Sm’algyax learners through Zoom and took online Formline Design and weaving classes at the University of Alaska Southeast and through the Sealaska Heritage Foundation. One of my Formline Design mentors, Robert Mills, taught us to see and apply simultaneity. In a balanced image, for example, the primary ovoid influences the design and each element of the design influences the primary ovoid. All elements are both part of the whole and whole in themselves.
Back at her desk in her sunlit office, Teedsa continues her story by telling me that recovering our art forms is not enough. She shares concerns that we need the Sm’algyax language, and we need to understand the ways our ancestors interacted with each other and with community.
I know she is right. I seek insight and support from living weavers. I interview Tlingit and Haida Chilkat masters and mentors to gather the historical context and cultural significance of ceremonial Chilkat weaving in the United States. I now walk the path I once dreamt of, living in ways I had believed to be impossible, leaning on Teedsa to help me with her own recollections and to search Sm’algyax for the worldviews and philosophical understandings that may not translate into English.
Willie White is walking this path ahead of me from his home in British Columbia. In his 2002 teaching kit My Ancestors Are Still Dancing, he shares his journey of becoming the first Tsimshian to weave Chilkat dancing blankets since 1887. He writes that ownership rights are integral to the skills of Chilkat weaving. Our people have the inherent right to weave. We have the right to apply knowledge that has been passed from generation to generation along matrilineal lines. I am the first Tsimshian in the United States to hold the knowledge and skills to craft Chilkat dancing blankets. I learned from Wooshkindeinda.aat Lily Hope, who learned from her mother Clarissa Rizal and — like Willie White did — from Tlingit master artist Jennie Thlunaut. Jennie learned from her aunt, her aunt learned from her aunt, all the way back to the first weavers.
People from our Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, and neighboring Indigenous nations honor inherent rights to the crests of our clans, moieties, and houses. Tlingit and Haida protocols balance these rights by having Eagles and Ravens, their two moieties, weave for each other. My research yielded no such restrictions for crafting Tsimshian regalia, though some elders, such as Sagoo Li’taa (Edward Innis), wondered whether these guidelines once existed and were lost. Today, Tsimshian people honor crest ownership by only using the images to which we have a right.
These are the only direct protocols I have found in my research thus far. But just as Teedsa reminded me, discovering pre-contact protocols for designing and weaving Chilkat blankets requires examining nah Sm’algyax, our true language.
Like every language, Sm’algyax contains the worldviews and philosophies of the communities who speak it. I started gathering Sm’algyax vocabulary in 2012, but only began studying and speaking in community in 2020. I learned the language in Zoom classrooms with communities of Northwest Coastal People and I met Teedsa in an online class at the University of Alaska Southeast. I began learning to weave at the same time. After six months of study with renowned Ravenstail weaver, Kay Field Parker, I started my first Chilkat piece with mentorship from Wooshkindeinda.aat Lily Hope in the fall of 2021. I dedicated the next year and a half to weaving child-sized Ravenstail and Chilkat robes. I completed the Ravenstail robe in October 2022, and the Chilkat robe in February 2023.
Throughout 2024, I conducted personal interviews in Sm’algyax and studied etymology. Based on a framework of language as philosophical repository, I seek to understand how to weave in a good way. I begin with a premise of simultaneity — all things are balanced as part of the whole and whole in themselves. Language influences understanding, and understanding both influences and is influenced by design. I dedicated one year to investigating the ways in which Sm’algyax conveys the philosophies of Tsimshian ancestors. I pulled apart sentences, statements, and questions, investigating the formation of thoughts and the ways our Elders communicate them.
The central tenet of communicating in Sm’algyax — the primary scope of existing as Tsimshian — is connection and reciprocal relationships, all the way down to the conjugation of each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb. Even the articles of Sm’algyax conjugate to convey relationships. Our people are in relationship with our plant, animal, land, and water relatives. We are in relationship with our ancestors, those of the past and those of the future. We are in relationship with ourselves and with each other.
Months after we first met in person, Teedsa stands in my home on Tohono O’odham traditional lands near Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a cool day for the Sonoran Desert, just over 55 degrees Fahrenheit, with a pale blue sky and a slight breeze. Teedsa tells a story in Sm’algyax, pantomiming her grandmother weaving cedar. Her depiction of her grandmother building a space to weave with a box, warm blankets, and heated stones confirms for me that weaving in a good way requires being in good relationship with yourself.
I am reminded of Willie White, who writes that the inherent right to weave yields his personal practice of being in good relationship with weaving by ensuring the knowledge that resided with our past ancestors will continue to live with our future ancestors. As weavers, we are the connection; each of us twining time immemorial with time unforeseeable. We honor the right to weave by choosing to teach others who have the right, and by ensuring, in turn, that every weaver has the training to teach.
At each stop on my research journey, comprising an education in language, history, and Chilkat weaving itself, I give where I gather. After five years of training, I now teach weaving to communities who have dreamed of having their hands in the warp and the weft for centuries. I prepare each new weaver to share their training with people who experience the same barriers to access we are overcoming. While we gather knowledge about the craft of dancing blankets, we give everything we learn to our relatives. We continue to contribute where we receive, increasing the number of contemporary Tsimshian Chilkat weavers and building relationships that increase our knowledge and understanding of this ceremonial practice. We craft our dancing blankets in ways that will make our past ancestors pleased with their future ancestors. We are weaving in a good way.
