Shoulder blankets woven by Diné women of the Navajo Nation between approximately 1800 and 1880 CE constitute the most widely traded and most valuable textile produced by any indigenous people of North America during the 19th century. Known in Navajo scholarship and the collector market as chief's blankets, the Diné name diyogí n'teel means simply "wide blanket," and the term "chief" does not derive from the Diné themselves. The Navajo Nation did not have chiefs in the centralized sense characteristic of Plains nations. The term entered the documentary record because the blankets' quality and price restricted them to leaders of the Ute, Cheyenne, Crow, Sioux, and other Plains nations whose trading networks brought them into contact with Navajo weavers, and because Karl Bodmer documented a Piegan Blackfoot leader in Montana wearing one in his 1833 watercolor, one of the earliest Western depictions confirming their geographic reach. A single chief's blanket in the 1860s commanded between $50 and $60 in gold or a significant number of horses. A first phase blanket with early Classic period provenance, the Schoch First Phase dated to approximately 1830, held at the Bernisches Historisches Museum in Bern, Switzerland under catalog number 1890.410.0027, was acquired from a widow in 1890 and catalogued by the museum as "Sioux trade cloth," the institution having no framework at the time to identify what it held. Major institutional collections are at the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.


 Material and Craftsmanship

The foundational material of all classic period chief's blankets is handspun Navajo-Churro wool. The Churro sheep, an Iberian breed called Churra introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, was bred by the Diné into a distinct variety producing a long-staple wool unusually suited to hand-spinning and weaving. Its fiber length, low lanolin content, and crimp characteristics made it the finest natural weaving material available in the Southwest. Diné women sheared the sheep, washed the raw fleece with yucca root, carded it to align the fibers, and spun it by hand into fine, even yarn on a supported drop spindle before weaving began. A 1973 study conducted with Diné Community College estimated that producing and selling a completed blanket required an average of 345 hours of active work, encompassing every step from shearing through finishing.

The classic color palette of first phase chief's blankets was determined by what the Churro itself provided and what was obtainable through trade. Natural undyed Churro wool produced white and brown. Indigo, imported by the Spanish from Mexican and South American sources, produced deep blue and was available to Diné weavers from the beginning of their documented weaving tradition. Red, the most coveted color in the Diné weaving palette, was not achievable through any locally available dye plant. From approximately 1830 to 1860, the primary source of red yarn was bayeta, a red woolen flannel cloth dyed with cochineal and woven in Seville, Spain, and Manchester, England, shipped to North American ports and transported by mule to Santa Fe and Taos. Diné weavers purchased the cloth, unraveled it by hand, and respun the extracted red fibers into fine yarn for weaving. The cochineal-dyed bayeta red had no equivalent in any plant-based dye available in the Navajo homeland. Navajo weavers also used Saxony, a red knitting yarn from Germany, available through the same trade networks. Black was obtained from sumac and ochre through a combined mineral and tannin dyeing process, or from naturally dark Churro fleece overdyed with vegetal materials.

The chief's blanket is the only Navajo weaving consistently woven wider than it is long, a structural decision that determined how it was worn. A standard first phase blanket measures approximately 137 by 183 centimeters, wider than it is tall. Worn draped across the shoulders with the two short ends hanging at the front of the body, the design ran across the wearer's back as a continuous horizontal composition and the half-pattern at each end met at the center front. The weave structure is tapestry weave, in which the weft threads carry all visible color and pattern while passing over and under the warp threads, which are hidden within the textile. The weft count was historically extremely high. The fineness of weave in early Classic period blankets, measured by weft threads per centimeter, was sufficient to make the textile practically waterproof due to the tight interlocking of fine yarn. The ratio of weft to warp threads in Classic period blankets produced a smooth, slightly ribbed surface in which the weft completely covered the warp. This ratio declined after the Bosque Redondo internment of 1864 to 1868, when the U.S. Army destroyed Diné flocks and the supply of Churro wool was eliminated, and never fully recovered.

 Form and Features

Four design phases are recognized in the scholarship, defined by the geometric elements introduced over successive periods. The first phase, dated approximately 1800 to 1850, uses only horizontal bands, the oldest and most fundamental design element in Navajo weaving, inherited from Pueblo tradition. The bands alternate between wide zones of black and white and narrower zones of indigo blue, with the three widest bands positioned at the top, center, and bottom of the composition. First phase weaving demands absolute evenness of line across the full width of the blanket, a technical challenge that weavers describe as harder than later phases because no geometric interruption stabilizes the weft path. The sides of a striped blanket want to draw inward, and maintaining consistent width across a long first phase blanket requires continuous correction by an experienced weaver.

The second phase, dated approximately 1840 to 1860, added twelve rectangular bars or blocks of color placed in pairs at the center and ends of the three widest bands. The rectangles were generally woven in raveled bayeta red, providing the first appearance of the signature red-white-black-blue Navajo color combination. The third phase, dated approximately 1860 to 1880, replaced the second-phase rectangles with nine stepped and serrated diamond forms arranged in a three-by-three grid across the blanket's surface: three complete diamonds across the center and four half-diamonds at the corners and edges. Internal elements including zigzags, crosses, triangles, and thin lines were added within the diamonds at individual weavers' discretion. The fourth phase, emerging after the 1870s, expanded the diamond forms until they dominated the composition, with the original band structure reduced to a secondary background element.

A deliberate imperfection called a spirit line, called ch'ihónít'i in Navajo, was incorporated into many weavings near the edge, where a single thread was carried from the interior of the design outward to break the border. Oral tradition documents that a weaver who enclosed her spirit completely within a perfect weaving risked becoming spiritually trapped within it. The spirit line provided an exit, keeping the weaver in balance with the work rather than consumed by it.

 Function and Use

The blanket served its primary function as a garment when worn across the shoulders. Its weight, tight weave, and wool composition made it waterproof enough to repel light rain and insulating enough to function as a coat. It could be removed and used as a sleeping blanket or as a door hanging for a hogan. Its functions as garment, bedding, and architectural covering made it among the most versatile single objects a person could own.

Among Plains peoples who acquired chief's blankets through trade, the object's status as a prestige garment was immediate and publicly legible. Its scarcity at distance from the Navajo homeland, its material quality, and the documented cost in horses or gold elevated it above all locally produced textile equivalents. A Plains leader wearing a Navajo blanket announced his wealth, his trading connections, and his status in a single gesture. This function required no explanation within the inter-tribal trading networks of the 19th-century West: the blanket's origin and value were known to every party in any diplomatic or trade encounter.

Within Diné culture, the blanket did not carry the hierarchical status functions it acquired among Plains purchasers. The Diné social structure organized itself through clan membership, ceremonial knowledge, and accumulated personal reputation rather than through material display in the same sense that Plains chieftainship required. A Diné weaver's most valued blankets were worn by her family and kept within the community. The finest were occasionally given as gifts to mark important relationships or ceremonial occasions. The decision to sell or trade a blanket to outside buyers was a commercial transaction rather than a social statement about the buyer's rank.

 Cultural Context

The Diné creation narrative attributes the origin of weaving to Spider Woman, a Holy Person who wove the web of the universe and who taught the Diné how to replicate this act. Spider Man, her companion, instructed the men how to build the loom from sky, earth, sunrays, rock crystal, and sheet lightning. Spider Woman is understood as present and active in Diné weaving to the present day, residing atop Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. A weaver who sits at the loom participates in a cosmological activity originating with the Holy People, not in a craft tradition of secular origin. The Navajo philosophy of Sa'ah Naaghai Bik'eh Hozhoon, living in balance and harmony with the natural world and the universe, is enacted through the weaving process, in which the four sacred mountains bounding the Diné homeland were historically understood as providing both the dye plants and the wool that materialized the weaver's relationship with the land.


The Long Walk of 1864 is the central trauma in modern Diné historical consciousness. In January 1864, Colonel Kit Carson's forces implemented a scorched-earth campaign through Canyon de Chelly: burning homes and peach orchards, poisoning wells, killing livestock. Approximately 8,000 Diné were subsequently forced at gunpoint to walk 400 miles east to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where they were held under military supervision for four years. One quarter of those interned died. The U.S. Army seized and destroyed the Churro flocks that were the material foundation of the weaving economy, ending the Classic period of Navajo weaving abruptly and permanently. Diné women continued to weave during the internment using whatever materials could be obtained, but the supply of fine Churro wool was gone. The Treaty of Bosque Redondo in 1868 allowed the survivors to return to a reservation covering one-fifth of their original territory. The federal government supplied replacement sheep: Rambouillet, a French breed with short, oily wool unsuited to hand-spinning. The fineness of weave that had defined Classic period chief's blankets was not recovered. The replacement of Churro wool with Rambouillet and the subsequent availability of commercial Germantown yarn from Pennsylvania through trading posts transformed the blanket's material character permanently after 1870.

The trading post system established on the reservation after 1868, dominated by traders such as J.L. Hubbell at Ganado, Arizona, redirected Navajo weaving from wearing blankets for use and trade to floor rugs for non-Native tourist buyers and mail-order customers. Hubbell's 1905 mail-order catalog listed the chief's blanket pattern as "the very oldest pattern known" and sold completed rugs by mail. The shift from wearing blanket to floor rug also shifted production orientation from a wider-than-long format to a longer-than-wide format and from fine weft counts to heavier rugs tolerant of foot traffic, completing the transformation of the object's function that the Long Walk had initiated.

 Discovery and Preservation

The earliest documented Western acquisition of a chief's blanket is the Schoch First Phase, purchased by Swiss collector Lorenz Alphons Schoch at an unknown date and transferred to the Bernisches Historisches Museum in 1890 by his widow. The museum catalogued it as Sioux trade cloth and held it without scholarly analysis until dealer Joshua Baer identified it as a Navajo first phase chief's blanket in 2021, making it the earliest documented museum-held example with confirmed collection history. The Woodhouse Bayeta First Phase, dated approximately 1850 and collected in 1851 by Samuel W. Woodhouse, surgeon to the Topographical Engineer Corps on the Sitgreaves Expedition, is the next earliest documented example with a confirmed collection date. It was subsequently inherited through the Woodhouse family.

Karl Bodmer's 1833 watercolor documenting a Piegan Blackfoot leader in Montana wearing a chief's blanket establishes the blanket's geographic reach into northern Plains territory by that date, confirming a well-established inter-tribal trade network at least two decades before the period of most intensive non-Native documentation. George Catlin painted Diné and Ute subjects wearing similar blankets during the same period.

The Joe Ben Wheat Southwest Textiles database at the Arizona State Museum holds the most comprehensive analytical record of 19th-century Navajo weaving in any institutional collection, documenting individual blankets by size, pattern phase, weft and warp composition, dye identification, and collection history. Wheat's material analysis of thousands of examples established the evidentiary framework for the four-phase dating system. The Denver Art Museum, which holds one of the largest institutional collections of Navajo textiles, acquired significant Classic period holdings through the early 20th century before systematic export controls were in place.

Contemporary Diné weavers continue to produce chief's blanket pattern work, with practitioners such as Bertha Harvey, Barbara Teller Ornelas, and Roy Kady maintaining the tradition in both traditional and experimental forms. In 2019, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History commissioned a first phase replica from weaver Bertha Harvey using traditional Churro wool and indigo dye, documenting the full production process from fiber processing through finishing.

 Why It Matters

The Navajo chief's blanket is the only pre-industrial North American textile documented as having achieved a trade range extending from the Navajo homeland in the Four Corners region across the entire Great Plains to Montana within the first decades of its Classic period production, establishing a continental textile trade network predating railroad infrastructure by at least 30 years. The destruction of the Churro sheep herds by U.S. Army forces in 1864 and the four-year internment at Bosque Redondo interrupted the material tradition at the height of its technical achievement, making the surviving corpus of Classic period blankets produced before 1864 the only physical evidence of a weave quality and material composition that the internment made permanently unrecoverable. The discovery that the earliest museum-held example, the Schoch First Phase at the Bernisches Historisches Museum in Bern, was catalogued as "Sioux trade cloth" from its acquisition in 1890 until its correct identification in 2021 documents a 131-year institutional failure to recognize a Navajo masterwork, reflecting the absence of any scholarly framework for identifying or valuing Navajo textiles in European collections during the entire period of the object's institutional custody.