"Passing on a Weaving Tradition"
An artist's descendants learn her techniques
by Ed Schoenfeld
Juneau Empire Preview, Juneau, Alaska
Febraury 23--March 2, 1990

When she was young, Phoebe Warren watched her grandmother, mast Chilkat weaver Jennie Thlunaut, prepare for her work.

Warren, now herself a grandmother several times over, has a strong memory of Thlunaut hauling wood and water to build a fire under a tub on a beach near Klukwan.

"I remember asking her, "Waht are you doing?" And she said she had to cook up all that bark to get all the sap out of it," Warren said. The cedar bark, once properly cooked, was split and woven with mountain goat's hair to use to weave Chilkat blankets.

Warren also remembers how her grandmother's work, which included more than 50 finished blankets and innumerable dance leggings and beaded works, forced changes in her home.

"We had a closet in theold house that ws just a walk-in thing and we had a place on the side where we'd hang clothes," she said.

"She went in there and used that closet as a place to hang her loom and owrk, and my grandpa had to build another place to hang the clothes," she added, with a laugh.

While Warren was aware of Thlunaut's expertise in the traditional Tlingit art form and even learned a few techniques, she never had a chance to get the full benefit of her instruction. And in the summer of 1986, Thlunaut died at the age of 96.

But her technique was not lost. In the spring before her death, Thlunaut took on an apprentice: Juneau artist, poster-maker and musician Clarissa Hudson.

And over the past four months, Warren and several other of Thlunaut's descendants have had a chance to learn the weaver's techniques and style, under Hudson's gentle instruction.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Klukwan Inc., the Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center in Haines and the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, the learning began with an intensive three-day workshop in Haines in November.

It resumed with a two-week class earlier this month in Juneau at Hudson's downtown studio. And it may continue later this year with a session involving the children and grandchildren of some of Hudson's students.

The most recent session was attended by Warren, another of Jennie Thlunatu's granddaughters, Louise Light, and a great-granddaughter, Diane Young.

In the studio, the women worked close together, each sitting in a chair with a polished, brown, wooden frame called a traveling loom balanced in front of them.

On a shelf above the women were a pair of identical Tlingit dance leggings, one made by Thlunaut, one by Hudson. In the background, a boom box played traditional Tlingit dance music.

Under Hudson's watchful eye, Warren's fingers picked out and twisted white threads to make a border around a tightly-woven black design. Hanging from the frame were numerous strands of white, yellow, black and green yarn, some of it draped over the loom's top, held in place by red, blue and white push pins. The function of the pins, Hudson said, is to help keep the weavers' work from becoming tangled.

"You have to keep track of which threads go where because they're different groups of braids," Hudson said.

In some styles of weaving, the artist works acorss the full pattern, creating all the elements of the design at once. But in Hudson's style, the weaver focuses on one element at a time, completing a particular part of the weaving such as a stylized eye or face before moving onto the next part of the work.

"The reason you want to have sections like that is becuse the weaver can concentrate on one area at a time without having to divide her atention," Hudson said. "Jennie's fingering technique was perfect for speed, accuracy and tension."

To allow each part of the weaving to later become attached to other parts, Hudson described a technique called the drawstring. The idea is simple: loops of yarn are left sticking out of the edge of each design element for later attachment in the overall pattern.

The technique works - most of the time. Sometimes the loops just seem to disapper, Warren said.

"Then you make up a story about Raven coming and stealing it," Hudson joked.

While Warren, Light and Young were all working on learning Chilkat weaving, they were focusing on different patterns or apsects of Thlunaut's style. "The reasons for that is when they go home to Haines and they get together for weaving, if one of them wants to do the eyeball or the face, Phoebe knows how to do it. If it's the 'split U' with the crescent and the circle inside, someone else knows how to do it," Hudson said.

While traditional Chilkat weaving is done with a combination of mountain goat wool and thin strips of cedar bark woven together, the class used store-bought yarn and cord. The traditional materials are too epxensive and difficult to obtain and prepare to use in practice, Hudson said.

A long time Juneau resident, Hudson first studied under Thlunaut at a 1985 workshop in Haines.

"I knew there were other weavers around, but I wanted to learn from the source. I knew she was the last of the Chilkat weavers and I wanted to learn from her," she said.

Hudson returned to Juneau, determined to learn more about traditional weaving. After finishing what she had begun in the class, she returned to Haines and showed her work to her teacher. "I said, 'If you will take me as your apprentice I will be very grateful," Hudson said.

In the spring of 1986, Hudson traveled north to continue her studies under Thlunaut.

"The last day, she asked me to promise her that I would pass it on, 'So it doesn't die with me and it doesn't die with you," Hudson said. "And when we finished, she said, 'You are it! She said, 'You understand me. You are it. My work is finished and I can go home now."

A few months later, Thlunaut died. For 3 1/2 years, Hudson was unable to practice what she had learned. "I couldn't weave a stitch because I'd think of Jennie and break down at the loom," she said.

But an opportunity to resume her work was in the making.

Just before her death, Thlunaut was honored by the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment of the Arts as one of the 13 best Native artists in the United States.

The award carried a $5000 honorarium which her daughter, Juneau Tlingit song and dance leader Agnes Bellinger, turned over to the Sheldon Museum. "She asked the museum to supervise use of that money for workshops for her granddaughters to learn the weaving technique," said museum historian Elisabeth Hakkinen. "Clarissa was the last one who had been an understudy with Jennie."

Last Summer, the museum contacted Hudson abut teaching such a class. The call arrived shortly after she and her family returned to Juneau after spending about two years in New mexico and Hudson accepted the assignment. "I was somewhat afraid to teach these women because I wasn't sure if the memory of what I learned would come back," she said.

But come back it did.

"Jennie had told me, and I later found out she had told her granddaghters, 'Ill will be there. I will be right by your side." Hudson said. "And she was."

After November's workshop in Haines, the museum sought additional funds to hold another training session, the one in Hudson's Juneau studio. Funding came from Klukwan Inc. with additional support from the museum.

There is still some funding left, which will result in an additional workshop, Hakkinen said. This session may help bring the tradition to another generation; each student may bring a daughter or granddaughter to learn some of the techniques, she said.

Warren hopes to use continued training in Thlunaut's style so she can teach her children and grandchildren.

"I come from a big family," she said. "I could teach from here 'til I don't know when and still have more family to teach. Hopefully, there will be quite a few of them who will want to learn."

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Contact the artist (via email)

or snail mail:

Clarissa Hudson
PO Box 2709 
Pagosa Springs, CO  81147  USA
970-264-2491

Clarissa Hudson
P.O. Box 21453
Juneau, Alaska 99802 USA