ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTHWEST.
by
Margaret Nowell Finnan.

The Indians of the Southwest are a truly artistic people. Much of this ability to make everyday things beautiful has been handed down to them from preceding generations over a period of about two thousand years. Their ancestors in the cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde made even their cooking pots beautiful in shape. Their weaving tools were carved and painted, and the lasts on which they wove their sandals were often painted in a most intricate design in several colors.

The Navajo woman of the present day will work several weeks sewing bands of colored tape and ricrac braid on her thirteen yard skirt with its twenty yard ruffle. Lining her velvet jacket most carefully with bright calico, and decorating it with countless silver buttons and glass beads, every stitch of which she does by hand. Her husband is unhappy without his bright neckerchief and beaded hat band, not to mention his passion for the silver and turquoise jewellry of his own people.

The Pueblo woman keeps her choice pottery for her own use, and sells to the inexperienced traveller her other pieces. Possibly she will trade one of the better ones to her Navajo neighbor for a especially fine wool blanket for her floor or bed.

In the last ten years several associations and many interested persons have done a great deal to stimulate the Indian interest in his own work and to try to bring back the excellent workmanship and fine materials which had so deteriorated in the last sixty years, with the result that many of the blankets from the Navajo reservation today are as fine as the best museum specimens of that early period. A small group at the pueblo of San Ildefonso is making outstandingly beautiful pottery and the silver work of the Zuni, as well as among the Navajos, has shown marked improvement.

In the schools the Indian children are being taught how to carry on the arts and industries of their own people for which they have a natural aptitude, rather than to compete in an inferior way with our own children. It is hoped that within a few years it will be possible to get the finest of the basket-weavers, pottery-makers, rug-weavers, and silversmiths, as instructors in the schools to teach the children of the Indian so that the finest of the old things will not be lost, and the innate creative ability of the coming generation be stimulated to greater heights.