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Navajo Artisans Struggling With Hubbell Trading Post Closure

 A year-long closure of Hubbell Trading Post National Monument due to COVID-19 has disrupted a century-old model of buying and selling Navajo artwork and accelerated a shift of the art scene online.

Editor’s note: This clarifies that Western National Parks Association is a cooperating association, not a concession. Its mission supports education, interpretation, research, and public engagement in national parks. At Hubbell Trading Post, WNPA works to preserve the traditional arts of the Navajo Nation and other regional American Indian tribes.

On a freezing January morning, Edison Eskeets receives two phone calls: one from this reporter and another from an old friend raising money for a family member’s funeral service. While the first call is unusual for him, the second is all too familiar on the Navajo Nation.

At the time of publication, the 170,000-person tribe has reported over 29,000 positive cases of COVID-19 and more than 1,100 deaths. At one point last summer, the Navajo Nation experienced the highest COVID-19 infection rate anywhere in the country.

Another consequence of the pandemic has been a year-long closure of Hubbell Trading Post National Monument in Ganado, Arizona. Located in the middle of the Navajo Nation, Hubbell Trading Post is the oldest business in northern Arizona and the only active trading post owned by the National Park Service.

Handmade Navajo jewelry are among the items sold at Hubbell Trading Post/Kurt Repanshek

Its prolonged shutdown due to health and safety protocols is a financial hardship for Navajo artisans who sell tapestries and jewelry there. It has also accelerated the waning relevance of the trading post model for buying and selling fine art – a vestige of an expansionist Western era dissipating into the digital world.

Eskeets is the trader at Hubbell Trading Post. Under normal circumstances, he is responsible for dealing handmade Navajo tapestries and silver and turquoise jewelry on behalf of the Western National Parks Associationa cooperating association that provides educational and interpretive support for parks. At the trading post, WNPA endeavors to preserve traditional arts and crafts by supporting Navajo and other regional American Indian artisans.

From a long, wooden alley clustered with leather goods and rugs, Eskeets negotiates with Navajo artisans in their Diné language. Local shoppers and tourists from all over the world watch them do business as they peruse claustrophobic aisles of woven baskets, rugs, horse collars, canned goods, display cases, and more stocked from floor to ceiling.

In the past year, however, the ponytailed Navajo with a runner’s build and a fine arts degree has not done any trading. He has not even set foot in the Hubbell Trading Post. His interactions with artisans have been limited to somber phone conversations about loss and isolation.

“We’re losing a lot of weavers and metalsmiths, especially elders,” Eskeets said. “With them goes centuries of knowledge and stories of Navajo traditions.”

Edison Eskeets, the trader at Hubbell Trading Post, looks forward to returning there/Western National Parks Association

Once an essential marketplace for the Navajo and white families settling the West, Eskeets likens Hubbell Trading Post to the Walmart of the 1800s. He lists what it sold. “It carried everything from wagons to fresh-cut meat and sheep, clothing and yarn, kerosene and candles, knives and leather goods, weaving and jewelry. It was a one-stop shop.”

However, the origin of Navajo trading posts is more sinister than a retail comparison suggests. Trading posts came to be important vendors for the Navajo only after the U.S. Army expelled them from their land, forcing them to rely on white traders to purchase all the goods they needed for survival.

In the early 1860s, Gen. James H. Carleton sent an expedition to look for gold in the Navajo territory. Carleton ordered the expedition to use a “scorched earth” policy deployed by the military elsewhere in the West. Under this policy, the soldiers massacred several Navajo men, women, and children and destroyed the Navajo’s livelihood by killing their livestock and burning their homes and crops, according to the National Park Service.

In 1863, the Navajo surrendered to Carleton, but the malicious general showed no mercy. In what became known as the “Long Walk,” Carleton forced more than 8,000 Navajo to walk more than 300 miles from their ancestral homelands in northeast Arizona to the Bosque Redondo reservation in eastern New Mexico.

Don Lorenzo Hubbell

John Lorenzo "Don" Hubbell

Stripped of their land and their way of life, the Navajo began trading crafts for essential goods with white traders. Thus, the trading post era began inauspiciously.

In 1868, the U.S. Government allowed the Navajo to return to their homelands, where they continued to trade craft goods with white traders in order to purchase modern materials they had grown accustomed to at Bosque Redondo.

John Lorenzo Hubbell became the most successful trader. A Spanish interpreter for the U.S. Army, “Don” Hubbell was a gifted polyglot. When he became a trader like his father before him, he took care to learn Diné. By speaking the Navajo language, he earned their trust and came to appreciate their rug weaving and silversmithing traditions.

He founded the trading post in Ganado in 1878 that his family ran for nearly 90 years before selling it to the National Park Service along with the rest of the Hubbell homestead site. The site includes Hubbell Hill, the family cemetery where he, his wife, and three of their children are buried.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Hubbell’s trading post empire reached its zenith. At one point, the magnate operated two dozen trading posts in the Southwest, plus a handful of other businesses. Nevertheless, as roads and modern infrastructure made numerous marketplaces accessible to the Navajo Nation, Hubbell’s enterprise faltered along with his health. After his death in 1930, the Hubbell children struggled to keep the business afloat. 

In 1954, the Hubbell family declared bankruptcy and closed all their trading posts, save the one in Ganado. Dorothy, Hubbell’s daughter-in-law, began fielding offers for that land, and she was keen on keeping the trading post intact as a museum.

A group of Western historians led by Ned Danson – actor Ted’s father – began lobbying Congress and the National Park Service to purchase and preserve the property.

Initially, NPS Director George Hartzog was not interested in that idea, but nearly a decade of lobbying persuaded him on one condition: that the trading post would not become a site “frozen in time.” Rather, the Park Service mission would be “to perpetuate, for as long as possible, the trading post business as an example of that kind of business, changing as the Navajo themselves change,” according to Park Service documents.

Therefore, the contemporary Hubbell Trading Post is both a museum and a live trading post.

The "bullpen" at Hubbell Trading Post, circa 1918/NPS archives

The "bullpen" at Hubbell Trading Post, circa 1918/NPS archives

The bullpen today/NPS

The bullpen today/NPS

 

Although the NPS does not run the business operations at Hubbell, the mandate to run an active business stands out in an agency dedicated to conservation and preservation.

But even before the pandemic, what remained of the trading post business model had continued to decline for numerous reasons. Principal among them, younger Navajo artisans moved to sell their crafts online, at art shows, or direct to consumer instead of to trading posts where middlemen take a cut. Or, in the case of Hubbell, where a non-profit simply cannot compete with the prices paid by private buyers.

At 37, Zefren Anderson is considered a young weaver in a tradition dominated by elders. Anderson says he can make nearly 10 times as much selling directly to clients than to trading posts. “The trading posts never offered me more than $900 for some items I have sold at Santa Fe art markets for more than $8,000,” he said.

Anderson is not unique among artisans his age for building an online brand. He runs a website, YouTube channel, and Instagram page with more than 1,500 followers. Naiomi Glasses, a 7th generation weaver, has more than 45,000 Instagram followers, an online portfolio, and an email newsletter to alert potential buyers when new works are completed.

Anderson views the trading post model with disdain because of its prejudicial origin. “Historically, it has been and still is a system of exploitation and sexism that underpays Navajo women,” he said. He considers selling online as a form of empowerment that the monopolistic trading post system never afforded his ancestors.

Anderson does not absolve the Hubbell Trading Post’s participation in that system, but he does believe it has generally treated Navajo artisans more fairly than others, especially since the NPS acquired it. He laments that its closure has taken away what he calls a “lifeline” for elderly weavers. “It’s all they have,” he said.   

Roman Hubbell, buying jewelry, carried on the family business/NPS archives

 

Roman Hubbell, buying jewelry, carried on the family business (NPS archives photo). The Hubbell family’s belongings and other artifacts are catalogued in the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site’s museum. There are over 350,000 individual items in the collection. Learn more about this location in the book Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site or bring home an official park product from Western National Parks Association.

Like the coronavirus disease itself, the shutdown of Hubbell’s operations has disproportionately affected the elderly. Most cannot connect to the Internet from remote corners of the Navajo Nation. Those that can often lack digital savvy to sell online. For many, Hubbell Trading Post is the only marketplace within hundreds of miles. Now, their single stream of income is gone.

“Covid-19 has magnified the struggles and isolation for most artisans,” Eskeets said.

Eskeets, the Hubbell trader since 2007, admits that sometimes he cannot compete with the prices offered by boutique galleries. “I have to be selective about what fits in the Hubbell Trading Post since my budget fluctuates month-to-month,” he said.

The average cost of rugs and jewelry at Hubbell Trading Post spans $20 to $1,000, according to Eskeets. Occasionally, he will buy a rug for more than $5,000.

Worldwide, Navajo rugs and silver and turquoise jewelry are in vogue for their painstaking craftmanship, their allusion to history, and their portrayal in popular media. Each piece of art is made by hand and embedded or embossed with intricate patterns and symbols that can convey history, companionship and spirituality.

“The rugs incorporate pre-Hispanic designs with the opulent and ornate characteristics of Baroque art,” Eskeets said.

The rug room at Hubbell Trading Post/NPS

 

Since the 1970s, they have become collectors’ items because of their popularity in Western movies that show Navajo rugs on the floor, on the walls, and on furniture, according to Eskeets.

Yet, even if private buyers can often pay more, Eskeets believes that artists receive something unique when they sell at Hubbell: a place in history. “It’s a chance to connect with generations of artisans dating back more than 100 years, and I think that’s in the mind of the younger generation,” he said.

Unlike Anderson, many artisans revere the Hubbell Trading Post for its historic role in popularizing Navajo art in what Eskeets calls “mainstream society.”

Kee Yazzie, a 51-year-old metalsmith, still relatively young among Navajo artists, takes pride in being the latest member of his family to sell at Hubbell. Yazzie’s paternal grandmother, a weaver, used to sell her crafts there, too.

“I feel like I have a special bond to the trading post,” Yazzie said amid retelling a childhood memory where he walked with his mother hand-in-hand through a wash of cottonwood trees near the Hubbell home.

Not only is trading at Hubbell nostalgic for Yazzie, but he said that it has bolstered his credibility as an international artist. He has met clients from as far as Japan while doing business there.

Yazzie predicts that trading posts will continue to play a role in the Navajo art scene but not like in the past. “While some trading posts are closing down, there are others that continue to believe and invest in artists,” Yazzie said. 

Yet, even he is in the process of building a website to sell more work directly to customers. 

This story was made possible with the support of Western National Parks Association.

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Comments

Reading this piece made me sad to know that yet another piece of our heritage is passing. Yet such has always been since The People first walked the earth. All of us -- Native American, bilagaana, European, Asian, black, white, all shades of brown -- are held to the same rule of change and adapt, or die. New tools and materials allow artisans to develop new designs, new images, new ideas and expressions. Hopefully we don't loose the best of the past, we incorporate the best of today and of what is to ome.


The Dine were adept at raiding just as were other groups (e.g., Spanish, Mexicans, Pueblos, Utes, etc.).  So, to suggest that gold was the prime mover behind the Long Walk is quite an oversimplification.  But, it fits the article's theme of victimization. Also, the government gave each Navajo adult two sheep, along with tools and seeds upon their return from Bosque Redondo.  This helps the Navajo to replenish their herds which many had taken to Bosque Redondo. This eventually led to the trade in sheep and wool, which was at the heart of the early trading post history. True, Navajo still like their coffee today, but to suggest that the TP system arose only because of what was introduced to them at Fort Sumner is another oversimplification.


It "fits the article's theme of victimization" does it?  And, those of us who see the destruction perpetrated by Carleton and Carson, the treatment on the Long Walk, the deaths along the way, and the hardships at Bosque Redondo as injustices; are we guilty of "quite an oversimplification" that we just need to be taught to get over?  Am I the only one who thinks these are unnecessarily and rudely arrogant, disrespectful, insulting, and dismissive comments to make, comments that wouldn't have been posted if I had made them, or am I just the only one to speak up about it?


Humphrey Ploughjogger, 

I hear you! You are not the only one! As a non-native, I am grieved by the continued damage inflicted on your people and am amazed by your resilience! 

Continue to walk in beauty, 

Diane


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