Dressed the history of fashion is a production of Dressed Media.

With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

Every day, we all get dressed.

Welcome to Dressed, the history of fashion.

A podcast that explores the who, what, when, of why we wear.

We are fashion historians and your host, April Callahan, and Cassidy Sakrie.

The woven blankets, rugs, dresses, and tapestries of the Navajo, or denay people,

are some of the best known and most admired textiles in the entire world.

And rightly so, not only do they exemplify the highest expressions of the art from a weaving,

they also are representative of an incredibly rich spiritual and cultural practice that extends back

thousands of years. However, as we will learn more about today, the history of Navajo weaving

has historically been told from a non-navajo perspective that centers around treating Navajo

weavings purely as aesthetic objects. So this is why you often hear about first phase,

second phase, third phase, chief blankets, for instance. But by treating these weavings in

this way, scholars, collectors, curators have overwhelmingly ignored and dismissed the identity

of the denay creator. Very rarely, for instance, our historic Navajo textiles exhibited alongside

the name of their maker, because as you know, April, that information was not considered important

enough to document at the time the objects were collected. And of course, this is not unique to

the denay people's cultural property. So not only did they not document the creator, they also

dismiss and ignore the denay cultural knowledge ways and cosmologies that are central to really,

truly understanding the object's significance. And that is all changing. Thanks in no small part

to today's guests. We are so pleased to welcome back to part two of our conversation on Navajo weaving,

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