Lynda Teller Peter, a fifth-generation Navajo weaver, remembers spending her summers as a 6-year-old sitting across from her sister, their weaving looms facing each other, and feeling like the mandatory 20 minutes of weaving a day was a punishment because she wanted to be outside playing.
But those summer weaving sessions paved the way for Teller Pete and her sisters to become some of the Navajo Nation’s most well-known weavers.
Teller Pete is a weaver, author, advocate and teacher. She teaches weaving workshops with her husband, Belvin Pete and at times with her sister Barbara Teller Ornelas.
Their workshops take them across the country and internationally. They’ve traveled to Peru, Dubai, Canada and Mexico, teaching.
“It cascaded into quite the operation that we have now where we’ve gone from teaching at a local yarn shop to going traveling internationally,” Belvin Pete said. “And interesting enough, we have a lot of similarities across the world in terms of weaving because of the interlacing, the fibers, the artwork, and the cultural ties that we have to weaving is universal.”
Pete, a mechanical engineer, also comes from a line of weavers. His Great Grandma, Grandma and Mom were weavers and when he was younger, he would help his brother make his mom’s weaving tools. Now he makes looms for his wife.
As a mechanical engineer, Pete looks for the math and science in weaving, which can be found in wool fibers and how they cling to each other.
When the wool from a sheep is spun to make yarn, it causes the fibers to cling harder to each other and grow stronger with more tension, he said, adding that the concept of weaving and interlacing material is used in productions like steel manufacturing and semiconductor design. Pete said that one of the first computers was made using the concept of a floor loom.
While weaving can be seen in modern technologies, Teller Pete said it’s also important to teach history. In their workshops they talk about the Navajo Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, how weaving survived in the prison camp, they talk about the importance behind the designs and colors and how they relate to the landscape and they teach the cultural stories of how weaving came to exist in the Navajo culture and they teach the process of how the yarn is made.
The workshops are meant to help students at all levels of weaving and is open to Natives and non-Natives. While there is backlash for teaching non-Natives, Teller Pete said it’s important to share the history, technique and culture because some of those students could be future buyers and although weaving can seem like a solitary activity, it isn’t.
“I think that “we” is very powerful,” Teller Pete said. “There’s nothing in the world that will involve just you. “We” is really important because we need tool makers, we need the loom builders, we need the sheep producers, we need the collectors that buy our art to make a living. There’s so much packed in there that involves a collective “we.”