healds

Updated: June 26, 2025

She attaches one end of these to a fixed object, usually a rafter in her dwelling, and the other to the belt she wears around her body. She has a set of wooden healds by which she actuates the alternate threads of the warp. Instead of using the slender stick of the Navajos to elevate the threads of the warp in forming her figures, she lifts these threads with her fingers.

Washington Matthews - Navajo weavers: Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881-'82,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1884, pages 371-392.