[Dr. Susan Pavel]
But there's one weaving that stood out that kept making me go look back at her. And that was the tunic, who we now call Grandmother Tunic.
Quite honestly, the weaving itself, it's not much to look at. There's no color, and it's not particularly white. It's like a little bit dirty on the dirty side. Nothing's going to catch your eye about it.
However, it just kept talking to me. It just kept talking to me. So, I would wake up in the morning and I'd be thinking about this tunic, vest. We didn't even know what to call it back then. And I would go to sleep thinking about this too. And then I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this tunic.
And finally, I don't know about two weeks of this constantly happening to me. I went to uncle and I'm like, uncle, why does this weaving just, like, keep tapping me on the shoulder and keep whispering in my ear, I don't what's going on here.
And uncle says do you really not know what's going on?
It's vibrating. It's it needs more than living in the drawer in the basement of the field. Something is beckoning, hungry and almost desperate to live outside that box. To bring her teachings back into the world.
And for those of us who can hear that message, we are the beholden. We are commanded to allow that to work through us. And at this point in my life, I recognize that I have trained myself. Been obedient to in the most beautiful, precious way, obedience to the teachings of SQ3Tsya’yay, which means weaver spirit, power.
I don't take that charge lightly. I do all the things I'm supposed to do and then some to keep that pure and to keep it honest and to keep it thriving through. I don't squelch it. I don't dismiss it, I honor it, and I lift up the things that I can hear and see and smell and taste and feel and all the ways that the spirit wants to talk to this human called sa’hLa mitSa.
So that's what was happening with Grandmother Tunic. She wanted to be alive. She wanted her teachings to be out there and viable for all of us.
So, the most remarkable thing about that is that the opening for the neck was not something that, at least in our territory, nobody was teaching this particular weaving in this particular way with the neck opening woven in place, meaning you didn't cut the warp to produce the opening. You wove it in such a way that the opening was created while you wove it. And so, we figured out a way to weave her with the neck opening, and then we could not teach it fast enough. People were constantly asking, how do we weave this particular tunic?
So we taught and we taught and we taught and we taught and we taught and we taught. And I remember distinctly at one point there was, a young—could have been maybe ten years old-ish girl who had come to me and said, I learned from so-and-so, and that person learned from so-and-so, and you taught that person.
So it's like I had a great grandchild who was learning to weave as a result of Grandmother Tunic coming out and wanting to be heard and spoken and see the light of day.
