Biography of Jennie Thlunaut: Part 3

Fig 7. Jennie Thlunaut in her ceremoinial role in "The Captain."

"Jennie Thlunaut” Master Chilkat Blanket Artist
by Rosita Worl and Charles Smythe
from the Exhibit book “The Artists Behind the Work"
published by the University of Alaska Museum,
Fairbanks, Alaska 1986
Reprinted here with author's permission
Jennie Thlunaut 1892-1986

Contact Clarissa for permission to use images or text for educational purposes only

Jennie Gets the Name "Strong Coffee"
The name "Strong Coffee" was formally bestowed on Jennie when she was young, during a potlach in Hoonah. The name originated with John Benson and Henry Phillips.

John and Henry returned to Klukwan after attending school at Sheldon Jackson. Jennie said, "They don't know how to do hard work." This statement is often made about students who have not had the opportunity and time to learn adequately the technical skills necessary for hunting and fishing.

Jennie recalls that the price of the a river fish jumped from ten cents to twenty-five cents. Jennie said that "Hoonah People" and "Juneau People" had come to fish at Haines. They would put their nets in the river at Ten Mile (up the river) and drift down to Jones point, which is between seven and eight miles upriver from Haines. She said that their nets would be full of dog salmon even before they reached Jones Point.

Fishing in October is cold. Jennie recounted that Henry and John had built a fire under a cottonwood tree and "put lots of coffee on." The fishermen would gather at Henry and John's big fire and drink coffee. It was not too long before people started calling Henry and John "Strong Coffee." Jennie says that anytime she sees the big cottonwood tree by the side of the road as she passes by, "I think about it...good idea they build a fire."

Later in the year Jennie's husband's uncle, Kudei Nahaa, invited the young people from Haines to attend a "big party." According to Jennie, he had "put up lot's of money" which would be distributed to the guests. Kudei Hahaa had approached Henry and told him, "It's good for you that name, `Strong Coffee', you better give it to your son's wife." (Because Henry had the same name as Jennie's father-in-law). Jennie does not know how many thousands of dollars were "put up" in that potlach for her to receive the name "Strong Coffee" but she recalls with much pride: "I honor that name because my father-in-law gave it to me...that's the way we get (I got) the name but I honor the name, costs lots of money." In Tlingit custom only good daughter-in-laws receive gifts from their father-in-law.

Jennie is "The Captain"
This story involves a historical dispute between sailors who are remebered as being dutch, and the Tlingit. The silors killed some Tlingit people in Klukwan. They were pursued inthe war canoes by the Kaagwaantaan clan down to the Kaagwaantaan fort, Kax' Noowu (Ground Hog bay), near Hoonah. The Kaagwaantaan shaa (women) now claim the rights to the silors uniforms. Jennie was approached to serve as the Captain. She claims she was selected because she was the oldest woman in her clan. She says she is too old now, so Daisy Phillips is next in line to succeed her.

The First Blankets
In 1908, Jennie's mother died, and she left behind a chest containing materials necessary to make a blanket (yarn and such). The chest also contained a blanket that her mother had started, with "black and yellow on." Her father gave the chest and its content to Jennie and she took it with her when she went to the mining camp with her first husband. She "worked steady up there in Porcupine from May to September" and "finished that blanket up there." This was the first blanket she finished. Jennie's definition of 'steady' means working continuously through the daylight hours of the long summer day and stopping only for a few moments to eat.

Her husband's sister, Noow Teiyi, married a man from Ketchikan. Jennie and her husband used to go there during the summer for the fishing, starting in 1910. In the first summer she was there she made a blanket while living "in a tent." The white ladies would come in to watch her work on the blanket. She worked steady and completed it in two months. It was a "little one." She traded it for a gold watch "for her old man." This was the first blanket she made by herself from start to finish.

The next blanket she made was also woven in Ketchikan during the summertime. Someone had ordered it and she sold it for fifty dollars. Her husband used the money to buy a sailing boat which they used to return to Klukwan at the summer's end.

A man from Klukwan, Kawushgaa, ordered an ANB flag so that he could give it as a present to the Sitka ANB Camp. Jennie wove the letters ANB and the year on a plain white background. She thinks it is in Sitka now but does not know who has it.

Fig. 8. Jennie Thlunaut with a completed robe, ca. 1930.

When she was first married, she made baskets, beadwork, moccasins, porcupine quill work, and blankets (fig 8). She also knitted, crocheted, and did embroidery. During this time, it was evident she had difficulties with male children. She had six boys in all with her first husband, but "they did not grow up." After a while, her husband did not want her to work and make things; he told her to take care of the kids. When telling her to to stop sewing with porcupine quills, he had said, "Don't do that job. It's too dangerous. The kids are going to get in to it, that sharp thing." "That's why I quit. It's nice job, that." So she did not make any more blankets or other items until after he died.

Working and Learning
After her first husband died, Jennie began to devote most of her time to weaving. She notes, "I started good. Steady." Her aunt and other weavers would work only when "they got time to sit down." They would usually take two years to finish a blanket. Jennie would work continuously until she finished a blanket. She recalls that her auntie was "surprised I finished two months." She expresses gratitude towrds her mother for her ability to work "steady" until her task is completed. She credits her mother for teaching her to make things properly, which includes taking initiative and working diligently until her task is completed.
When Jennie spoke about her father taking items to sell in Skagway, she comments on the work of her mother that,"not many people do that job; just like that [today] they don't care nothing. But only my momma makes something."

Fig. 11. (L to R). Mountain goat wool, mountain goat wool spun into weft yarn, mountain goat wool spun with cedar bark into warp yarn, shredded cedar bark.

Jennie believes, "if you are willing to do it you'll learn it, but if you don't care you can't do it." When asked about her teaching skills to others, she said she would like to teach, whithout charge, but "nobody likes to learn. I feel funny about it...Just the same, they always say too much work. They don't like to do the spinning the yarn and the bark. I'm willing to do it--just my own people, not white people--but nobody like it. Funny. It's big money."

Materials
Click here to see map where Jennie gathered her Chilkat weaving materials

Jennie spins the wool for the Chilkat blanket from mountain goat hair (fig11). In the fall time, the hunters would get the mountain goats, and she would buy the skins from them. Her most recent blankets are a combination of mountain goat and commercially made yarn.

Four skins in all are needed for a blanket. The entire skin is not used., but only a strip along the back which is thicker. She uses two skins for the inner part of the blanket (the warp), and the outer yarn (the weft) takes two additional skins.

She always prepared the wool and made the yarn herself by spinning it on her leg or hand (fig. 12). She says that the hardest is the inner part (warp) in which the goat wool and cedar bark are spun together. Jennie recalls at one time she almost purchased a spinning wheel to make her yarn, but no one knew how to use it. She cooked the bark herself, to prepare it for spinning. Cedar bark is not available locally in Klukwan. She would purchase the bark from her sister, Margaret Shatter, who lived in Hoonah. Margaret's husband picked the cedar bark, and they would send it to Jennie in a box used to ship eggs. Each box held about fifteen pieces; the first box cost her twenty five dollars. Subsequently, the boxes were higher priced.

Fig. 9. Jennie does beadowrk as well as weaving. She made this vest with a beaded Eagle crest design for her granddaughter, Rosita Worl, in the 1970s.

The Chilkat Blanket
Jennie related the following as her understanding of the origin of the Chilkat blanket: there was a Gaanaxteidi man who had two wives. One wife was a Tsimshian named Ha yu was tlaa (I was not able to hear her pronounce this name well, and Johnny Marks was not familiar with the name. It may be Tsimshian name, but it is also certain that if she were married to a Tlingit she would have been adopted and had a Tlingit name). This Tsimshian woman knew how to weave Chilkat blankets. Jennie said that the women of the Gaanaxteidi tribal house in Klukwan "rip it back [that is took a blanket apart]; the whole house people [all of the women in the Gaanaxteidi tribal house], they learn first, but they have different designs--Killerwhale, Eagle, and the Raven design. The Kaagwaantaan [women] used the Eagle, Killerwhale, Wolf, and Bear [designs]." Jennie said that the first blanket made by the Gaanaxteidi women, which Martha Willard has, is "too old" and that it has a "beaver on it."

The Gaanaxteidi shaa (women of the Gaanaxteidi clan) claim the Chilkat blanket. Jennie said, "My daddy pay my auntie [a Gaanaxteidi] to learn my momma [a Kaaagwaantaan], my momma's sister, Saant'ass, my auntie, my momma's auntie." Jennie's father has thus paid a Raven woman to teach the Eagle women. Jennie added, "Mrs. Benson, she's a Raven, she a good blanket waever. I married her son, she learned me."

Johnny Marks related the following about the origin of the Chilkat blanket, saying that it was told him several times by his auntie Jessie: A young Tsimshian woman fell asleep and dreamed. In her dreeam, she learned how to do the Chilkat weave. When she awoke she said, "They've been teaching me something." She told her family what she needed and then made leggings. Chief Daakw Tank from Chilkat, who was a Kaagwaantaan from the Bear House, heard about this weaving. His daughter was coming out of puberty seclusion and he wanted to commemorate it with something significant so that the people would remember it. He bought the leggings. His wife or daughter took them apart and studied them and from this made the Chilkat blanket. They practiced it for years before they perfected it. (The hardest to weave is a shirt). Johnny has the impression that this was a fairly recent occurance, five hundred to six hundred years ago, or maybe more.

The Tsimshians were the first group to start weaving ceremonial garments. They were known for making dancing aprons, leggings, and blankets. Through intermarriage, the Tlingit learned this craft. By the time of the incursions of European traders into the area in the late 1800's, women of the Chilkat villages were regarded as the greatest producers of the largest of the ceremonial garments, the dancing blanket. The European traders coined the name "Chilkat blanket" in recognition of the weaving skills of the Chilkat women.

Fig. 12. Jennie Thlunaut spinning wool warp at the Festival of American Folklife, Washington, D.C., 1984

Specific designs are woven into the blankets. These designs are rests of family or clan groups which serve as property markers and emblems of the group (plates 12, 13, 14). The crests are stylized animal figures which are symmetrical and are comprised of conventialized, colored design elements. Blankets are identified by the central figure, although the design may include additional elements or other figures which fill in the available spaces. More rare are blankets in which a single design is repeated in checkerboard fashion in the design space. The design is bounded by three bands of solid color: yellow, black, and white. The white band is narrower than the others and forms the outer edge; braids flow out from it on the bottom and two sides of the blanket. These braids produce evocative effects during dances, often flowing from side to side or shaking violently.

Carving and blanket designs were similiar in style. Weavers were provided with pattern boards fashioned and painted by a male artist (fig. 13). The desings on the board were transformed into wool, each portion being measured by a cord or a piece of cedar bark which would be marked with the thumbnail. Weavers could count the number of stitches in design elements so measured, in order to replicate the design elements with the conventional symmetry (fig. 14).

Women made the yarn from mountain goat wool obtained from skins provided by male hunters. They spun the wool into yarn by hand on their thighs, (although Cheryl Samuels [1982:62] reports an alternatiove method involving the use of spindles and whorls.) Black and yellow colors were obtained from dyes made from hemlock bark, copper, and a specific lichen which, combined with urine, would produce the desired colors in the yarn. Women also gathered the inner bark from cedar trees which they prepared and spun together with the mountain goat yarn, making the stonger yarn used for the warp of the blanket.

Fig. 13. This pattern board was made for Mildred Sparks of Klukwan and is similar to ones used by Jennie. Sheld Museum and Cultural Center collection. Fig. 14. Jennie shows Irene Jimmy how the design on the pattern board is wven into the blanket. Photo by Larry McNeil (www.larrymcneil.com)

The loom consisted of two upright posts to which a cross-piece was attached at the top. Another beam was situated just below the cross-piece to which the heading cord was attached by strings that were laced through holes placed in the beam. Several different stitches were used for various sections, including the heading, sidebraids, borders, and the design field. In addition to straight stitches, Chilkat weavers were capable of a variety of curvilinear shapes, including circles, ovals, and arcs used frequently in the design element.

Shirts
Jennie made six Chilkat woven shirts in her life. There was only one lady in Klukwan who knew how to make shirts, but she did not want to teach Jennie how to make them, so Jennie tried it and figured out how to make shirts on her own.

The shirt was made for Jack David is a spirit shirt. It has the name Naa Tuxgaayi. Austin Hammond has this shirt now (fig. 16). She also made a shirt for Tom Jimmie and for her second husband John Mark (Thlunaut). Her husband sold the shirt Jennie made for him while she was in the hospital. He sold it to someone aboard the missionary boat Sheldon Jackson, which at the time traveled to all southeastern communities. She felt so bad about it that she made another one just like it. Austin Hammond inherited this shirt as part of the Lukwaax.adi clan property. Jennie also indicates she made a shirt for Peter Dick of Angoon.

Cultural Signifigance of Chilkat Blankets
The ceremonial regalia of the Tlingit nobility includes the Chilkat blanket. They are worn at potlaches and other ceremonies. Weavers were often commissioned to make Chilkat blankets to commemorate events recorded in a clan's oral traditions. Chilkat blankets were also given away in potlatches. Sometimes they were even cut up and the pieces were distributed among the guests. The blanket is used in dancing and is quite spectacular when it is swirling in motion as the dancers spin around. Today the blankets are the prize of musuem collections around the world. Chilkat blankets are important to the Tlingit both in life and death. Tlingit nobles were cremated in their ceremonial regalia. After the practice of burying the dead was adopted, the Tlingit would either wear their blankets or drape them over their burial sites. When they found that whites were taking them from the graveyard sites, the Tlingit began cutting the blankets into strips. They found that even this did not discourage the grave robbers, who continued to remove them.

Jennie made a number of Chilkat blankets for outright commercial sales to non-Tlingits. She was also commissioned by other Tlingits to make them Chilkat blankets and shirts. Jennie also made and gave away Chilkat blankets and shirts to her family members. Many of these Chilkat blankets and shirts remain the propert of the clans. Clans also own rights to specific crests. Jennie is always careful to ensure that she weaves only those crests on the blankets and shirts to which the Tlingit recipients of the blankets or shirts have property rights. For instance, she would never weave a Raven crest for a Tlingit who is a member of the Eagle clan.

The following stories which Jennie related reveal the importance of the Chilkat blankets to the Tlingit.
Jennie was invited to a potlach in Hoonah. During the potlach Jimmy Marks put money on the table (which would be distributed to validate her right to the name), called Jennie out and said, "Excuse me, sister, I am going to adopt you, I am going to give you my sister's name, Alice Sutton's name." Jennie felt so honored to be given the name L'eex'eendu.oo, (Keeping the Broken Pieces), and to become the adopted sister of Jimmy Marks, who was the Chief of the Chookaneidi Clan.

When Jimmie Marks became ill, Jennie was so worried that she would not have any money to give in his honor when he died. She recalls the distress she felt: "What we [I] going to do when he died. I got nothing...I got no money." At that pont she decided to make him a Chilkat shirt. When she finished the shirt she went down to Juneau to visit him. He had recently been released from the hospital. She approached him, "I just came to see you. I worry about [you]. I thinking about you all the time. I got no brother, that's why I'm glad adopt me for your sister...what are we going to do when you go away? That's why I make something for you." Jennie recounted his response: "How do you know my thoughts? Thank you. That's the way we think about it when we know we're going to pass away. Somebody going to put the bear ear, you know, dancing, they use it, they put it on my head and then we died with it. Now this time you make that bear, thank you very much!" (Gangoosh [head band with bear ears] was put on the nobility just prior to their death). Jennie returned to Klukwan pleased that she had made something special for her adopted brother.

Jennie occasionally stayed with her daughter, Edna Land. Edna lived in Haines next to the Raven House in which Jennie had once lived with her husband John Mark (Thlunaut). Austin Hammond is now the recognized Chief of the Lukwaax.adi and lives in the Raven House.

Jennie recalls that one day in July when she was staying with Edna, she looked out the window and was surprised to see her adopted brother and his wife going into Austin's house. She recalled thinking, "Oh, my auntie coming and her husband too!" It was not too long before someone came to get her to go to Austin's house, and soon the purpose of the visit was made evident. Jennie recalled her brother's words to her: "We come back from Hoonah. I show the one you give me, the shirt. I show my family, and my family says they don't want to bury with me." Jimmie explained that his family wanted to keep the shirt rather than having it buried with him. His family felt that the shirt would remind them of both Jimmy and Jennie. Jimmy told Jennie the purpose of his visit was to explain his family's wishes to her. Jennie simply replied, "Thank you."

After his death, Jennie went to Hoonah to participate in his potlach. The evening before the big potlach, all his personal possessions, "his tools, everything" were given to members of his clan. Jennie was approached by one of her adopted brother's clan members, "Sister,your brother was talking about you lots, about the blanket shirt. It costs too much money...He feels bad he go away before you. He [was] talking about he was going to buy your casket when he go away. Now this time he go ahead of you. That's why he told me to give you this money." Jennie was handed an envelope which she opened and found one thousand dollars. The clan member continued, "your brother was talking about it, when you go away you buy some casket." Jennie explained that this is why her family and friends need not worry, "I'm all right. Everything is okay." Jennie has put the money she received from her brother in the bank to pay for her coffin when "she goes away too."

The Chilkat Bear shirt which Jennie had made for her adopted brother, Jimmy Marks, became part of the Chookaneidi Clan property. Willie Marks, who succeeded his brother Jimmy, inherited the shirt. Jennie's neice, Mary Johnson, who is also Chookaneidi, became the caretaker of the clan's possessions. Jennie points out that she is often given money by those who have her Chilkaat blankets or shirts. She tells that once she was at a potlach and a man came and embraced her, he said, "I'm glad I got it your job. Thank you very much." He pressed fifty dollars into Jennie's hand and said, "That's my thanks; don't say no." She also tells that Willie Marks would give her twenty dollars of fifty dollars just to go the restaurant.

Continue “Jennie Thlunaut” Biography Part 4

Click here to see map of where Jennie lived and worked

Click here to read about the Chilkat Valley environment.

Clarissa Hudson
970-903-8386