"Instructor Weaves Together Generations of Art"
Clarissa Hudson teaches her first Chilkat weaving class to Jennie Thlunaut's Granddaughters at Sheldon Museum
by Bonnie Hedrick
Chilkat Valley News, Haines, Alaska
November 23, 1989
Contact Clarissa for permission to use text or images for educational purposes only

Two months before she died, famed Chilkat weaver Jennie Thlunaut pulled apprentice Clarissa Hudson close.

"My work is finished," Thlunaut said, "You are it. You understand me? You are it! I am a tired old woman who wants to rest...I want to go home how and I'm glad I learned you. You promise me you will learn somebody else this weaving. I do not want this to die with me. This is our life, this is our culture."

Last week, the master weaver's request ws realized when three of her grand-daughters and one great-granddaughter studied the skills and techniques of their family's weaving under the tutelage of Hudson at the Sheldon Museum.

It was a study in contrasts as the ages-old technique of weaving mingled with the rhythms of contemporary music under the warmth of high-intensity lamps in the museum's conference room. On the wall hung one of Thlunatu's blankets, given to historian Lib Hakkinen 29 years ago in memory of her parents.

The three-day workshop here was sponsored by a $5000 grant awarded Thlunaut by the National Endowment for the Arts before her death in 1986. Chosen as one of only a dozen folk artists nation-wide to receive the National Heritage Fellowship, Thlunaut planned to use the grant to continue her weaving and teach her family its intricacies, daughter Agnes Bellinger said.

But Thlunaut's death put the grant's future in question until her daughters convinced administrators in Washington, D.C. that their mother's art could still be kept alive. With the help of long-time friend Hakkinen, the local museum became the grantee for the award and the medium for the teaching of her life's work.

Without Thlunaut to teach the class, the family had only one choice for instructor. "There's only one choice for the instructor. There's only one person we can use to do this my mother's way. She told all her grandchildren she (Hudson) was the only student she ever taught from stitch one to finish a project," said Bellinger.

Hudson's training went beyond the intricate fingerwork of traditional weaving. Bellinger said, "She got extensive training in the emotional and behavioral side of it, too. She taught Clarissa you have to have the right attitude toward life in general, get rid of the negativeness." Weavers traditionally fasted for three days before beginning a project, and each morning would also come to the loom "clean" before eating or doing other work, Bellinger said.

Although traditionally handed down only within families, Hudson said Thlunaut's choice to allow her, not a relative, to apprentice was a matter of necessity brought on by the master weaver's failing health.

"It was a real sacred thing to her and important thing for her to stick to her traditional ways. She wanted to pass it on traditionally to someone of her lineage.

She went beyond her traditons (by teaching me) but she had to, knowing she was leaving," Hudson said.

At the time, however, Hudson said she had no inkling of the responsibility Thlunaut was giving her. "She said all those words, but it never registered. You take it for granted that people are goint to live. I didn't realize she hadn't taught anybody else...It was a responsibility I didn't realize I had with passing her technique on. It didn't hit me until she died."

Almost paralyzed by the weight of that responsibility, Hudson said she did little weaving from the time of Thlunaut's death until the workshops here. "I was afraid to start, because what if I didn't remember," she said. "I asked for her assistance. Right now I still get goose-bumps. When I started weaving the feeling was there. I think she's here. All my actions and words were very careful because I don't want her to leave or get upset."

Hudson now feels she's weaving better than ever before. In the meeting room of the museum, she quietly went from weaver to weaver, offering assistance to the four women huddled close to their looms.

"I don't see myself as a teacher, I see myself as a vessel," she said to Phoebe Warren, Louise Light, Vivian Stevens and Diane Young. "I wasn't related to Jennie, you guys were. You are already weavers, in my mind. You're just remembering."

Warren and Light recalled watching their grandmother weave, helping her by gathering bits of mountain goat yarn and learning the rudiments of weaving. The pressures of family life and work kept them from focusing on the art in the following years, however. Now, they are impressed by how their grandmother was able to raise her family, work in town and be such a profilife artisan. "With all those grandchildren, you wonder how she had the time to do anything like this," Warren said.

Nearly 50 Chilkat blankets to her credit, no one comes close to the skill which earned Thlunaut the title of "master weaver," Hudson said. Ironically, that title was one which Thlunaut didn't put much stock in. "She never thought of herself as a master weaver," Warren said. "Whenever someone said it, she would laugh."

Although her work was a source of pride, Thlunaut taught Hudson a weaver shouldn't boast. "She said when you choose this person to learn from you, you watch how this person is, what they do, how they do it. You watch them close before you learn them. That's what I did with you. You cannot choose somebody who is going to get bigheaded about this, it is not right."

The workshops here were not meant to teach expertise in the historic tradition of weaving, but offer instead a base upon which further learning can be based, Hudson said. "It takes five years to gain the skills to do a blanket, but at least they're getting the beginning."

Instead of using the traditional mountain goat yarn and cedar bark, the women wove cotton clothesline and acrylic yarn. "they don't have the right materials. "They're improvising just so they could learn the stitches," Bellinger said.

Warren said she hoped to some day pass the art of Chilkat weaving on to others. "Everyone hopes that (to teach others). I'm not too interested in teaching people who are just interested. I'd like to pass it on to my family."

Bellinger said it gave her satisfaction to see her relatives learn the weaving she described as "becoming a lost art."

Hudson agreed and said it would have also made Thlunaut happy. "Weaving was not just her life, it was her passion. This was her love made visible."

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