9 Starring Sally Peshlakai: Rewriting the Script for Tad Nichols’s 1939 Navajo Rug Weaving Janna Jones Introduction The library cart next to me is stacked with video transfers of amateur films. I am looking for films that might be candidates for a film preservation grant: footage that is pleasing to the eye and culturally significant to the Colorado Plateau region. After several satisfying hours of watching dusty cows and mule deer, black and white cactus flowers, and 1950s cars on bumpy roads, I start watching Tad Nichols’s 1939 Navajo Rug Weaving. I am immediately struck by the vivid Kodachrome color of a Native American woman’s rust- colored blouse. Shearing a sheep, she works unselfconsciously, neither glancing at the camera nor avoiding it. On her knees, she works deftly, barely looking at the sheep or her sharp shears. In the next scene, the camera focuses on a Native man in a faded blue shirt and a well-made cowboy hat. For 12 seconds, he watches the sheep, the women and children around him. Sitting back in a wooden chair, his arms crossed, he looks casually at the camera, and then nonchalantly looks away. The film chronicles the Navajo rug-weaving process, and it does so systematically. Brief intertitles explain the processes of shearing, wool dying, spinning and weaving. The film offers no information about the weaver, her family or where the film was made, but sometimes the camera counters 9781441139054_txt_print.indd 123 04/10/2013 15:53