Dancing Off the Wall: The Tlingit Naaxein and the Limits of Western Textile Theory
Written by Hannah Katchen
Edited by Justin Choi
On the closing day of The Spirit Wraps Around You, the Alaska State Museum exhibit that brought two dozen Chilkat and Ravenstail robes together, Tlingit dancers lifted the naaaxein from their mounts and danced them through the galleries into the collections storage. The weavers co-curated the show and requested this ending for the exhibit [1] .
The naazein is worn across the shoulders, announcing the wearer's clan with a woven crest. Its heavy fringe of cedar bark and goat wool sways with the body, while lighter fringe bounces against it in the rhythms of song. The robe connects the living to the ancestors whose crests it carries. Chief Daanawaak of the Lukaax.ádi wore the Gaat Naaxien to court to prove his clan’s title to land. He compared it to “white man’s papers,” noting that legal documents change while the robe does not.[2] The naaxien is regalia, genealogy, territorial record, and ceremonial participation all in one.
The robe cannot function pinned flat to a wall, yet the wall is where Western scholarship has encountered the naaxien. The robe should not be understood through a Western textile-theory viewpoint that analyzes it as a craft, decorative art, artifact, or tapestry. Western textile histories often present twining, the technique used to make the naaxien, as an early and inefficient stage of weaving that the loom later replaced. However, for the naaxien, twining is essential. It packs the weft tightly enough to cover the warp, creating a fabric heavy enough to swing the fringe in dance and durable enough to be worn at potlatches for generations. Many hands contribute to a single robe. Mountain goat wool is spun into yarn by the spinner and dyed with wolf moss and other natural dyes. Cedar bark is twisted into the warp that becomes the fringe. Men carve the pattern board that produces the design, drawing on the same tradition that shapes totem poles, house posts, and regalia. Women do the weaving, a skill learned through close instruction from a master weaver [3] . Neither role is secondary to the other. There are only a dozen living weavers, holding high status in their clans [4]. Saantass’ of Klukwan, who wove the Gaat Naaxien, is highly regarded, and her great-great-granddaughter Lani Hotch is a master weaver today. [5]
Once finished, the robe belongs to the clan at at.óow, sacred property that binds the clan to its crest, its land, and its ancestors. Its authorship is shared among the carver, spinners, dyers, weaver, and the clan itself. Many museum labels leave out most of these elements.
The last element added to a naaxein is its side fringe, which is attached by a single thread. When that thread breaks, the whole side fringe is lost, and many robes in museum collections are missing theirs [6] . The fringe is central to the robe's spiritual work, because its movement in dance links the human and spirit worlds. When a museum displays a robe without its fringe, and without acknowledging the loss, it cannot convey what the robe means.
Museums have begun to respond to what the robe needs. For The Spirit Wraps Around You, weavers served as co-curators, and one asked that the robes be shown as if dancing rather than laid flat. The museum built three-dimensional mounts shaped to the body and clear enough for weavers to study the construction on the back. Other problems are harder to solve. Some clan regalia sits in museum safekeeping because a federal court applied patrilineal inheritance to a matrilineal clan. Until the clan decides who can grant access, weavers cannot study those robes. [7]
The naaxein does not need outside theory to give it meaning. Its authority comes from clan inheritance, ceremony, and use. It is most fully itself on a dancer's shoulders, where the fringe moves and the crests face the community, as it was when the weavers danced the robes out of the exhibit and into storage.
(Hannah Katchen ’28 is in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hbk42@cornell.edu)
Sources:
KTOO 360TV, “At the APK: The Spirit Wraps Around You Closing Event,” YouTube, 2021.
Henrikson et al., The Spirit Wraps Around You, 25.
Ellen Carrlee, interview by Hannah Katchen, April 2026
Carrlee, interview.
Henrikson et al., The Spirit Wraps Around You, 25musignificanceseums.
Carrlee, interview.
Carrlee, interview.
