Hubbell Trading Post: The Economy Behind the Weaving

Juan Lorenzo Hubbell opened his trading post at Ganado in eighteen seventy-eight, a decade after the Navajo Long Walk survivors had walked home to their reduced homeland. He built one of the most consequential Indian trading operations in the Southwest, operating continuously for more than a century. The National Park Service took over the site in nineteen sixty-seven; it still functions as a working trading post today.

Hubbell was an influential figure, and the tourism narrative around him tends toward admiration. He learned Navajo, advocated for Navajo rights in some contexts, and pushed for quality standards in Navajo weaving that shaped the visual vocabulary of what became known internationally as the Navajo rug. His trading post was a gathering point. Prominent figures, from politicians to photographers, passed through.

The part that takes longer to document is the trading post economy as Diné weavers experienced it. The trading post system set prices for Navajo goods in a market where the trader controlled credit, supplies, and buyer access. Navajo women who wove the rugs that Hubbell and traders like him sold to Eastern collectors and museum buyers had limited negotiating power in that transaction. The commercialization of weaving patterns that had ceremonial meaning, including the adaptation of sacred sand-painting designs into rugs for sale, was not universally welcomed within Hopi and Navajo communities.

The rugs in the Hubbell collection are beautiful objects. They represent the skill of Diné women who wove them over lifetimes. The trading post economy that connected those women to American collectors was built on a significant asymmetry of power that the current National Park Service interpretive materials have begun to address directly.

Navajo-authored documentation of this history is available through the Navajo Nation's own archives.