Ancestral Pueblo people began making turkey feather blankets about 1,800 years ago, coinciding with the transition to settled agricultural life.
Feathers made an excellent insulating material and replaced rabbit skin strips in blanket construction. Early settlements within the Four Corners region were 5,000 feet above sea level, so warm bedding and clothing were essential for survival.
A 2020 study examined a roughly 800-year-old blanket from southeastern Utah housed at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding. The three-and-a-half-foot-long blanket required more than 11,000 downy turkey feathers woven with nearly 600 feet of yucca fiber cordage. Researchers estimate that feathers of four to ten turkeys were needed to produce a blanket of this size.
Feathers can be painlessly harvested from live birds during natural molting periods, twice a year, when old, dead feathers are shed at the shaft. That allows sustainable collection over a turkey's lifespan of ten years or more. Ethnographic data suggest women made the blankets, which served as cold-weather cloaks, sleeping blankets, and funerary wrappings.
Mary Weahkee, of Santa Clara Puebloan and Comanche ancestry, is a retired New Mexico archeologist and practitioner of traditional arts. She’s woven an ancestral Puebloan turkey feather blanket using traditional methods and materials. She shows how the process of creating these works of art is a testimony to remarkable patience and artistry.
This Earth Note was written by Carrie Calisay Cannon and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University.
