She learned finger weaving
An open notebook on her couch shows a grid of notations that look like something from an advanced math class. A nearby suitcase is filled with brightly colored yarn and projects in various states of completion.
“Everything I need is in there. Whenever I do a workshop I have everything put together and ready to go,” Wisey Narcomey, Seminole, explained.
She pulls out ziplock bags filled with yarn, key rings and beads.
“These are easy to do.”
The notebook is for the patterns she weaves. The formulas are for the number of threads in which order to use for each pattern.
Wisey, pronounced “why-zee,” practices and teaches the art of finger weaving.
“I learned at Chilocco. I only went one year, but that is where I learned,” she said.
She attended the Indian boarding school near Newkirk to complete her senior year of high school.
“My daddy had to drive me two miles in order to catch the bus. I only needed this one class to graduate,” she said. “What you need to do, (some family members said) is put her clothes in a suitcase and put her on the bus to Chilocco.”
Her family didn’t want her walking the two miles to catch the bus every day or for her dad to have to drive her.
“So I went to Chilocco,” Wisey said.
She said students only attended class for half a day. The other half was spent in common labor. “That’s the way that school was ran. You either had a morning class or an afternoon class.”
“When I went up there, the Navajos were still living on their land and wasn’t associating with other people. They had classes for them so they could learn English because they spoke only their language. They were kinda secluded to themselves,” she said. She remembered being in a room and ironing. The Navajo students would come by to visit. “They kept to themselves. But they would come talk to me.”
One of the classes the students had to take was a domestic-themed one. For a week a student would assume the role of the father of a family. The next week, be the mother and so on.
“You had to do all these things. Whatever they’d do at home. Being a father, you’d do whatever a father does. A mother, of course, she cooked and all that. The housekeeper did the housecleaning. We had to milk the cow, drain the milk, separate the milk, the whole bit,” she said.
She said they had a cow back home, but her mother wouldn’t let her or any of the kids milk it.
Over all, she liked school and said it was interesting and fun.
“All the girls were nice to me. There was two or three to a room or you stayed in the dorm, that big room with all those beds in there,” Wisey said. “I just stayed in a room with two other women. There was three of us.”
She remembered one girl in particular. She liked to borrow Wisey’s clothes.
“I guess she came without any clothes ‘cause she was always borrowing clothes from me. She had a boyfriend, too. She was really nice though. But she’d borrow from me and she wouldn’t bring my stuff back and I got tired of it!” she exclaimed.
The other girls told Wisey what they would do. They would go to the girl’s closet and get their clothes back.
“I went to her closet and the only thing hangin’ up there was my skirt! I guess she was just wearin’ other people’s clothes. I don’t know. She dressed well, I know that.”
Wisey graduated Chilocco in 1950.
“I finished there. After class, I was taking extra credit. It was in finger weaving.”
Her teacher was Josephine Wapp, a Comanche craftswoman who is well known for her weaving today. She instructed the students in the various tribal styles of finger weaving. Anything the girls made, the school sold.
“We even had the loom I made a rug on. The first rug you made, that was the school’s. The second rug you made, it was yours,” Wisey said.
She came back home after graduating and thought she’d stay there.
“I thought that Indians, after they graduated from school, they don’t do nuthin’ but stay home. So that’s what I decided to do. But that didn’t work,” she said.
She was the youngest of 13 children and her mother had other plans for her.
“Mama sent me to town to get a job. I had to walk. Yeah, she gave me a dollar or two. She said, ‘You got you a education. You’re not staying home. You get a job. That’s what you’re supposed to do,’” she said.
So Wisey went to work. She waitressed for a time. Then worked in a jeans factory. She eventually went to college and made her way through as a work-study doing janitor work.
“That paid the tuition. The tribe paid too, but they just paid so much.”
She stayed busy with her life and family and didn’t have time for weaving, at least not until she was at a powwow with friends one weekend. They were admiring the woven belts worn by the dancers when Wisey said, “I can do that.”
As soon as her friends learned she knew how to finger weave, they and her family encouraged her to pick it up again.
Since then, she’s been traveling to powwows and festivals all over the country demonstrating and selling her weavings.
“I do mine like I was taught. We use two chairs. I use the back of a chair. You work from the one in front of you and work to the back,” she explained.
She counts the number of strands of heavy acrylic yarn needed for the pattern she has chosen and ties them in order to the back of a chair. She then pulls the strands to the back of the chair she is sitting in and wraps the yarn around a rung of the chair’s back. She starts weaving from the front, the strands of yarn suspended between to the two chairs, the one she is sitting in and the one she has in front of her.
“If the truth be known, I’m a left-handed person. But when I was taught how to do this, I was taught to use my right hand. So when I do this, I do it with my right hand,” she said.
The strands of yarn are laced between her fingers, her tips bent, plucking the individual strands and guiding one over or under the other. She talks her way through the row.
“That’s down. That’s up. This has got to go down, that goes down. Up. Down. And up and down. This goes up and this goes down. Black is hard to see,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t cross your work either. You gotta go straight. You goin’ straight, ya gotta stay straight.”
“It’s not hard,” she tells her students. “You just have to get the hang of it. It’s all what you know, what you can do and what you get used to.”
But she admits that she’s had more than one student who ended up asking her to complete their project for them. “‘Here, you take it, Wisey, and finish it for me. I can’t do it,’ they’d say.” From her tone, she doesn’t quite believe them. But she shakes her head and says she’ll do it. “Some people, they just can’t get it. They just can’t do it.”
Even she has had her moments. She’s unintentionally created some designs of her own. She pulls out a piece that has one pattern on one side and a completely different on the other.
“I didn’t even know it was like that until I turned it over and it was like that. I don’t sell it. I just show it,” she said laughingly.
Could she do it again? On purpose?
“Of course I can! All I got to do is count the threads and put them in the right order. That’s all you got to do, is count the threads and put them in the right order and you got it made in the shade.”
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