Weaving today

The majority of modern Cherokee weavers are older women on the Qualla reservation in North Carolina, but this does not mean that basket making among these people is a dying art. None of the presently recognized weavers began to make baskets regularly until they were in their late twenties or older, and there are a number of younger women who are now learning the craft and beginning serious basket production.

North Carolina weavers tend to specialize as to materials used and shapes or designs preferred, but all utilize locally gathered materials and for the most part natural dyes. Among the weavers are: Emma Taylor and Carol S.Welsh. The most skilled cane basket makers are Eva Wolfe, Rowena Bradley and Edmond Youngbird. Oak splint baskets are made by Elsie Welsh Watty, Amanda Smoke and Agnes Welsh. Oak rib basketry is the specialty of eighty year old Julia Taylor and her daughters Dollie Taylor and Sallie Taylor Wade and granddaughter, Mary Ann Ball. Sally Locust, Joyce Taylor, Nancy Conseen and Geneava Tooni are expert weavers of honeysuckle wicker.

Increased production a marked improvement in quality and the re-learning ofthe almost forgotten double-weaving by Eva Wolfe have been positive responses by basketmakers to market demands. Through the years there have been changes in popular shapes and favored materials, an increase in exoticforms, and in the number of styles with handles. The most recent innovation has been the substitution of maple for oak in many of the simpler plaited styles. Maple has a glossy sheen which has been found to have a greaterappeal to the purchaser of baskets at Qualla.

In Oklahoma, where no stable market for baskets developed, there was a brief florescence of the craft in the 1930s and the 1940s followed by a rapid decline. Today there are few well-known weavers and most baskets are made on commission or occasionally for small local outlets. Oklahoma Cherokee basketmakers, particularly Joyce Johnson, Ella Mae Blackbear, Mavis Doering,Thelma Forrest, Shirley Gewein and several living in the Tahlequah area are making some effort toward revitalizing the craft in the state. Quality and production are improving although several weavers work extensively with commercially purchased materials.

Eva Wolfe, an Eastern Cherokee, specializes in cane double-weaving and is one of the most widely known basketweavers in the United States.

source: Basketry of Southeastern Indians by Marshall Gettys, Editor

The Original Weaver

Baskets carry many levels of meaning. They evoke the primeval era, mythological time, and the genesis of the world and the people themselves.They recall the original weaver, Kanane-ski Amai-yehi (Spider Dwelling in the Water), who was, by her very name as well as her habitation and manner of living, literally connected to water. Universally identified as female, the first weaver associated women with water, an association that was born out in the early Cherokee division of labor that gave women the responsibility for carrying water.

The brief narrative of the First Fire identifies certain characteristics of the weaver, "She can run on top of the water or dive down to the bottom,"Swimmer and John Ax explained to James Mooney. The legendary weaver crosses boundaries between world, moving from the surface to the depth, from land to water, from water to fire, and finally, for the sake of the people, from darkness to light and from cold to heat. Crossing and connecting worlds, she posits a relationship between two places, elements, and conditions. As a female, as a being connected to water, and as one who moves from one world to another, she evokes women's ability to be simultaneously one person and two, an individual and also a woman carrying an infant in a sac of water in her belly.

The myth of the First Fire celebrates the weaver, the act of weaving and finally the container itself. The container carries fire, the earthly representation of the sun, who was also female in the early Cherokee pantheon. Kanane-ski Amai-yehi's container of fire parallels early Cherokee households that had central hearths where women maintained fires.

In surviving myth fragments, baskets carry elements of sacred power even in their most common place usage. The first woman, Selu, takes a basket with her when she goes into the seclusion of the corn house. ... Moreover, the story of Selu represents change - from one kind of food production to another, from one way of life to another. By understanding the necessity of change, Selu guarantees the future of the Cherokee people.

The stories of the First Fire, Selu, and How the World was Made are like doublewoven baskets, multilayered and densely textured. They are expressions of the customs, behaviors, and beliefs of women and asset a culture and identity of women that is specifically Cherokee.

Weavers have not simply replicated the work of their predecessors. Basketry has been a living tradition that has changed over time. The most significant changes have occurred in the selection of material.

Weavers have had access to many possible materials. Even with such a variety of resources, they emphasized rivercane above all others for hundreds of years. The material was abundant and it was durable. Their preference for rivercane accompanied a spiritual association with flowing water. Cherokees lived by the water spiritually, psychologically and physically. The historical period when rivercane was their primary basketmaterial correlates with an elaborate ceremonial life that continuously connected them to water.

Although Cherokees adopted various customs of surrounding whites they continued some of their own conventions. These different strands are represented and evoked by the coexistence and intermixing of rivercane and white oak basketry.

Honeysuckle basketry developed in a period of extraordinary discrepancy between the rhetoric of American liberty and the reality of Indian policy.

In the 1940's weavers added a fourth material, the indigenous red maple that grows fast in forest clearings.

Contemporary baskets are decorative items rather than ceremonial or work objects. The ceremonial use of baskets disappeared in the nineteenth century, and domestic functions waned in the twentieth.

source: Weaving New Worlds by Sarah Hill

Lottie Queen Stamper

In 1937 Gertrude Flanagan accompanied boarding school principal Sam Gilliam to the Painttown home of basketweaver Lottie Queen Stamper and asked her to teach basketry at the school.

Lottie Queen was born in 1906 "on a little farm" in Soco. She was the fifth of six children and the fourth of five daughters born to Levi and Mary Queen. They "use to go to the hills" to get white oak saplings for baskets. As a child, she learned from her father "how the log was to be split," andthen "my mother took over and showed me how to make splits."

After she married, Stamper learned from her mother-in-law how to weave with rivercane.

Stamper's school courses were an instant success. Stamper's contribution to Cherokee basketry is immeasurable. For more than thirty years, she taught both young girls and grown women. She worked in the Cherokee Boarding School until it closed in the early fifties, then taught high school classes and adult extension courses.

In the late 1930's someone sent her a photograph of the two rivercane doubleweave baskets Governor Nicholson had carried with him from Charleston back to London in 1725. Stamper painstakingly wove a smaller version of each container using more than 500 splits of cane. The patterns in the baskets were not familiar to her and she had to recreate the designs on paper. "It took me two and one half days to work out the pattern," she later acknowledged. Her effort is dramatic testimony to the intricacies ofCherokee basketweaving.

Stamper collected old patterns, copied them in a notebook, and reproduced them on graph paper. Drawings of rivercane patterns hung on the walls ofher classroom, and her students practiced reproducing them on graph paper in order to learn the numerical combinations for each design. Patterns that once belonged to families became common property. And patterns that once belonged only to rivercane were shared with white oak.

Copying the work of others became common place, but public dissemination of family traditions contravened customs of knowledge and training. Patterns of basketry and life were undoubtedly lost in the process. The old rivercane designs hanging on the classroom walls represented a great deal more than weaving techniques. They were strands that connected family members, expressed identity, documented concepts shared through time, preserved knowledge and experience, and interwove past and present. Patterns were forms of communication and assertions of self. " Some people say if you copied their baskets," one weaver remarks quietly, "they say you're taking their patterns away." The implications are profound.

As family patterns moved into public arenas, they took on new names. Most weavers recall that the names of basket patterns came from Gertrude Flanagan and Edna Groves. The names, like "Flowing Water" and "Chief's Daughter,"tended toward nostalgia. Many say that such names have no meaning to them and that their mothers and grandmothers did not identify patterns by name. Others, however fully adopted the custom and participated in the new practice of naming designs and patterns. After Stamper replicated the Nicholson basket, she claimed that "we basket makers named the bottom part"The Pine Tree" and the the top "The Casket."

In 1951, The Indian Arts and Crafts Board hired Gertrude Flanagan as Arts and Crafts Specialist for the Southeastern region. In her new role, she assumed responsibility for encouraging and directing craftwork amongChoctaws, Seminoles and Catawbas, as well as Cherokees.

source: Weaving New Worlds, by Sarah Hill

Vegetation Dyes

Near each weaver's home, a large iron pot of water sits on a hearth of river rocks or metal and irons. Stoking the fire under the pot until the water simmers, she immerses roots, bark, hulls, berries, or leaves by the handful to make natural dyes that endure for decades or even centuries.

Vegetation for dyes include ripe berries of pokeweed (tsayatika) for pale red, oak galls (atagu) for rich red, anjelica leaves (wane-kita) for green,bark and roots of sumac (kwalaga) for brown, and yellow root (daloni-geunaste-tsi) for yellow. Through the long, complex development of Cherokee basketry, weavers have undoubtedly experimented with many indigenous and introduced plants for basketry materials. Any berry or nut or root that stained the fingers gathering them must have been potential dye.

From earliest memory, however, Cherokee weavers have chosen red, dark brown, and black hues for basketry. Black come from hulls, roots, or bark of butternut or white walnut (ko-hi), brown from hulls, roots, leaves or bark of black walnut (se-di), and red from roots of the bloodroot plant (gigageunaste-tsi). Material from black or white walnut trees can be gathered anytime of year, then dried and stored for use later. Though all parts of the tree can be used, the roots supply the most intense colors. Bloodroot is a nearly spring forb that thrives in the soil of deciduous forests. The fragile blossom that appears in early March is followed by deeply scalloped, blue-green leaves that grow through the summer. The orange-red dye comes from small rhizomes attached to multiple underground stems. The roots must be dug before the plant dies back in early autumn, for it leaves no sign of where it has grown. Weavers can dry and bury roots to store over fall and winter, but mold will cause rapid decay. In modern times, some weavers preserve bags of roots in their freezers.

Each color requires a separate pot of simmering water, which may account for the limited number of colors on baskets. To speed the dyeing and set the color, weavers might add a mordant. Before modern commercial mordants the mordant came from ashes, urine, or alum. Without mordants, splints take at least one full day to absorb brown or black walnut dyes. Red dye from bloodroot sets in a few hours. Weavers submerge the coils of splints into the simmering dye, weighing them down with rocks or heavy roots. Dyeing requires a watchful eye and plenty of time.

source: Weaving New Worlds by Sarah Hill

Baskets Meaning and Reason

Baskets have both meaning and reason. The meaning of Cherokee basketry, evident in legend, custom, and history, relates to the role and work of women as the source of food and life, as providers and sustainers for their families.

The direct evidence, Cherokee baskets, is quite variable. Few baskets have survived from the eighteenth century. Perhaps a dozen remain from the early19th century, before removal.

Toward the end of the 19th century, basket collectors discovered the Cherokees, and accordingly, from the turn of that century to the present, many baskets of rivercane, white oak, and honeysuckle can be found in collections in Oklahoma, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Tennessee, and North Carolina.

The second primary source of information about preremoval Cherokees is government documents. These, however, are most concerned with politics. ...giving little information about women and almost none about their transforming work in ecosystems.

Louise Goings says that "everybody has their own way of making stuff.""Their own way" includes details such as basket shapes, split widths, organization of colors, and varieties of ornamentation like rim bindings and curls. There is also something ineffable about their work that basketmakers can't define. In the long run, as one explains, "even my own baskets, I know, they're not two made alike."

Contemporary weaver Agnes Welch says that she makes a basket the way she does because "that's how it is supposed to look."

In a basket, there is both something very personal and something related to a collective consciousness.

source: Weaving New Worlds by Sarah Hill

Basket Periods and Materials

Basket materials correspond to chronological periods. The rivercane period extends from the earliest contact with Europeans until the removal encompassing the era when Cherokees depended most on cane as a basket source. They made and used rivercane baskets for daily subsistence activities, for exchange, and for ceremonies and rituals.

The white oak period begins with removal. 19th century Cherokees fullyincorporated white oak into conventions of rivercane basketry as they recastsettlement patterns, subsistence customs, and social systems on themountainous land that became the reservation. White oak basketry is a European American tradition that includes men as well as women. Access to rivercane, and to all that it had meant, became increasingly limited. By the end of the 19th century, white oak baskets were as much an index of change as rivercane baskets had been signifiers of continuity.

Honeysuckle period develops around the turn of the 20th century, when new federal policies aimed to assimilate Native Americans through formal education, industrial training, and the eradiciation of native languages and customs. Weavers did not relinquish rivercane or white oak basketry, rather, they incorporated a third material and developed a new tradition.

The red maple period includes the New Deal for Indians, a program implemented by the Roosevelt administration and Indian commissioner John Collier and it follows the development of Cherokee dependence on tourism that has continued through the last decade of the 20th century.

source: Weaving New Worlds, by Sarah Hill

Cherokee Patterns

That spring morning, Rowena Bradley was sitting in a kitchen chair at the edge of her front yard. Dogs slept fitfully nearby, a cat stared from the window, and hens pecked nervously at the ground. Looking out toward the mountains as she wove a rivercane basket, Rowena Bradley followed with her fingers a pattern that lives in her memory. Occasionally selecting a cane split from a bucket half-filled with water, she wove quickly, scarcely pausing to examine her work. She knew without looking how the pattern would develop in the basket. She has woven rivercane baskets most of her life. The pattern she was weaving is sometimes called "Flowing Water", but the name has no meaning to Rowena Bradley. "Well now," she says, "I'll tell you just like I've told everybody else. My mother never had no names or no meaning to her designs. she just made them. And that's the way I do."

Among Cherokees, women have been the primary makers and users of baskets.The story of Cherokee basketry and the story of Cherokee women are like a doublewoven basket, interwoven, inseparable, and complex. The stories encompass strands of the past and present, and represent transformations in lives, minds, and landscapes.

source: Weaving New Worlds, by Sarah Hill

Cherokee Materials

Rowena Bradley explains that acquiring material for baskets has long been a problem. "You know, at times, she couldn't get cane." Once Tahlahyeh even made a few baskets of bamboo. A man from the neighboring town of Bryson,six miles west, "put up a craft shop" and brought her some bamboo. He was curious about the material and the weaver. Rowena Bradley smiles with the memory. "He wanted to know if she could make a basket out of it. Well, she did, but she dyed it just like she does the rivercane."

Rowena Bradley's mother was Nancy George Bradley (Tahtahyeh). That craftshop owner keeps one of Nancy Bradley's bamboo baskets in his extensive private collection. He considers it one of his most valuable acquisitions because of the unusual material and because it was made by Nancy Bradley.

source: Weaving New Worlds, by Sarah H. Hill