Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of Our Elders

Project

Preface

From the Hands of our Elders aims to reveal the full and accurate story of Cherokee artisans who lived during the first half of the twentieth century. This book is the first in a series of publications that documents their creative output. While the objective of any research project is a full picture of one’s subject, constraints come into play. This project, in particular, was limited by the availability of source material: what is left to see, examine and think about. This opening paragraph is an expression of gratitude to those who documented, photographed and interviewed Cherokee elders during their lifetimes and to those who collected and preserved their work. Without them, this book would not be in your hands now.

Today’s effort to document twentieth-century Cherokee basketry is the result of a collaboration among a number of cultural preservation institutions in western North Carolina. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation and Western Carolina University provided funding and support. Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and the Hunter Library at Western Carolina University formed the core partnership, each contributing valuable staff time and important historical materials. Particular individuals were generous with their time and expertise. Vicki Cruz of Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual and James Bo Taylor at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian gave this project their attention and provided guidance throughout. Tonya Carroll assisted with initial basket documentation. Research Assistants Jason Woolf and Kate Carter wrote image captions, checked facts and verified historical sources. Lucas A.A. Rogers photographed the contemporary baskets that appear in this book. Colleagues of Western Carolina University’s Cherokee Studies program—Tom Belt, Robert Conley, Andrew Denson, Jane Eastman and Hartwell Francis—shared their understanding of Cherokee culture, history and language and ensured that results met academic standards. And finally, this project could not have seen the light of day without the generous spirit of Dean of Library Services Dana Sally and the encouragement of the faculty and staff of the Hunter Library.

Project Assistant Tonya Carroll with baskets in the permanent collection of Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual.

For the most part, the images reproduced in this publication are from the collections of Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Important regional collections include: Great Smoky Mountains National Park; McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources; Southern Highland Craft Guild; and the Special Collections of the Hunter Library. Betty DuPree and Cherokee basket weavers Carol Welch, Elsie Watty and Martha Ross shared personal recollections. Of particular significance is the work of the late Stephen Richmond, who made many of these photographs while he worked for the Department of Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Others collections include the Library of Congress; Museum of the Red River, Idabel, Oklahoma; National Archives and Records Administration, Special Media Archives Services Division; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; and the British Museum.

Still, with the efforts and collections of so many, there are challenges in telling this particular story. Circumstance plays a role in its telling. Certainly, there were prolific makers whose stories were not available. These elders join the thousands of unnamed makers who created and maintained traditions during centuries past. To the young people of today, this is the story of your elders, revered makers who practiced a craft much older than they. Where possible, this book uses direct quotations in an attempt to give them voice.

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THE CHEROKEE

The lands that these Europeans invaded was hardly a New World. Yet even today, there are people who believe that this vast domain called America was nothing but a wild and virgin land just waiting for the advent of the wise and superior Europeans to tame and domesticate it.

–Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People

The ancestral homeland of the Cherokee—the Tsalagi—lay in the mountains of western North Carolina, the valleys of South Carolina and along the river bottoms where east Tennessee meets north Georgia. Their territory once extended to portions of eight modern states. Based on linguistic evidence, most scholars agree that the Cherokee were related to northeastern Iroquois tribes, although there is little consensus as to when the Cherokee first inhabited the southeastern section of the American continent. By the time the first European explorers arrived, the Cherokee shared the southeast territory with the Catawba, Chickasaw and the Creeks. The Choctaw and Chitimacha lived to the south and west. Tsalagi settlements dominated the heart of the region.

Cherokee towns were usually located near creeks where their people had access to an abundance of free-flowing water. Small streams fed into larger ones that, in turn, fed the Little Tennessee, Hiawassee, Savannah and Chattahoochee Rivers. Rivers played an important role in Cherokee life, providing fish for food and navigation by canoe. Water transport was common, and practical, where a mountainous terrain and dense vegetation complicated overland travel. The Cherokee were a settled people who farmed green valleys and hunted abundant wildlife. They hunted deer for meat and used deerskins for clothing and shelter. In the mid-eighteenth century, there were still an incredible number of buffaloes, bears, deer, panthers, wolves, foxes, raccoons, and opossums in the region.¹ Woods buffalo roamed until hunted to extinction.

Map of the southeastern United States showing the locations of the major Native American tribes of the region. Museum of the Red River, Idabel, Oklahoma.

Map of the Cherokee Nation, 1760. Map courtesy of WildSouth.

While the Cherokee were hunters, they were also farmers. When Hernando de Soto arrived in 1540, he found the Cherokee living in settled agricultural communities. Their primary settlement areas—Overhill, Valley, Middle, Lower and Out Towns—were made up of towns separated by a few miles. Each town had a cluster of homes, a ceremonial center, cultivated gardens and outlying fields. Towns varied in size from a dozen houses to much larger communities of several hundred people. In the rich bottomlands of the region, the Cherokee grew the three sisters—corn, beans and squash—along with sunflowers. The mother town—Kituwha—lay along the banks of the Tuckaseegee River in western North Carolina (near present-day Bryson City). Chota, an ancient capital and sacred peace town, was situated on the western side of the Great Smoky Mountains (in present-day Tennessee).

CONTACT

By the time the English reached the shores of Virginia in 1607, the Cherokee had emerged as a populous and powerful tribe. By the late seventeenth century, colonial traders were making regular journeys into Cherokee lands. Cherokee manufactured goods included baskets and pottery made by women and wood and stone tools made by men. But the main trade product of the Cherokee was deerskins, raw material that the English exchanged for trade goods that included iron tools, brass kettles, knives, firearms and glass beads. With increased contact, the one hundred years from 1738 to 1838 brought devastation and hardship to the Cherokee people. The year 1738 marked the first wave of smallpox. Like other native populations in the Americas, they were hit hard by the introduction of nonnative diseases to the western hemisphere. Over the next fifty years, half the population—some say as many as fifteen thousand Cherokee men, women and children—died from smallpox. Apart from multiple epidemics, the Cherokee engaged in numerous bloody encounters with Europeans who continued to move into their homeland. The late eighteenth century was marked by a succession of battles, treaties, land grabs, betrayals and retaliation. By 1838, a seriously weakened and smaller Cherokee population faced their greatest trial, the Trail of Tears.

One of the earliest written accounts of Cherokee domestic life came from Henry Timberlake, a colonial soldier who served as an emissary to the Overhill Cherokees during the 1760s. During his travels, Timberlake mapped the Overhill country and made notes on his encounters. In 1762, he escorted three distinguished Cherokee leaders to London, who unsuccessfully attempted to halt the encroachment of settlers into their homeland. Timberlake kept a journal in which he described his interpretation of Cherokee life. Some of his descriptions were straightforward, and others were a reflection of his worldview. Early explorers—all men—could not imagine a culture in which women participated in government and enjoyed independence in their personal lives. Cherokee women, the makers of baskets, were the owners of their household’s domestic property. Moreover, their personal property passed from mother to daughter according to a system of matrilineal inheritance. The autonomy of women, especially in matters of sexuality, led to descriptions of the Cherokee as being ruled by a petticoat government. Timberlake called the women Amazons… famous in war [and] powerful in council.² In reality, Cherokee society was based on gender balance. Day-to-day life was dominated by a complex clan system that governed domestic alliances and retribution. Seven familial clans—Bird People, Blue People, Deer People, Long Hair People, Paint People, Wild Potato People and Wolf People—were at the center of Cherokee relationships.

In spite of cultural misunderstandings, Timberlake recorded important information about Cherokee towns that he visited; he was one of the first outsiders to record the use of baskets in Cherokee life. Describing a feast at Chota in 1762, Timberlake noted that food was served in flat baskets made of split canes. His is one of the first accounts to not only describe how baskets looked, but also how they were used. Early travelers to Cherokee territory, including Timberlake and naturalist William Bartram, each described a seven-sided council house and woven mats that were attached to the building’s framework. Mats made of split cane were placed on benches for seating. These and other journal entries document that the Cherokee used rivercane as a weaving material well before European contact. Such accounts help establish authentic Cherokee materials and forms that help contemporary basket weavers maintain important traditions.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee were at last at peace, but not without great loss of land and life. During the first decade of the century, from 1800 until 1805, the Cherokee lost eight thousand square miles of land through the signing and execution of numerous treaties. As Robert Conley points out in his book, Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee had plenty of enemies:

Cherokee haters were still popular in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. Tennessee had sent Andrew Jackson to Congress. Jackson had fought in campaigns against the Cherokees and had personally profited from the sale of ill-gotten Cherokee lands…It seems the quickest road to fame and fortune in Tennessee during those times was