Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (And Government; 5) - Softcover

Hill, Sarah H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807846503 ISBN 13: 9780807846506

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 1997

Synopsis

In this innovative study, Sarah Hill illuminates the history of Southeastern Cherokee women by examining changes in their basketry. Based in tradition and made from locally gathered materials, baskets evoke the lives and landscapes of their makers. Indeed, as Weaving New Worlds reveals, the stories of Cherokee baskets and the women who weave them are intertwined and inseparable. Incorporating written, woven, and spoken records, Hill demonstrates that changes in Cherokee basketry signal important transformations in Cherokee culture. Over the course of three centuries, Cherokees developed four major basketry traditions, each based on a different material -- rivercane, white oak, honeysuckle, and maple. Hill explores how the addition of each new material occurred in the context of lived experience, ecological processes, social conditions, economic circumstances, and historical eras. Incorporating insights from written sources, interviews with contemporary Cherokee weavers, and a close examination of the baskets themselves, she presents Cherokee women as shapers and subjects of change. Even in the face of cultural assault and environmental loss, she argues, Cherokee women have continued to take what they have to make what they need, literally and metaphorically weaving new worlds from old.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah H. Hill is an independent scholar who lives in Atlanta. A native of Georgia, she received her Ph.D. in American studies from Emory University.

Reviews

Far more than a survey of Eastern Cherokee women basketmakers, this is an in-depth study of tribal women's history, the ecological and social obstacles facing weavers and other artisans, and the pressures of society?mainly tourism?on their craft. Hill, an independent scholar with a doctorate in American studies, has done a staggering amount of research to produce possibly the definitive historical study of Cherokee women and their basketry. Indeed, the baskets often take second place to the powerful quotes?representing all periods from the time of white contact to the present?especially about the strength it took to remain hidden in the mountains on their own land when most of the tribe was removed to Oklahoma. But the baskets are the attraction here: a variety of materials (primarily cane, oak, honeysuckle, and maple) are used through the centuries in a variety and quality that remains amazing. More recently, ornamentation and novelty have replaced utility, but the baskets still have the tautness and beauty of the old forms, and the same designs persist. For more scholarly Native American collections.?Gay Neale, Southside Virginia Community Coll. Lib., Alberta
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807846503
• ISBN 13: 9780807846506
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440