Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry / Edition 1

by Sarah H. Hill

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807846506
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	06/30/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.08(d)

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

I am grateful for this gracefully written, big-hearted, incredibly smart work. Sarah Hill's book proffers a clear-sighted, unanticipated, and mind-changing story to those, including me, who think they know material culture, women's history, or Indian history. Hill's passion for knowing the heart and soul of Cherokee women, their baskets, and their intertwined history is matched dramatically by her capacious, keen scholarship.—Rayna Green, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Weaving New Worlds is a triumph at combining historical and cultural materials to present a comprehensive history of the art form of Eastern Band Cherokee basket making. . . . A must for all those interested in Southeastern Indians in general, American Indian art, and the Eastern Band Cherokee in particular.—Appalachian Journal

Fresh and intriguing. . . . This well-written, meticulously researched work is not just a history of basketry. . . .After reading this book, one will surely have greater insights into Cherokee baskets, the female artisans who made them, and the times in which they worked.—Journal of Southern History

Editorial Reviews

Hill's metaphorical examination of women's roles through the various changes reflected in their basketry is masterful.

National Women's Studies Association Journal

[A]n illuminating picture of the lives of southeastern Cherokee women.

Journal of Appalachian Studies

[S]hould be read by anyone with an interest in ethnohistory, Southern history, women's studies, or material culture.

American Historical Review

Fresh and intriguing.

Journal of Southern History

Destined to become a classic reference text to which future scholars of Native American material culture will always return.

Atlanta History

From the Publisher

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 societymainly tourismon 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 quotesrepresenting all periods from the time of white contact to the presentespecially 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

Library Journal