Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (review)

In Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry, Sarah H. Hill has developed an intriguing reconstruction of the history of the Cherokee from the time of European contact through the twentieth century. The book is an extensively researched and meticulously documented examination of the role of women in the history of these persistent occupants of the Southern Appalachians. Hill provides both interpretive and historic views of the ways in which women’s lives exemplify the changes that have occurred over the past three centuries.

Hill begins by recognizing the contributions of contemporary Cherokee basket makers who shared with her the meaning of baskets in their lives. Her compelling descriptions evoke the interwoven contexts of Cherokee women and their basketry. Other descriptions of the women who shared their lives with her are equally evocative. Basket making crosses generations and weaves the lives of Cherokee women together, as knowledge of the technical and artistic components of basket making is passed from mother to daughter and on to granddaughters. Although there are men who make baskets, this skill has for the most part been the purview of women, providing them with both income and an outlet for their creative talents and abilities.

The prologue to the book provides an extensively researched history of the Cherokee in the early-1700s. Hill details Cherokee social structure and recounts traditional stories and myths concerning the origin of the earth, the role of plants and animals in Cherokee cosmology, and the basis for family structure centered on the mother’s kin group. She emphasizes the role of women in subsistence, in healing, and in all aspects of Cherokee mythology.

Hill’s innovative narrative integrates the various materials from which Cherokee baskets are constructed as the framework for her examination of the role of eastern Cherokee women and of basket making in their lives. She begins with rivercane, used in the 1700s and later for constructing containers, for making mats that were used in many ways in Cherokee households, and as a source of food during times of famine. She also describes the methods used to prepare the cane for weaving, a process that requires training and manual skill. Hill discusses the types of plants used today, as in the past, for dying the cane so that patterns incorporated in baskets are easily observable. She includes photographs of several early examples of rivercane weaving, including two that date prior to European contact. The fact that these examples are preserved at all is remarkable and is attributable in part to the strength of the material itself.

Hill next describes the adoption of white oak for making baskets, introduced by Europeans early on. Oak was preferred by Europeans because of its strength, but the Cherokee apparently were satisfied with using the traditional river cane for all their needs until the mid-1800s. Hill suggests that the adoption of this material reflects the growing acceptance and integration of Euro-American technological innovations into Cherokee life.

Once the Cherokee did begin to use oak as a material for making baskets, men began to make white oak baskets along with the women. These changing gender roles coincided with the shift from a matrilineal to a patrilineal kinship focus in response to pressure from Euro-American culture. Another change was the addition of carved wooden handles, replacing handles made of flexible materials such as cord or leather.

Continuing her focus on the use of different raw materials as an indicator of social change, Hill then discusses the introduction of honeysuckle as a basket making material by just one woman around the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps as a result of exposure to other tribal groups when young Cherokee women were placed in boarding schools by the Federal government. The introduction of Japanese honeysuckle coincided with changes in the economy and environment wrought by the development the logging industry in the Southern Appalachians...