Weaving Material Objects and Political Alliances: The Chitimacha Indian Pursuit of Federal Recognition

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Weaving Material Objects and Political Alliances 25 Articles DANIEL H. USNER Weaving Material Objects and Political Alliances The Chitimacha Indian Pursuit of Federal Recognition “WHEN WE FORAGE FOR STORIES,” Ellen Meloy wrote in The Anthropology of Turquoise, “we may end up telling our own. When we cannot possess the thoughts of past cultures, we possess their things.” This shrewd observation occurred to Meloy while visiting a small museum in Needles, California, yet the essayist reveals its fuller and more ambiguous meaning elsewhere in her book. The fifth-generation possessor of a California Indian basket, given to her maternal great-great-grandmother by a Yokuts woman in the 1850s, Meloy devotes an entire chapter to reflections on this object’s storied history. She first wonders about the interaction that might have gone into the cooking basket ’s origin, since its rim was ticked with alternating dark and light stitches more common in Panamint basketry from Death Valley. She also considers the difficulty that increasingly confronted basket makers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, as White invaders’ farms, herds, and canals endangered the deer and saw grasses. Then there was the likely circumstance in which the Yokuts woman either sold or gifted the basket to Meloy’s ancestor, whose ranch seasonally employed Yokuts families camping on its outskirts. Meloy finally acknowledges how displacement and depopulation of Native Californians joined the unraveling of an Indian woman’s stories with the beginning of her own family’s stories. “When I look at this basket,” she takes some comfort in saying, “I do not know how it was made, but I know that the soul of the Sierra Nevada went into the weave.”1 For my own inquiry into basketry made by Chitimacha Indian women a century ago, the question of whose stories tend to prevail, even in the best studies of American Indian arts and crafts, is a driving question. If I borrow from Meloy’s view of things and see the soul of Atchafalaya wetlands in their weaving, to what extent am I simply echoing the aesthetic and ethnographic sentiments that channeled countless objects away from Indigenous Daniel H. Usner NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 26 communities? Nearly two decades ago, Greg Sarris wondered how, despite so much academic and popular attention garnered by Pomo basketry, so little could still be understood about its integral place in Pomo history and culture. “Interest in Pomo basketry,” he wrote, “becomes an interest in discourse about baskets, a discourse principally about itself.” Abuses committed across years of collecting, analyzing, and exhibiting objects that were separated from their makers are bad enough. But critically explaining how baskets became autonomous artifacts or art works “under glass” just might make matters worse, especially if we fail to consider the specific episodes and settings in which they left the hands of their makers.2 By now, what happens to the meaning of an object once it leaves the hands of its producer and enters networks of science and commerce has received thorough scrutiny from humanists and social scientists alike, discoursing over the discourse, as Sarris aptly puts it. Some historians of material culture have even become more conscious of the fact that written documents and archival sources are themselves material objects, which our craft transforms into historical texts.3 But the business at hand—how to emphasize the meaning and value of Chitimacha baskets for the particular women who produced them in Charenton, Louisiana, a century ago—remains unfinished. Can this be done, to further complicate the question, without returning to a strictly ethnographic approach that tended to overlook or conceal cross-cultural influences of historical interaction?4 With useful results, anthropologist Janet Hoskins attempts to integrate analytically how things are conceptualized through exchange with how things actually contribute to identity. “The imagination,” she writes, “works on objects to turn commodities, gifts, or ordinary utilitarian tools into sometimes very significant possessions, which draw their power from biographical experiences and the stories told about these.”5 Imagining that an American Indian basket has a certain kind of antiquity or represents a vanishing way of life, as is well known, contributed to the non-Indian consumer...