In the context of Western knowledge systems, textile traditions and crafts are not traditionally seen as a valued form of knowledge on par with academia or public organization. This is the way it is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is textile industries being historically women’s crafts or occupations filled by people of lower economic classes. This is not the case in other knowledge systems and pedagogies, most notably (for our purposes) in Indigenous cultures around the world. Textiles and garments form in these cultural contexts form real-world, visual-tactile representations of personal or community identity, shared history or trauma, authority or nobility, occupation or community role, as well as healing and reconciliation. Not only are the crafts themselves greatly valued, but the information, identities and traditional knowledges deemed valuable by the communities are inseparable from their textile traditions. As someone who places an enormous amount of herself into each sewn garment I create, I want to explore what that change in social weight and epistemology looked like, and how a reframing of textile traditions using Indigenous frameworks different contexts can help us learn more about the textile material record.
Here is the depositing spot for all of my resources and citations across the whole blog. For your convenience, sources will be sorted by the post Categories, and by large umbrella terms to make tracking down resources easier. All my sources will be cited in Chicago author-date format.
Pacific Northwest and Alaska
Ravenstail Weaving:
Samuel, Cheryl. 1987. The Raven’s Tail. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Stonington Gallery. “Evelyn Vanderhoop’s Ravenstail Robe Enters the Collection of the MFA Boston.” Stonington Gallery, December 28, 2019. https://stoningtongallery.com/22612-2/.
Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu : Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Urton, Gary. “A Calendrical and Demographic Tomb Text from Northern Peru.” Latin American Antiquity 12, no. 2 (2001): 127–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/972052.
McEwan. “Quipu: British Museum.” The British Museum, 2009. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1907-0319-286.
Saez-Rodriguez, A. (2014). Khipu UR19: Inca measurements of the moon’s diameter and its distance from the Earth/Quipu UR19: Mediciones realizadas por los incas del diámetro de la luna y de la distancia que nos separa de la luna. Revista Latinoamericana De Etnomatemática, 7(1), 96-125. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/khipu-ur19-inca-measurements-moons-diameter/docview/1689656050/se-2
International Connections:
Native Aids Quilt:
Carocci, M. (2010). Textiles of Healing: Native American AIDS Quilts. Textile : the Journal of Cloth and Culture, 8(1), 68–84. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183510X12580391269986
Peacock Dress:
Thomas, Nicola J. “Embodying Imperial Spectacle: Dressing Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1899-1905.” Cultural Geographies 14, no. 3 (2007): 369–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44251153.
The AIDS crisis in the 80s was one complicated by layers of oppression and politics, and one many Native communities were hit disproportionately hard by due to inequity in access to healthcare on reservations and in urban centers, as well as community isolation, homophobia and racism. It was referred to by some as “new smallpox,” which illustrates the sheer degree of devastation the pandemic wrought on Indigenous communities in the US.
Copy of the quilt hanging in the entrance hall to the NAAP, British Museum.
The quilt to the left was created by a Native mother whose son passed away from complications arisen from AIDS, and was given to the NAAP after his death. A copy made by Christopher Gamora, an Ojibwa artist, resides in the collection of the British Museum for their Living and Dying gallery in 2004. Its made based on the original, with a few noted differences like the hanging orientation of the hide, and, most notably, the names of deceased clients of the NAAP embroidered in beading were removed. This was due to lack of time to seek out the appropriate level of consent from each of the deceased families, which struck me as a good example of collaborative museology practiced in good faith. A representation of a unique Native American response to the AIDS crisis is a very valuable teaching tool for context on the crisis’ impact, and recreating it with meticulous detail as well consideration for how certain on display in Europe would detract from, rather than help in healing the origin community.
Researcher Max Carroci sees as the act of making these quilts as “the very moment of remembrance that establishes a connection between memory and lived experience, one that is entangled with the notion of “wrapping” and the cognate concepts of protecting and preserving widely shared by Native Americans in ritual and healing practice.” This function of art and textiles in particular as vehicles of healing and records of historical emotion within communities is just as large a part of a knowledge system as the technical and logistical information potentially stored in khipus. Not only is this quilt a material record of the hardships this community went through, its also a record of how a community uses materiality to heal, remember and recover. The names of those who passed, the number of turkey feathers adorning the bottom, the type of shell used in the beading: the twining with knowledge of the craft with knowledge of the past and present is the cornerstone of how textiles braid into Indigenous knowledge systems.
Ravenstail weaving, or Yel-ku uu [Yeil Koowu] (‘the raven’s tail’), is a generationally-transmitted art form that holds a tremendous amount of cultural knowledge and social prestige in its communities, so named due to its resemblance to raven tail feathers. Beginning in the Tsimshiam culture, it was preserved and retained by the Haida and the Tlingit. The tradition was passed through matrilines and was predominantly reserved for women. This style of weaving is very complex and has been likened to basket weaving by many craftspeople. One of the most important components of its creation was the 6,000 year old practice of twining, where strands of goat fur and bark are twisted together. In Tlingit basketweaving, this forms watertight seals that make the baskets long-lived and functional. Ravenstail robes use primarily bold geometric designs with a limited color palette, and every thread end is worked into the piece.
The 18th century is widely regarded to have been the so-called “golden age” of Ravenstail robes, but that golden age wasn’t to last. Due to the rapid and devastating effects of colonialism in the Northwest, the craft went through a period of stagnation 200 years long. In the 70s, a non-native weaver named Cheryl Samuels and a Haida weaver named Delores Churchill created the first robe since the decline, and since then Native weavers have made leaps and bounds in reclaiming and revitalizing the art.
During this stagnation time, there were a few robes that came in to the possession of Western collections and museums. One such robe is the “Swift Blanket,” made around the mid 1700s, and it is the only complete historical Ravenstail robe we know of. Evelyn Vanderhoop provides wonderful insight on the robe: it would have been worn by a chief and used to convey multiple characters and stories with the two sides of the robe, while also functioning as a symbol of the leader’s authority. “The Swift robe threads together a duality that is found in the ancestor stories and early chiefs’ fashions at the time of contact,” as Vanderhoop puts it. This speaks directly to how Ravenstail robes were an integral part of the organization of society and the dissemination and transfer of knowledge and stories within that society.
Made from mountain goat wool. Named after its collector, Benjamin Swift. Now at the the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
One of the people that first drew me into historical costuming and fashion history in general was Bernadette Banner, and by extension, British dress historian Cathy Hay. And anyone who learns about Cathy Hay then learns of the Peacock dress.
The gown colloquially known as the “Peacock Dress” was a custom ballgown created by Jean Phillipe Worth for Lady Mary Curzon, the Vicereine of India, for the 1903 Delhi Durbar in celebration of the 1902 coronation. It’s creation began with teams of zarbozi embroiderers in the Kishan Chand workshop in India, where they embellished huge panels of silk taffeta with iridescent beetle-wing cases and gold and silver beading. Then the panels were shipped to the House of Worth in Paris, where the dress was constructed and the finishing touches added. The dress itself is a very deliberate symbol and enforcement of colonialism and British dominance, with its use of peacock motifs representing a replacement of the Mughal Peacock throne by British power. The throne was destroyed during a British raid in 1857. Even the specific type of fabric that formed the base of the dress was a traditional fabric for Mughal kings.
The Peacock dress is currently held in Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire by the National Trust collections, with none of the Indian artisans who worked on it named, and is a shell of its former self. The delicate zarbozi beading has tarnished and dulled, and all of the wondrous colours present on the dress in its prime have faded. Hay, after visiting the dress, became infatuated with it and resolved to raise money to recreate it in original practice. There was years of work that went into her recreation project, with commissioning Indian embroidery studios and pattern making all documented on her YouTube channel, and often signaling that the project would have different connotations than its original counterpart. It was a burgeoning and popular project within the historical costuming community, with lots of potential, funding and momentum. And then, the cracks began to show. It’s a beautiful piece of history, but is it really?
Hay began receiving feedback, from craftspeople of colour and Indian sewists in particular, that strongly discouraged her from continuing the reconstruction. Many felt that the recreation of the dress was at best unnecessary and at worst a history repeating itself while its problems fall on deaf ears. The head embroiderer of the company Hay commissioned burned the peacock dress embroidery sample after finding it, citing it an “inauspicious sign” that wasn’t to be made anymore. Nami Sparrow, an Indian-American YouTuber, called on Hay to end the project as it supported the trauma of colonialism, implicit or not.
An Indigenous seamstress from Arizona named Cher Thomas was also involved in the conversation. Thomas runs her own clothing business that is intimately connected to her heritage, and she hails from multiple Indigenous tribes around the US including the Akimel O’odham and the Cocopah. She calls out Hay’s “guilty conscience” and the part it played in her wanting to recreate the dress but “do it better” or “decolonize it,” pointing out the white saviorism in assuming that role for herself and the appropriateness of the project without consulting Indian creators. She encourages Hay to use her platform to uplift Indian designers and dress historians and using the funding accrued not for charity-tourism but for the projects they want to pursue in their communities, and stresses the importance of a transfer of power in this work.
Personally, I totally understand the initial appeal of a recreation project as ambitious and potentially gorgeous as Worth’s Peacock Dress. I mean look at it! However, understanding the context this dress was made in, the express imperialist purpose it was made for, the colonial way it was manufactured, the people who’s labour it exploited and the potential effects the recreation could have on the modern costuming landscape, it is blatantly obvious that beauty is not and should never be the sole reason for a historical recreation in an archaeological context. We need to be asking deeper questions, especially about our position relative to our work. I exist in a very similar positionality to Cathy Hay, and have absolutely fallen into the same privilege trap while researching projects of my own. Thomas’ perspective was invaluable to me while I was learning about this dress, and I carry it with me when I consider recreation projects of my own. I think this case study is a good example of how experimental archaeology can be destructive and harmful to Indigenous and colonized communities, just like excavation, and we need to think very critically about why we do the work we do. Not everything is as surface level as beetle-wings and swishy skirts.
The Peacock Dress on display in Derbyshire, all rights belong to the National Trust Collections.
Lady Curzon in the Peacock Dress, painted by William Logsdail in 1909.
I will say, just to start off, that this is my favourite thing in the world.
Khipu from the British Museum.
Khipu, or quipu comes from the Quechua word for “knot,” and these knots are the basis for what you see below. Using a central string that branches off with attached “pendant” cords, the order, colour, number and configuration of the knots and their parent strands can be used to encode a large amount of information. We find these belongings all over the historical Incan empire–some of my favorite examples come from the Chachapoya culture in the Peruvian Andes–but we do find them from earlier in the record. There have been multiple researchers who have proposed different interpretations for the khipus’ coding system, like Gary Urton who proposes a cipher similar to binary code that could also notate decimals. He and multiple other researchers have studied the artifact known as Khipu UR19, and it is thought by some in the field to note pi, the diameter of the moon and its distance from the earth. There is a sizeable amount of debate over whether khipus were akin to memory devices or “mneumonics,” that helped the user recall figures or information without encoding the entirety of said information, or whether khipus constituted a system of writing that could be used and read by people all over the empire.
Scholars estimate that about 600 extant examples of khipus exist in museums and collections around the world, and most were looted from gravesites during the 18th and 19th centuries. The presence of khipus in funerary contexts is really interesting to me; were they records of the persons life? Similar to the Book of the Dead in ancient Eqypt? Or were they eulogies, wishes from family or wills?
Khipus are such a vital example of textile traditions and industries being firmly ingrained in and in many ways inseparable from systems of gender, politics, religion, ancestral history and collective knowledge; and in some cases are the foundation for a writing system, a literal vessel for a way of knowing. Availability of cotton or camelid fibres would therefore have been essential to the dissemination of information and resources in the Inca empire and previous to it, centering a textile craft in both academia and administrative roles throughout a large society.
Diagram from Signs of the Inca Khipu by Gary Urton (2003)
Chilkat robes are regarded to be the descendant artform of Ravenstail robes, and are practiced in much of the same communities. They are similar in technique but have a few key differences in technique, design, and social positionality. Ravenstail uses a total of nine twining methods while Chilkat uses three, and also has a more muted colour palette. Chilkat robes can use a myriad of colours, and are usually 5 sided instead of rectangles as shown below. Chilkat robes are also not woven continuously with thread ends worked in while weaving, but are rather constructed in separate sections and then brought together. The motifs used are more organic and fluid as opposed to the geometric designs of the Ravenstail, and are often referred to as “totemic” art.
Spirits and deities in Haida and Tlingit mythos are often incorporated into Chilkat totemic designs. Usually Ravenstail weaving is exclusive to women, but in Chilkat weaving a design board is created by a male community member which is then worked off of by the weaver. Weaving is still passed matrilineally, and the 1895 picture below is the genesis point of one of these prolific lines of weavers. Clara Benson, or Deinḵul.át, was a Tlingit weaver who belonged to an aristocratic family in the G̱aanax̱teidí clan, and was arguably the most sought after creator of regalia and robes in the Northwest region during her lifetime from 1856-1935. A descendant of her teaching lineage, Lilly Hope, is one of about a dozen modern Indigenous weavers who create Chilkat robes. During the beginning of my research, all I knew of Benson was her last name, and that is about all that was known of her, both by researchers and in the wider world, until a biography by Zachary Jones came out in May of this year. One of her robes is still in the posession of The Shangukeidí (Thunderbird Clan) of Klukwan, and it can still be seen dancing and on display during ceremonial events in Southeastern Alaska. That specific robe was worn by the culture-bearer of the clan, and is a testament to both the longevity of these garments as well as their social and political roles within their communities.
Clara Benson weaving a Chilkat robe, 1895.
Naaxein robe woven with mountain goat wool and cedar bark, 1880. Currently in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum.
Teri Rofkar dancing in the first robe of the Tlingit Superman project, photographed by Tom Pich in 2009.
One of the most influential Ravenstail weavers was Teri Rofkar, pictured right. Beginning as a Raven clan basket weaver taught by her grandmother, she began to experiment with robe-weaving and incorporating her foraging knowledge from basket making. The Tlingit Superman series is probably her most well known, with 8 robes each more different than the next (one was even made of kevlar). The one pictured here is the first of the series, being woven entirely of shed mountain goat wool, and carries both a DNA motif for the unique species of goat on Baranhof island and a small red patch to denote a basket of berries she was brought during its creation. I think these small details really serve to show how these robes are physical examples of communal and personal knowledge being passed down, and they fascinate me to no end. She talks about realizing the “pure science embedded in Tlingit art”, which harkens back to how this garment involves a tremendous amount of innovation and ancestral knowledge coalescing.
Evelyn Vanderhoop her handmade Ravenstail robe (Twined wool, sea otter fur, cedar bark fiber, shell, copper threads)
The picture to the left is of Evelyn Vanderhoop, who is a Haida weaver, wearing the robe she created for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She also danced in the robe during the museum gift ceremony, with her daughter accompanying on drums and vocals. Vanderhoop is an example of the matrilines of weavers being brought back, as she is the daughter of Delores Churchill, an incredibly masterful and influential weaver. She also learned basket weaving from her grandmother and stresses the many cultural functions of the robes as well as the many roles of their creators. This wonderful short documentary by the Stonington Gallery shows Vanderhoops journey in creating the MFA robe, and delves into her history as a multi-generational weaver.
Hi everyone! My name is Phaedra McArdle and I am a third-year undergraduate at the University of Washington, majoring in linguistics and archaeology. I want to spend this section talking a little bit about who I am in relation to my research and why it matters to me. I’m a white woman from the US and Hong Kong, and I am also, queer, Autistic and disabled, and carry these perspectives and lived-experiences with me in my analysis.
I started becoming fascinated with fashion history, textile and garment archaeology/museology, and original practice reconstruction when I was about 16, facilitated at first by the wealth of material on historical costuming on Youtube. I had always been very expressive with my clothing and it was an avenue of freedom for me. I love learning about everything from the trade economies that brought fabric and raw materials to the minutiae of technique and methodology of creating garments to how those garments become cultural fundamentals and avenues for human express
ion. Experimental garment archaeology and original practice in particular are hugely interesting to me, since I love to hand sew and gain an understanding for how it must have felt to make the same dress or shirt. There is something so human about decorating ourselves in things we spend so much time and heart on, they feel like they are a part of us.
Since I have such a deep love for fashion and the craft of sewing in general, I wanted to explore what those traditions looked like outside my normal span of research, which tends to be Western Europe, and center them in a lens Indigenous knowledge systems. On a personal level, I wanted to understand the differing roles of textile and garment making traditions around the world, and how they are affected and shaped by global phenomena like colonization, the slave trade and industrialization.
This is an academic anthology blog, created for a college level Indigenous archaeology class, that aims to explore and showcase different Indigenous textile traditions and industries (focusing primarily on North and South America) and how they function as or within Indigenous knowledge systems or ways or knowing. In the class I created this blog for, we discussed much about the nature of Indigenous versus Western/colonial pedagogies and epistemologies, and where those pedagogies live in the societies that cultivate them. These conversations covered things like what kinds of knowledge are deemed valuable, whose knowledge is deemed valuable, and the cultural backdrops that frame these pedagogies. Through this blog and all the research it serves as a culmination and showcase for, I wanted to gain an understanding of how Indigenous textile cultures, industries and traditions serve as and fundamentally affect the pedagogies they are a part of. Because most of the frameworks we learned about were centered in the United States, that is where I’ve chosen a lot of my case studies from, but I will also be discussing a few garments, artists and traditions from other regions of the world, such as India.
Guiding Research Questions
These functioned as guidelines for my research and kept me centered as I looked for case studies.
How are textiles integral to different Indigenous ways of knowing in North America?
What cultural roles do they play and how have those roles changed over time and the advent of colonization?
How do these textile traditions and their corresponding knowledge systems thrive today and what is their relationship to historical events in a broader context?
What insights do modern Indigenous weavers and textile craftspeople have about their culture’s textile traditions and its knowledge lifeways?
How does repatriation of textile belongings serve to bolster those knowledge systems and the revitalization of Indigenous communities?
Why “Dancing Baskets”?
I chose to name this blog “Dancing Baskets” because I absolutely fell in love with the term when I first read about it. It is a term used to describe Raven’s tail woven robes coined by esteemed and revolutionary Tlingit weaver researcher Teri Rofkar, or Chas’ Koowu Tla’a, who we will discuss much in the post titled The Raven’s Tail! She describes them this way as the experience of creating one is, to her, very similar to basket weaving, a process she was intimately familiar with and tremendously skilled at. Not only is the twining of bark and wool a process that binds the two crafts, but the robes themselves were meant to dance and swirl with the wearer. She was hugely influential for her community and her craft, and I look to her as a huge personal source of inspiration as a craftsperson and community member.
