December
14
Introduction
Hello and welcome to Dancing Baskets!
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.
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How are textiles integral to different Indigenous ways of knowing in North America?
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What cultural roles do they play and how have those roles changed over time and the advent of colonization?
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How do these textile traditions and their corresponding knowledge systems thrive today and what is their relationship to historical events in a broader context?
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What insights do modern Indigenous weavers and textile craftspeople have about their culture’s textile traditions and its knowledge lifeways?
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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.