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/.

Chilkat Robes:

Central and South America: 

Khiqu:

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:

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.