A Case of Basket Diplomacy
Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt University
Artfully acknowledging that both joy and desperation went into the weaving of those Chitimacha baskets that she held inside the Montclair Museum, Sarah Sense asks us to carefully consider the circumstances surrounding the creation and circulation of all those woven during the early twentieth century. Picture during the winter of 1901-02 about fifteen women and girls busily making baskets out of wild cane that grew along south Louisiana’s bayous and lakes. They first had to cut the cane at just the right width and length, cutting only at joints that showed thumb prints of the Holy Woman who first taught them how to make baskets. After the canes were carried home and while still green and soft enough, weavers split and peeled them into very narrow splints ready for drying and dyeing. Splints meant to be colored black were boiled in water with seeds and leaves of black walnut. To color splints yellow, weavers boiled them with a wild root known as swamp dock gathered from nearby wetlands. When some of the yellow splints were soaked in lime and again boiled with that root, they reached a distinctive red color. Weavers then plaited the dyed and undyed splints into many different patterns, shaping them into mats, trays, bowls, and boxes. Some boxes might even be double-woven, with an interior wall separate from the exterior surface. Silica in the rivercane gave all Chitimacha baskets a remarkable durability and lustrous finish.
The Native American women making those baskets at the dawn of the twentieth century were engaged in a resurgence of production driven by a new kind of attention to their art. Possessing many ceremonial and household purposes over millennia of time and even attracting non-Native buyers in south Louisiana since colonial times, their basketry had been steadily suffering a decline in both domestic uses and local sales. Thanks in large part to a relationship formed with daughters of the man who started the Tabasco Pepper Sauce company, however, Chitimacha baskets were now reaching distant and diverse buyers. By the year 1900, Mary McIlhenny Bradford along with her older sister Sara McIlhenny had taken a passionate interest in the Chitimacha community on Bayou Teche thirty miles from their family’s estate on Avery Island. That interest mainly sparked by an appreciation for the unique beauty of their baskets, Mary and Sara began urging Chitimacha women to weave as many as possible in various shapes, sizes, and patterns for circulation through a widening network of sellers and buyers. Mary Bradford’s numerous correspondents included curio-shop owners catering to tourists, department stores located in big cities, individual women seeking items for home decoration, anthropologists studying Indian cultures, and museum officials building public collections. To this patronage of Indian handicrafts, women like the McIlhenny sisters across the country brought a range of aesthetic sensibilities and philanthropic motives to their patronage of Indian handicrafts.
Closely resembling what happened among Indigenous communities elsewhere in the United States, Chitimacha basketry was suddenly influenced by frenzied attention to Native American material culture during the heyday of a wider Arts-and-Crafts Movement. And among all the Indigenous cultural objects being sought by merchants, shoppers, and collectors, it just so happens that baskets made by women became the most widely and deeply craved. Also coinciding with the market for Indian arts and crafts was the aggressive acquisition of Indigenous material culture by anthropologists and curators at natural history museums. This unexpected craze for Indian things revitalized demand for Chitimacha baskets, altered what the craft meant to the community, and renewed incentive to pass-on weaving skills to another generation. Within the earliest years of production in response to Mary Bradford’s orders, from mid-November 1901 to mid-December of 1904, about fifteen Chitimacha women and girls made 1,932 baskets that sold for a total price of $2,100.25. The amount paid to the weavers was $1,851.80, with the difference kept by Bradford going toward prize money awarded those making the finest baskets and fees charge by attorneys for the tribe’s land case.
While Mary Bradford ordered more and more baskets from Chitimacha weavers, however, their community was simultaneously facing a deluge of severe hardships and dangers. The tribe had recently lost a suit in federal court for recovery of land lost to neighboring sugar-cane planters, and on Christmas day 1901 chief John Paul lost a brother and a son to killings committed by a local sheriff and his posse. John Paul’s daughter Virginia, who was expecting a child, was seriously wounded with a gunshot to her head, and other family members were taken into custody following this attack on their home. As despondently reported to Mary Bradford by Christine Paul, a thirty-three-year-old weaver and daughter-in-law of the chief, “we are in a big trubble here.”
The invasive spread of sugar plantations along Bayou Teche over the nineteenth century had already drastically reduced the Chitimachas’ territory and diminished their access to resources—including the rivercane woven into baskets. Although the Chitimachas still managed to preserve attachment to places of spiritual as well as material importance, they were now overwhelmed with new threats resembling what many Indigenous communities in the Jim Crow South had to endure. Liens on unpayable debt threatened what remained of their land. Several members of the tribe were murdered in two separate encounters with white neighbors. Contaminated water from sugar refinery offscourings and chronic respiratory illness plagued their health, and the children lacked access to schools as formal education became more necessary. Making matters even more desperate, the Chitimachas’ Indian identity was brought into question by local antagonists while the federal government kept denying them protection of tribal rights. This was a perilous condition suffered by many Indigenous communities across eastern states, proving that government inaction could be as damaging as government action when it came to coercive efforts at assimilation. So while Choctaws in Oklahoma were facing mandatory allotment of their land—as represented in some of Sarah Sense’s interwoven mapping works—the Chitimachas in Louisiana were also confronting a threat to their sovereignty and territory, but in a quite different form. In their case, it was the lack of much needed attention and support from the federal government that made things so desperate.
At such a dire time in their history, it turns out that Chitimacha women were weaving hundreds and hundreds of rivercane baskets not only as a source of income but also as a strategy of political action. In other words, diplomacy as well as dexterity went into their work as they hoped that the basketry’s aesthetic and ethnographic appeal might draw attention to their people’s deepening plight. What began as a partnership with the McIlhenney sisters, mainly brokered by weaver Christine Paul, grew into an alliance network that included persons and groups far from south Louisiana who possessed potential influence on government policy. Throughout her written correspondence with Mary and Sara regarding shipments of baskets, Christine consistently reported on what was happening to the Chitimacha community and appealed for assistance needed to save its remaining few hundred acres. And consequently, after persistently bearing setbacks and delays, the Chitimachas did eventually gain federal recognition of their sovereignty and protection of their territory.
Sarah Sense emphasizes that the responsibility taken-on by Chitimacha women to weave for the basketry market a century ago becomes a responsibility of those who practice weaving today. Historians likewise possess a responsibility in bringing their story forward. For a long time the initiatives and strategies taken by the Chitimacha women themselves—combating dispossession with basket diplomacy—have stood mostly in the background of the McIlhenny sisters’ efforts on their behalf. But in this case—among countless others that warrant recovery of Native American women’s agency from behind the more visible actions of white allies and advocates—it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge the resourcefulness and endurance that Chitimacha weavers demonstrated in a fight for their people’s sovereignty and territory. Plenty of traditional knowledge and technical proficiency of course went into weaving the large volume of baskets requested at a demanding speed by the McIlhenney sisters. Equally important, however, were the improvisational skills in negotiation and communication across a wide cultural divide that it took to weave together a consequential alliance network.
That alliance initiated a hundred and twenty-five years ago between Christine Paul and Mary McIlhenny Bradford, which indeed would save Chitimacha land by 1916 and set the nation on its course of federal recognition, also ensured that thousands of Chitimacha baskets would reach stores, homes, and museums across the country—joining tens of thousands of Indigenous baskets that crisscrossed the continent during the early twentieth century. And as those rivercane baskets took many pathways from Louisiana bayou country to places like the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum—just to name a few—they carried different memories and accumulated different meanings along the way. Patrons, merchants, collectors, anthropologists, and curators gave them purposes largely fixed on an imagined pastness of things made by vanishing Indians. Rather ironically, though, the weavers were making and selling those things for the sake of their people’s future—only one example of how Indigenous people for centuries have turned tools of colonization into ones of resistance and negotiated colonial circuits and spaces on Native terms.
Unquestionably a busy and skilled basket weaver by 1912, Sarah Sense’s great-great-grandmother Delphine Stouff understood clearly that the federal government had authority to protect Indigenous lands against alienation and Indigenous people against erasure. Unfortunately, however, it was still paying her people no mind at a most desperate moment in their history. Reporting in a letter to anthropologist and collector Mark Harrington that “some said we not Indians,” Delphine believed that he could prove otherwise. Reminding him about his visit several years earlier to buy things “made by my parents,” she now hoped that the anthropologist could appeal to Congress on the Chitimachas’ behalf. In a flare of defiance and determination, she declared that “we are Indian too” and thus deserve “the same right” held by other Indians. The weaver Delphine Stouff was doing nothing less than reclaiming Native American space for her nation, a reclamation of Indigeneity vividly resonating in her descendant Sarah Sense’s current works of art.
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A Case of Basket Diplomacy
Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt University
Artfully acknowledging that both joy and desperation went into the weaving of those Chitimacha baskets that she held inside the Montclair Museum, Sarah Sense asks us to carefully consider the circumstances surrounding the creation and circulation of all those woven during the early twentieth century. Picture during the winter of 1901-02 about fifteen women and girls busily making baskets out of wild cane that grew along south Louisiana’s bayous and lakes. They first had to cut the cane at just the right width and length, cutting only at joints that showed thumb prints of the Holy Woman who first taught them how to make baskets. After the canes were carried home and while still green and soft enough, weavers split and peeled them into very narrow splints ready for drying and dyeing. Splints meant to be colored black were boiled in water with seeds and leaves of black walnut. To color splints yellow, weavers boiled them with a wild root known as swamp dock gathered from nearby wetlands. When some of the yellow splints were soaked in lime and again boiled with that root, they reached a distinctive red color. Weavers then plaited the dyed and undyed splints into many different patterns, shaping them into mats, trays, bowls, and boxes. Some boxes might even be double-woven, with an interior wall separate from the exterior surface. Silica in the rivercane gave all Chitimacha baskets a remarkable durability and lustrous finish.
The Native American women making those baskets at the dawn of the twentieth century were engaged in a resurgence of production driven by a new kind of attention to their art. Possessing many ceremonial and household purposes over millennia of time and even attracting non-Native buyers in south Louisiana since colonial times, their basketry had been steadily suffering a decline in both domestic uses and local sales. Thanks in large part to a relationship formed with daughters of the man who started the Tabasco Pepper Sauce company, however, Chitimacha baskets were now reaching distant and diverse buyers. By the year 1900, Mary McIlhenny Bradford along with her older sister Sara McIlhenny had taken a passionate interest in the Chitimacha community on Bayou Teche thirty miles from their family’s estate on Avery Island. That interest mainly sparked by an appreciation for the unique beauty of their baskets, Mary and Sara began urging Chitimacha women to weave as many as possible in various shapes, sizes, and patterns for circulation through a widening network of sellers and buyers. Mary Bradford’s numerous correspondents included curio-shop owners catering to tourists, department stores located in big cities, individual women seeking items for home decoration, anthropologists studying Indian cultures, and museum officials building public collections. To this patronage of Indian handicrafts, women like the McIlhenny sisters across the country brought a range of aesthetic sensibilities and philanthropic motives to their patronage of Indian handicrafts.
Closely resembling what happened among Indigenous communities elsewhere in the United States, Chitimacha basketry was suddenly influenced by frenzied attention to Native American material culture during the heyday of a wider Arts-and-Crafts Movement. And among all the Indigenous cultural objects being sought by merchants, shoppers, and collectors, it just so happens that baskets made by women became the most widely and deeply craved. Also coinciding with the market for Indian arts and crafts was the aggressive acquisition of Indigenous material culture by anthropologists and curators at natural history museums. This unexpected craze for Indian things revitalized demand for Chitimacha baskets, altered what the craft meant to the community, and renewed incentive to pass-on weaving skills to another generation. Within the earliest years of production in response to Mary Bradford’s orders, from mid-November 1901 to mid-December of 1904, about fifteen Chitimacha women and girls made 1,932 baskets that sold for a total price of $2,100.25. The amount paid to the weavers was $1,851.80, with the difference kept by Bradford going toward prize money awarded those making the finest baskets and fees charge by attorneys for the tribe’s land case.
While Mary Bradford ordered more and more baskets from Chitimacha weavers, however, their community was simultaneously facing a deluge of severe hardships and dangers. The tribe had recently lost a suit in federal court for recovery of land lost to neighboring sugar-cane planters, and on Christmas day 1901 chief John Paul lost a brother and a son to killings committed by a local sheriff and his posse. John Paul’s daughter Virginia, who was expecting a child, was seriously wounded with a gunshot to her head, and other family members were taken into custody following this attack on their home. As despondently reported to Mary Bradford by Christine Paul, a thirty-three-year-old weaver and daughter-in-law of the chief, “we are in a big trubble here.”
The invasive spread of sugar plantations along Bayou Teche over the nineteenth century had already drastically reduced the Chitimachas’ territory and diminished their access to resources—including the rivercane woven into baskets. Although the Chitimachas still managed to preserve attachment to places of spiritual as well as material importance, they were now overwhelmed with new threats resembling what many Indigenous communities in the Jim Crow South had to endure. Liens on unpayable debt threatened what remained of their land. Several members of the tribe were murdered in two separate encounters with white neighbors. Contaminated water from sugar refinery offscourings and chronic respiratory illness plagued their health, and the children lacked access to schools as formal education became more necessary. Making matters even more desperate, the Chitimachas’ Indian identity was brought into question by local antagonists while the federal government kept denying them protection of tribal rights. This was a perilous condition suffered by many Indigenous communities across eastern states, proving that government inaction could be as damaging as government action when it came to coercive efforts at assimilation. So while Choctaws in Oklahoma were facing mandatory allotment of their land—as represented in some of Sarah Sense’s interwoven mapping works—the Chitimachas in Louisiana were also confronting a threat to their sovereignty and territory, but in a quite different form. In their case, it was the lack of much needed attention and support from the federal government that made things so desperate.
At such a dire time in their history, it turns out that Chitimacha women were weaving hundreds and hundreds of rivercane baskets not only as a source of income but also as a strategy of political action. In other words, diplomacy as well as dexterity went into their work as they hoped that the basketry’s aesthetic and ethnographic appeal might draw attention to their people’s deepening plight. What began as a partnership with the McIlhenney sisters, mainly brokered by weaver Christine Paul, grew into an alliance network that included persons and groups far from south Louisiana who possessed potential influence on government policy. Throughout her written correspondence with Mary and Sara regarding shipments of baskets, Christine consistently reported on what was happening to the Chitimacha community and appealed for assistance needed to save its remaining few hundred acres. And consequently, after persistently bearing setbacks and delays, the Chitimachas did eventually gain federal recognition of their sovereignty and protection of their territory.
Sarah Sense emphasizes that the responsibility taken-on by Chitimacha women to weave for the basketry market a century ago becomes a responsibility of those who practice weaving today. Historians likewise possess a responsibility in bringing their story forward. For a long time the initiatives and strategies taken by the Chitimacha women themselves—combating dispossession with basket diplomacy—have stood mostly in the background of the McIlhenny sisters’ efforts on their behalf. But in this case—among countless others that warrant recovery of Native American women’s agency from behind the more visible actions of white allies and advocates—it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge the resourcefulness and endurance that Chitimacha weavers demonstrated in a fight for their people’s sovereignty and territory. Plenty of traditional knowledge and technical proficiency of course went into weaving the large volume of baskets requested at a demanding speed by the McIlhenney sisters. Equally important, however, were the improvisational skills in negotiation and communication across a wide cultural divide that it took to weave together a consequential alliance network.
That alliance initiated a hundred and twenty-five years ago between Christine Paul and Mary McIlhenny Bradford, which indeed would save Chitimacha land by 1916 and set the nation on its course of federal recognition, also ensured that thousands of Chitimacha baskets would reach stores, homes, and museums across the country—joining tens of thousands of Indigenous baskets that crisscrossed the continent during the early twentieth century. And as those rivercane baskets took many pathways from Louisiana bayou country to places like the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum—just to name a few—they carried different memories and accumulated different meanings along the way. Patrons, merchants, collectors, anthropologists, and curators gave them purposes largely fixed on an imagined pastness of things made by vanishing Indians. Rather ironically, though, the weavers were making and selling those things for the sake of their people’s future—only one example of how Indigenous people for centuries have turned tools of colonization into ones of resistance and negotiated colonial circuits and spaces on Native terms.
Unquestionably a busy and skilled basket weaver by 1912, Sarah Sense’s great-great-grandmother Delphine Stouff understood clearly that the federal government had authority to protect Indigenous lands against alienation and Indigenous people against erasure. Unfortunately, however, it was still paying her people no mind at a most desperate moment in their history. Reporting in a letter to anthropologist and collector Mark Harrington that “some said we not Indians,” Delphine believed that he could prove otherwise. Reminding him about his visit several years earlier to buy things “made by my parents,” she now hoped that the anthropologist could appeal to Congress on the Chitimachas’ behalf. In a flare of defiance and determination, she declared that “we are Indian too” and thus deserve “the same right” held by other Indians. The weaver Delphine Stouff was doing nothing less than reclaiming Native American space for her nation, a reclamation of Indigeneity vividly resonating in her descendant Sarah Sense’s current works of art.
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