"Black ash is a metaphor for being native. It is indigenous. It is how we survived: being flexible, without breaking." -Neptune.
See Ross Power's project here Black ash basket weaving has been a continuous craft practiced throughout northeast Native American tribes in the Northeastern United States and Canada for centuries. Black ash is a rigid yet flexible wood. Emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle species, has been attacking the trees; female beetles lay eggs on the bark, and when they hatch, the young larvae hide under the bark, and the damage goes undone until the branches start dying. The preservation of the ash tree and basket weaving are woven together in a story of resilience and colonization. Current indigenous communities are fighting for the ash tree by preserving ash basket weaving. This battle connects the land, women's bodies, cultural resistance, and the crafting of narratives of resilience. In order to purse this project as part of my dissertation in English at GWU on representations of gestation and birth in eugenics and its aftermath, I propose an archival project to examine native ash basket-making in the NMAI collections, including videos recorded as part of The Recovering Voices Team, and Frank Speck collection of historical photographs of indigenous lives in Maine. My research will examine the indigenous northeast basket weaving culture and its political and historical contexts. I want to contextualize this archival investigation within the eugenics project of the 20th century in the northeast and how policies of forced sterilization, the vanishing Indian myth, and the artistry/labor of baskets were part of this context. Indian Boarding Schools forced children away from their homes and away from their cultural practices. Eugenics-based institutionalization utilized basket-making as a tool in the exhaustion of time that disabled people were forced to perform. Sterlization, a practice that offered release from institutionalization in exchange for the surrender of one’s procreative capacity, continued colonial projects of genocide by interrupting generational reproduction of largely poor and indigenous people. Eugenicists sent predominantly Euro-American women into rural communities to collect social worker family genealogies to target the labor of basketweaving as a marker of cognitive disability, and thus, unemployability. However, basket weaving did not die, and neither did indigenous peoples. Basket weaving was retained as a vital practice of indigenous cultural practice despite the stigmatization of the practice by American eugenicists. The interplay between those targeted by eugenics and the rhetoric’s of disability, racism, and capitalism weaves a complex story. Nan Wolverton writes on basket weavers in New England in the 1800s through the early 1900s, describing them as marginalized craftspeople of indigenous derivation who existed on the peripheries of white society. Basket makers made up a class of deviants from the ideal Yankee society. Poor White and Native basket-makers were outside the norms of the idealized human who were increasingly defined as working on behalf of a burgeoning mass market corporate production industry. Additionally, Basket weaving is part of the pedagogy of vocational programs in institutions for those deemed feeble-minded. My ancestors were white basket makers in Vermont, this history is not a part of my memory from oral traditions and the ways in which a blanket of secrecy encompassed my family history on his side. In my research I came across research leading me to analyze my own roots and has led me to considering why and how basket-weaving operates as culture, artistry, and domestic use as well as a weapon to enforce inequitable power relations (Powers). Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, Basket weaving was a widespread summer trade, and communities sold them in coastal Maine as part of the emerging tourist trade (Carol 41 & mt. Pleasant 2014). Advertisements for baskets were part of the vanishing Indian myth that was not just an idea but part and parcel of national policy. Wolverton writes, "It was, ironically, the Indian as icon of tradition that some twentieth-century marketers used to help sell factory-produced baskets, the wares that by the end of the nineteenth century had forced Native Americans to find other means of economic survival." (361-362). Basket weaving as a craft intersects with issues of gender, race, class, and history. As a methodology, it demands a complex investigation and analysis of oral history (Mt Pleasant A 2014). Between 1840 and 1916 in the NE US, the dovetailing influences of rising immigration, evolutionary theory, and the relationship between immigrants and germs, along with the rise of statistical tracking demographics of a nation’s peoples as part of its wealth (Swedlund, 150). Eugenics policy rose to prominence in the wake of Darwinism. In response to several disease epidemics, Cholera in the US started in 1832, thus leading to the founding of statistical organizations. The measuring and organizing of those who died and where, led to questions around preventing the infection of “deviant” identities to a pure white non-immigrant race. Victorian positivism combined with stat science leads to essentializing or grouping people through statistical analysis. Narratives of hygienic purity create policies of family separation and sterilization and are part of the deconstruction of American Indian identity (Gonzales, Kertes and Tayac 2007). Research on the history of eugenics in the US has not fully addressed state policies or paid enough attention to how eugenics erased native people and communities. I want to further explore the interweavings of basket making, disability, eugenics, and resistance through craft as a site of continuation that resists the erasure of Native Americans. Estabrook's research created detailed records on families throughout New York, Vermont, and Maine; she worked to create pedigree charts of targets by eugenics and “basket making” is noted as a marker for potential qualification of undiagnosed “feeblemindedness”, "IV 30 had, moreover, by a slow, quiet, unambitious, and illiterate basket-maker, two boys, V 81, 82. The former, born in 1841 in Vermont, was an indolent, unambitious, disorderly basket-maker, like his father, a pauper, and in his youth licentious." (105). Estabrook's analysis of 1,795 people in a few months of fieldwork created several narratives similar to the one above, identifying native ancestry, French-Canadian blood, alcoholism, disabilities, and promiscuity, along with basket-weaving as markers of elimination. They took these narratives and calculated the costs for society to maintain these families to argue for sterilization as the cheaper option (113). According to Jarvenpa, the association of deviancy with basket-making was a way "to make a creative artistic enterprise seem like something shameful, another outward sign of inner decay" (118). Jarvenpa identifies how Estabrook and Davenport turned basket-making into a code for degeneracy through their narrative strategies. In Jarvenpa’s study, disability and native identity is a necessary thread to weave to explicate the ways power operates to target disabled and/or indigenous people; she advocates for an examination of differences between dominant cultural practices related to disability can lead to new ways of viewing ontology and epistemology and can help create more solidarity in collective organizing (Lovern, 2008). My project, title, seeks to examine the relationship between native and white basket makers and how trade operates as a space for women's collective social identity. I want to examine how basket weaving operates as a counter-discourse to the eugenic rhetorics of eugenics and settler-colonialism. By starting at the local, through my own family history of white basket weavers in Vermont, which I recently discovered, I want to explore a way of weaving allyship that raises Native Voices of continued resistance. Why did my family hide basket weaving while native women continued the art? The film, “Dawnland”, explores the complex spaces of truth and reconciliation in Maine. It highlights the need for the connections between separating indigenous children and the resistance of mothers through basket weaving and the continued work of indigenous communities to address the related plights of the environment, cultural heritage, and resistance through the black ash weaving tradition. "Basket-weaving is a communal process in Ashininaabe culture through which a woman becomes a "carrier of her culture," similar to the way that a mother is a carrier of culture in the form of her child." (Burkhart, 2021) Parrish's work “Next Generation – Carriers of Culture” (2018), is a basket of a pregnant woman that honors the role of Native American women. It is a carrier that embodies the social and political power of indigenous mothers keeping their traditions alive. Traditionally, Native American birthing has been seen as transformative (Simpson 27). While there is no single Native American identity, nor is there a universal mother identity, there are a series of particularities that I want to weave together to analyze the narrative strategies of mothering resistance and resilience. All these issues weave together as traditional midwives are pushed away in the rush of embrace of Western medicalization of femininity. Through the rising science of health and statistical research, doctors took over in the form of obstetricians beginning early in the 19th century. (Swedlund, p. 104) Maternal policies that sterilized Native Americans and other so-called deviant identities were the basis of medicalization, anti-midwifery, and imposition of hospitals (alongside the removal of children) to boarding schools are all strategies of reproductive interruption employed by the eugenics movement of the early 20th century (Theobald, p. 54, 58). Theobald investigates the forms of resistance Native American women have continued throughout the process of medicalization and eugenics policies: "Native women have displayed fortitude and creativity in navigating the federal government's often contradictory demands on their bodies and behaviors and in meeting their perceived parturition and childbirth needs in evolving historical contexts" (12), Theobald's historical approach is powerful but does not mention disability except in a minor reference to one of the doctors whom the women did not trust in a birthing center. I want to find the stories, artwork, narratives, and records where disability and mother/child lie. I hope to provide a critical new perspective to the disciplines of US literary, indigenous, material culture, and disability studies while adding to future possibilities for the research of material, archival research, and collaborative use of research outside the texts in the “field.” Following the call of Clare Barker and Stuart Murray in their special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) to work towards making "criticism emerging from and informed by cultural locatedness in the first instance. "The markers, 'disability' and 'indigeneity,' are, as Bushman and Toscano write, "in tension while also mutually constitutive of one another through…colonial project, the branding, transformation and invasive reading of the body-mind" (2022). As Sieben analyzes literature, he asks an essential question between seeing Native Americans as not having seen disability as a problem in ancient history versus the other stories in which disability is a reality that causes physical pain and is an issue "that bears further engagement’" (228). Sieben writes, "If disability studies can centralize disability in indigenous studies, then perhaps indigenous studies, for its part, can bring to disability studies new purchase on the relations between bodies and territories, and on varying forms of embodiment, including dis-embodiment" (2012). As a disability scholar, I want to futher conjoin the two fields in order to expand ways of examining medicalization and how taking Native American children through adoption, boarding schools, and sterilization are part of the less visible violence of settler-colonialism in northeastern America as examined by William T. Vollmann in his counter-historical archival novel, Fathers and Crows, and the connections between taking the children and taking the land (“Dawnland” 20). Woven into the research is a discussion on research methods following feminist indigenous approaches; I hope to collaborate and weave cultural continuation together. I hope to collaborate with the NAIM to develop cross-institutional ties with George Washington University and look for items that may be seen afresh or brought to light in new ways from this moment. Calls to de-colonize rhetorical and composition studies classrooms have been part of my focus since my time teaching during my MA and pursuing “debate coaching studies” at Kansas State. Through engaging in alternative teaching and research methods, rhetorical action becomes praxis. As Hindman writes, "incorporating museum-based pedagogy in my contact zone curriculum allowed my students to witness and appreciate for themselves a rhetorical practice essential to rhetorical sovereignty. That practice, of course, is survivance, the process whereby American Indians have not just survived but also resisted "(Hindman, 2019). Hindman advocates for starting locally and entering in collaboration with the resources we have; as a student at GWU, I am here now and through a research engagement with the NMAI in conjunction with examining my geographic roots on my father's side in Vermont, I hope to not only enrich my research but form a new connection between my department and the museum community. I will use these connections to focus and guide my research, and in future courses, I will be teaching and collaborating with the university community through such work. I have been working with Ross Powers, a researcher at Woodstock Museum in Vermont, an expert on basket weaving in Vermont. These connections have been part of my preliminary outreach, and I am working towards building and utilizing my networks to engage this topic. Works Cited: Bolen, A. "A Silent Killer: Black Ash Basket Makers are Battling a Voracious Beatle to Keep Their Heritage Alive." American Indian. Spring 2020, Vol. 21, No. 1 Burkhart, E. "Saving Black Ash Trees and Native American Basket-Weaving: Cherish Parrish's Carriers of Culture." Arts Help. June 4, 2021. https://www.artshelp.com/native-american-women-carrying-culture-saving-black-ash-trees-and-indigenous-basket-weaving/amp/ Bushman, B. and Toscano P. "The Way History Lands on a Face: Disability, Indigeneity, and Embodied Violence in Tommy Orange's There There.” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 2021. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4.8483 Carroll, L. C. (1995). People of the Dawn. Native Peoples Magazine, 8(3), 36–42. Gonzales, A. Kertesz, J. and Tayac, G. (2007) “Eugenics as Indian Removal: Sociohistorical Processes and the De(con)struction of American Indians in the Southeast.” The Public Historian. Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 53-67. Jarvenpa. (2018). Declared defective : Native Americans, eugenics, and the myth of Nam Hollow. University of Nebraska Press. Lavonna L., (2008). "Native American Worldview and the Discourse on Disability," Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 1. Mt Pleasant, A. (2014). Salt, sand, and sweetgrass: methodologies for exploring the seasonal basket trade in southern Maine. American Indian Quarterly, 38(4), 411–426. National Museum of the American Indian. "Protecting Black Ash Trees for Future Generations - Salmon River School District." January 16, 2013. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRVcvrqUV8. Powers, M. “The Tradition of Basketmaking and Basket Use in Woodstock.” Woodstock History Center. https://www.woodstockhistorycenter.org/articles/thetraditionofbasketmakingiandbasketuse Senier, S. "'Traditionally, Disability Was Not Seen as Such.'" Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2013, pp. 213–29. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.3828/jlcds.2013.15. Senier, S., and Barker. C., "Introduction." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Vol. 7, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 123–40. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.3828/jlcds.2013.10. Simpson, L.(2006). "Birthing an Indigenous Resurgence." Until Our Hearts Are on the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth. Demeter. Swedlund. (2010). Shadows in the valley : a cultural history of illness, death, and loss in New England, 1840-1916. University of Massachusetts Press. Theobald. (2019). Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (pp. 1–269). The University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469653181_theobald Wolverton, Nan. "A Precarious Living: Basket Making and Related Crafts Among New England Indians" in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol 71: Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1409
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