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Early Indigenous Literatures

Lace Moxie's Purse (Front View)

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Rodslen Brown's "Lace Moxie's Purse"

The Cherokee Nation followed the Muscogee and the Choctaw Nation in 2007 in exclude descendants of freed people from the rights and privileges of tribal citizenship. Revealing the tension of anti-blackness within the community, Phillip Deloria understands this move across tribal nations as a struggle to “reconcile citizenship claims with tribal-sovereignty claims” (Deloria 6). While much of this legal battle was legislated upon by the Cherokee Supreme Court, which decided to remove the phrase “by blood” in its constitution, this decision reflected the effects of blood quantum and genetics in legalizing kinship relations within the Cherokee community. In this context, Cherokee artist and basket weaver, Rodslen Brown’s “Lace Moxie’s Purse”, takes up the Indigenous art of weaving to express that “whether by blood or through kinship, freedmen are … relatives”, and that freedmen and Black-Native histories are central to Indigenous histories.

   In her study of the history of basketry amongst Cherokees, Sarah Hill notes that the art of basketry needs to be approached with a dynamic perspective towards the changes in dietary habits, living conditions, gender roles, and waves of dispossessions that altered the utility and the form of the basket. She writes, “Within and between households, women bridged the differences between past and present, prosperous and sparse, and Indian and white…They did not merge passively into new identities, nor hold intractably to old ones. Rather they engaged fully in the complexities of change” (Hill 133). At the intersection of gender, labor, and intramural tribal politics, Hill highlights the influence of identity in shaping the preservation of traditional basketry practices by working within contemporary resonances of representational politics. Yet, Sherry Farrell Racette in “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art” underlines that traditional Indigenous art have also been subjected to both “continuous and broken ‘lines of descent’ as the knowledge for gathering and processing materials, techniques, and patterns has survived and transformed over generations” (Racette 115). The simple act of retaining and protecting Indigenous knowledge is political, as it stems from the premise that the materials used for weaving are “living and present”, and the gestures and movements involved in creation are historically inherited, yet deeply personal and meditative (Ibid.).

   Commenting on the materials used in Lace Moxie’s Purse — root runners, flat reed, dye, hide — Amber Starks (Muscogee Creek Nation) notes that the interplay of each material “speaks to the care and attention that goes into observing, learning, and translating culture” (Starks 2022). The contrasting colors, centrally wound by a brown reed symbolizes that the notion of Black and Indigeneous harmony is not antithetical Native sovereignty, but integral to its shared futurity. Moreover, the utility of the basket as a carrier and keeper, most evident in the leather handles, speaks to the care and stewardship that form the literal social and political ties between Black and Indigeneous people. Starks further remarks, “This basket, with its modest shape but interlocking details, cautions us not to forget the struggle, resilience, and solidarity it has taken for Native people to still be here” (Ibid.)

   Qwo Driskill (Cherokee) in their essay, “ Doubleweaving Two Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies”, use doubleweaving as a rhetorical strategy that creates stories and models newer ways of reading between and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Although Driskill’s critique positions Native Studies as embedded within queer-of-color critique, it is helpful to extend this analysis to Black and Native studies to speculate on the embodied, aesthetic, and erotic grounds upon which Black-Native identity is fashioned. Doubleweaving, to reiterate Lisa Lowe’s vocabulary, points to an “emergent formation” (Lowe 20), which communicates “a story much more complex and durable than its original and isolated splints, a story both unique and rooted in ancient and enduring form” (Driskill 74). Rodslen basketry exhibits the radical relational possibilities that can be nurtured by honing the techniques, corporeal histories, and even tensed interactions that have carried Indidgenous arts into the present.