Weaving Alliances with Other Women

A preface to a book can be many things. It may offer a roadmap to a book’s contents. Often it serves as an opportunity to acknowledge and thank the many hands that contribute to a scholarly production: archivists, librarians, colleagues, students, editors, family, and friends. It is also an opportunity to establish a pedigree, if you will, an intellectual family tree that can situate the new text in its rightfully identified place. Daniel Usner’s preface to Weaving Alliances with Other Women does all that. In the opening pages Clara Sue Kidwell reminds us that Native American women’s stories are often overshadowed by their mythologized past. Lucy Murphy’s insights into the acts of mediation and negotiation by Metis women provided opportunities to improve the conditions of their communities. Devon Mihesuah challenges us to remember the absence of Native American women’s voices in chapter after chapter of historical scholarship. If that is not enough to convince you that Usner’s most recent work is a worthy read, then his own record of scholarship should. Weaving Alliances is a small but mighty contribution to the history of Native American women, but it is also a significant addition to Usner’s ongoing research that studies the nuances and complexities of exchanges and alliances in the Native American cultural experience.Christine Paul, a Chitimacha woman living along the winding reaches of Bayou Teche, Louisiana, is the central focus in a story that illustrates the significance of material culture to the vibrancy and persistence of many Native American communities. Paul, like many other Chitimacha girls, learned to weave river cane into the beautiful and unique patterns, shapes, and colors that make the baskets so distinctive. By the opening years of the twentieth century, the superb craftsmanship of the baskets caught the attention of privileged white buyers, whose interest in collecting and selling were part of a broader trend in acquiring and displaying Native American arts and crafts. Usner rightfully argues against the assumption that the increased production and proliferation of Native American handiwork that began during this period was driven solely by the self-interest of white buyers and collectors. Instead, Usner demonstrates that Christine Paul’s basketry was a tool that she and other members of her community used as leverage to protect and promote Chitimacha sovereignty and land. Through her alliances and relationships with two privileged white women, Mary McIlhenny Bradford and Caroline Dorman, Christine Paul’s perseverance, as expressed through the promotion and distribution of Chitimacha material culture, influenced the decision to extend federal trust status to the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana in 1916.Weaving Alliance is a highly accessible narrative that will appeal to a wide audience of scholars, educators, students, and general readers. It is also a much-needed contribution that challenges us to revisit our assumptions about the commercialization and commodification of Native American arts and crafts. The only inadequacy in Usner’s research, and perhaps this is an unfair expectation beyond the scope of the work, is that there is no attempt to connect the craft to the culture beyond its production and usefulness in building alliances. Chitimacha weaving is the result of generations of indigenous knowledge. I, for one, would like to know more about the cultural tradition and how it is connected to Chitimacha cosmology, history, and science. But leaving the reader wanting to know more is the job of a good scholar

Art · Literature · Media studies · Metis · Narrative · Native american · Negotiation · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Law