Continuity During Times of Coronavirus – Bringing Together the Choctaw Textile Community
By: TSA Member Jennifer Byram
Originating in Mississippi and Alabama, Choctaw communities have been dispersed due to colonial forces, removals, and continued interventions in Choctaw lifeways since the time of European contact. These forces brought about abrupt changes in Choctaw clothing styles and textile practices in the 1700s and a dramatic shift in our people’s access to materials native to the Choctaw homelands (Byram 2018). A renewed interest in native clothing from the Southeastern United States has manifested in community groups on social media in recent years. Since 2018, a growing number of Choctaw artisans and community members have come together near the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma’s headquarters in Durant, OK over a love of textiles and a desire to reawaken sleeping textile practices and the clothing of their native ancestors. The group worked passionately to provide the Choctaw Nation’s upcoming Cultural Center with clothing recreations representing different periods in Choctaw history. In this dramatically altered age of social distancing, video and mobile connection capabilities allow for involvement from the Choctaw community across North America.
Inspired by other Native American groups fighting isolation and creative apathy with virtual beading circles and social media pages, the “Choctaw Traditional Textiles” community not only continued to meet regularly via video but also broadened our community’s participation and brought to our meetings new areas of textile expertise. Through this new forum, the textile community evolved to include Choctaw textile enthusiasts both in the U.S. and Canada. Virtual meetings provided a shared space for Choctaw artisans separated or spread widely across the tribe’s territory. Choctaws and native textile artisans participated from across the United States and Canada, reminding us of the significance of community in maintaining our identity and creative momentum.
Through these meetings, we have hosted conversations on ethnobotany and perishable archaeology while watching fiber plants (rattlesnake master) grow month to month in a member’s yard. The virtual meetings provide the space to connect more frequently over time as we continue to celebrate the sharing of textile skills among households of community members and share genealogies over projects in progress. This time has highlighted the ways that making textiles in community helps us to address our greater needs for connection and affirming identity.
Through the Choctaw textile gatherings, the Choctaw Nation Historic Preservation department aims to address the difficulty of accessing native textile materials for artisans spread across the continent. These materials, including dogbane, stinging nettle, milkweed, red mulberry, and bison hair, are often location-specific, vary in quality from region to region, or are difficult to obtain. To tie virtual and physical experiences together, participating members will process bison hair from a hide at a distance—each taking on a bison hide section. Through this remote collaboration, we will pool our bison hair processing and spinning experiences and learn from each other’s successes and failures. As community efforts across North America continue to add momentum to the textile revitalization efforts, Choctaw textiles remind us of the ancestors who carried on these lifeways over hundreds of years.
To read more about the narrative of Choctaw textile history and ongoing community revitalization efforts, see the article “Reawakening Chahta Nan Tvnna (Choctaw Textiles),” presented at the TSA Symposium in Vancouver (Byram 2018) or attend the upcoming TSA Symposium 2020 session “Many Makers: Collaborative Renewal of Chahta Nan Tvnna (Choctaw Textiles).”
Jennifer Byram (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Arizona and a Research Assistant for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Historic Preservation Department. She has been a member of TSA since 2017 and coordinates community efforts to reawaken sleeping Choctaw textile traditions.
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