The Basket as Archive: A Crafty Turn in Feminist Archival Practice
by
Farrah Cato
One of the first lessons I learned in the first basket-making classes I took was that I would need to “break [the] memory” of the materials I worked with. “Break their memory” was the phrase my teacher used in reference to pine needles and the necessity of making these materials pliable enough to work with, but she repeated the phrase in later lessons on baskets made with reeds, and I found the idea echoed—in spirit if not precise language—when I learned about sweetgrass baskets. This idea of “breaking memory” carries resonance for me as I consider how these lessons and the materials used, particularly in the practice of basketry, connect to feminist archival practices and what it means to use atypical crafts to conduct memory work.
I propose that we look to basketry, both the baskets themselves and the act of creating them, as embodied archival practice in the form of feminist craft. Whether we look at the basket, or container as an archive, or we examine the weaver as engaging in embodied archival work, the end result is the same: we connect past and present through active engagement with longstanding traditions and their practitioners. At the same time, we extend into the future a constantly evolving notion of what counts as archival work and who counts as an archivist or memory keeper. It is this latter point, the extension of what archives and archivists look like through the embodied actions of basket makers, that I take up for this essay.
There is a great deal of scholarship on archival work, especially the “turn” in feminist and queer archival practices. Kate Eichhorn (2008; 2013) posits that the archival turn is connected to digital and technological shifts, and also that it functions as a response to various cultural or social factors. Abigail De Kosnik’s (2016) study on rogue archives advances the idea that archival work has been democratized through the work of “rogue” hands, primarily fan-fiction enthusiasts from all backgrounds, who look quite different from our traditional understanding of archivists. These rogue archivists, although their subject matter challenges the idea of what others might term serious, traditional, or important archival material, nonetheless engage in and practice the very work that academically trained archivists routinely perform in the normal course of their duties.
Such repetition of action in the course of archival duty is what Diana Taylor describes as repertoire, arguing that “if performance did not transmit knowledge, only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity” (2003). Taylor anchors archival work in performance, primarily but not exclusively in the performing arts, arguing that we transmit knowledge through actions and not words alone. Most importantly, she notes that too many voices, traditions, and histories would be lost if cultural memory existed only in the institutions of those in and with power. Performance, then, functions as a form of archive, and it is a kind of archival work accessible to all, not only those with written authority or institutional power. Just as De Kosnik extends Taylor’s idea of repertoire, repeated performance, and implicitly the democratizing factor to fan fiction archivists, I take a cue from both of them by extending repertoire and performance to the embodied actions of those engaged in craft work, and in this case, basketry as an archival craft.
Basket making requires repetitive actions, and many mimic those used in similar craft practices such as sewing, quilting, or other needlecrafts. Pine needle baskets, for instance, require a needle and some sort of thread to bind the rows together as the basket grows to the desired size. Just like the hand quilter or embroiderer, the basket maker may wet the thread between their lips before placing the end into the needle’s eye in an effort to make the thread catch easily; this action is so ubiquitous in needle crafts that Amy Elkins calls it the “threader’s kiss” (2021). Once the needle is threaded, the basket weaver (quilter, embroider, or other needlework practitioner) generally finds a rhythm of inserting the needle into the material, pushing it through to the other side, and, depending on the stitches they choose to use, wrapping it back to the front to begin the process again. Simultaneously, in the pine-needle basket making tradition, the pine needles find their “memory broken” as they are soaked in water or glycerin so that they are pliable enough to be manipulated into the desired basket shape. If they are not sufficiently broken, or made pliable, the integrity of the basket may be compromised. These practices hold true in other basket-making traditions where natural materials are used, including Nantucket baskets or sweetgrass baskets. It is simply the nature of the material and craft that, in order for the process to work, some difficult manipulations must first be processed. There is another metaphorical thread that could be followed here in terms of how we wrestle with difficult histories, but I leave that for another reflection at a future time.
The repetitive performance (the threading, the building up of rows, the memory breaking of the materials) in basketry functions as a kind of repertoire; it is often an embodied set of actions passed down through history. As one generation teaches another, collectively they re-create this performance and the memories contained within. To make the object, be it basket, quilt, dress, or tablecloth, and share the knowledge of how to do so, is not only a domestic tradition frequently passed down from mothers to daughters, but also—if we follow Taylor’s thread about performance both as a way to transmit knowledge and as vital collaborative work—a kind of feminist archival practice. In other words, both the object and the makers are complicit in the memory-making process, feeding off each other with the basket serving as archive and the maker serving as archivist. In the case of basket making, this shared lesson becomes even more poignant when we consider traditions of basketry and who practiced them, including Indigenous Native populations as well as enslaved people in the US antebellum south. Despite its recognition today as a valuable folk art, the sweetgrass basket tradition is associated with US slaves, who used these baskets in their backbreaking work of harvesting rice.[1] It is a craft so deeply revered by some of the artists who practice it today that they will not teach it to individuals outside of Gullah-Geechee communities. Corey Alston, a fifth generation maker whose work resides in the Smithsonian, calls sweetgrass baskets a “bloodline” (SouthCarolinaETV 2022). A trip to the Charleston Market in South Carolina will present many opportunities to engage with Alston and other skilled artisans, with most proudly laying claim to the generations who practiced before and taught them, too, indicating their place in their family lineage and larger cultural history.
This claiming of tradition might also be reckoned as repertoire, but what I find particularly striking about it is what it suggests to us about the connection between past, present, and future. The basket is an object representative of the archive, but it speaks, too, of the people involved in its making yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Alston’s “bloodline”) while transmitting generational and historical memory continually. It is a shared tradition practiced by some, but whose knowledge can be conveyed in various ways to others who may not engage in, yet still appreciate, the practice. That sweetgrass baskets have a history connected to antebellum slavery only heightens these sensations, at least for me. Similarly, in her performance art, Ursula Johnson’s basket-making repertoire draws on Indigenous practices she learned as a child from her ancestors, with installations that draw connections to commodification of basketry, questions of colonization and legislation, and connections to Indigenous history (Anderson 2020). In one series, Johnson weaves a basket around herself, “enclosing” her body because she “desired to remain inside, protected by the basket and her culture” (Anderson 2020, 240). Johnson’s performance of basket making is, much as Alston describes, the work of and connection to her bloodlines even as it demands that others recognize a history, painful though it is, contained within. Taylor asks, if we looked “through the lens of performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible?” (2003). In the case of the sweetgrass baskets and their makers, or in the case of Johnson’s literally embodied basket, we begin to see what otherwise might have been lost histories. The baskets serve as vehicles that connect us to the past and, if we are wise, into the future. Is that not what archives should do?
As someone who engages in craft and identifies as feminist, I find in the practices of basket making an opportunity to participate in meaningful memory work. These kinds of archives and the archivists who construct them are atypical. Their teachers and materials may come from any number of different places, but their functions are no less valuable. Their work becomes ever more vital as an act of queer archiving. Bek Orr (2021) reminds us that to queer the archive means disrupting narratives that do not typically leave room for the voices, works, and even the performances, of the marginalized. Similarly, it is democratizing work that De Kosnik calls attention to in the practice of rogue fan fiction archivists, just as it is the “collective effort” that Taylor evokes. Such work is, at its core, feminist in nature. That it comes in the form of craft somehow makes it a little more evocative to my mind, since craft has, for so much of history, been minimized and equated with cutesy homemade objects when practiced by women or people of color but prized as art when not. To pull the thread just a little further, it is basket-making, after all, that many use as a punchline to indicate subjects that matter little or are overly simple in their construction. Most of us have, I am sure, heard jokes about taking basket-weaving classes as an easy way to boost a GPA or round out an otherwise challenging academic schedule. Clearly our knowledge about whose stories, families, and bloodlines are bound up in these materials and their construction need reconsideration. After all, it is not only their history at stake, but our own. In this vein, why not look to baskets and their makers as just what we need to add to a slowly-growing definition of what constitutes archives and their archivists? What better place to turn?
In studying function as an abstract element of studio craft, Anna M. Fariello notes that containers like baskets “may have been the most valuable possession a family could own” because of their ability to clearly delineate one set of objects (the valuable) from another (the valueless). Further, she explains, containers grant us the “ability to hold, to save, to possess, […] store, [and] sometimes hoard” (2011, 37). Baskets, as a kind of container, are archives in their capacity to hold or save pieces of the past as valuable, memory-laden objects for the future and for us and the future to reflect on. Like any other archive might do, they hold pieces of history that we should value, just as we should value those who create these memory-containing objects for us. Memory may be broken in the initial making, but we can return to those memories each time we engage the archive. It is vital feminist, communal, and generational work to do so.
References
Anderson, Heather. 2020. “‘Ursula Johnson: Weaving Histories and Netukulimk in L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) and Other Works.” In The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, 239–48. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
De Kosnik, Abigail. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Eichhorn, Kate. 2008. “Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 12 (May). http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_12/eichhorn/index.htm.
———. 2013. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Elkins, Amy E. 2021. “The Weaver’s Handshake.” MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, December 13. https://maifeminism.com/the-weavers-handshake/.
Fariello, M. Anna. 2011. “Making and Naming: The Lexicon of Studio Craft.” In Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek, 23–42. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392873.
Orr, Bek. 2021. “Feminist Engagements with the Queer Archive.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 19 (Fall). https://doi.org/10.23860/jfs.2021.19.01.
Rosengarten, Dale. 2018. “Babylon Is Falling: The State of the Art of Sweetgrass Basketry.” Southern Cultures 24 (2): 98-124.
SouthCarolinaETV. 2022. “How to Fold a Palmetto Frond Into a Rose | Go For It.” Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USD0qWUogZo.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
[1] According to Dale Rosengarten, artists of the 1930s Charleston Renaissance like Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, a wealthy white women, featured sweetgrass basket makers in a series of paintings. On one hand, these paintings “eulogize[d] the glory days of the rice plantations” (2016, 103). On the other hand, they helped popularize basket traditions and their sale to tourists. This is simply one example of women participating in a kind of recovery work with mixed results.
