How Cherokee Basket Weaving Has helped a culture survive
Native American basket weaving has been an important tradition and ritual for many of these cultures, and the Cherokee culture is no different. In Cherokee tradition, basket weaving has presented as an important skill for women to have. Basket Weaving has allowed the Cherokee peoples to have a ritual and tradition that has been around through generations and has allowed them revive their culture. "Basket making crosses generations and weaves the lives of Cherokee women together, as knowledge of the technical and artistic components of basket making is passed from mother to daughter and on to granddaughters" (Rodgers 1999, 200). Thus, they form a folk group that uses basket weaving to express their culture. But how has basket weaving allowed the Cherokee Culture survive into modern times when it is such an old tradition?
As Sims puts it in his book Living Folklore: An introduction to the study of People and their Traditions (2011), "tradition is simply the sharing of something of cultural significance from group member to group member". This is essentially what basket weaving is for those in the Cherokee Culture -- tradition. However, this tradition has become something more for this culture, as it allows them to hold onto remnants of what their culture was pre-contact. During pre-contact times, the Cherokee culture thrived, and women were often in charge of creating baskets by harvesting the plants, preparing them, and then creating baskets that performed various tasks (Hill 1996, 112).
In modern times however, basketry has become a form of art that relates back to their culture. Some have said that "baskets are so richly interdependent with all forms of cultural expression and concern that indeed it would be difficult to find another art form so saturated with symbolic and broad cultural value" (Westerman 2006, 111).
These baskets represent so much more than they initially appear. These baskets represent art, culture, and this group's identity. In Basso's article Stalking with Stories: Names, places and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache (1984), he discusses how certain things such as speech or art can define a Native American culture. This is exactly what basket weaving is for the Cherokee culture, as it represents their historic identity, a tradition and ritual that has lasted through the ages and is still practiced today. Thus, the basket weaving tradition and ritual has helped the Cherokee nation go back to its roots and re-establish their culture even in modern society through art.
