During a visit with adult children in Georgia recently, we participated in a basket weaving activity at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, just outside of Macon, Georgia.
The park is an attempt to honor the people of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Native Americans who thrived in the area for thousands of years before the American government sent them off to a reservation in unsettled parts of Oklahoma. That allowed white people to have the land and force Black people to work it.
(Photo: Susan Cartledge)
It was a mixed emotion kind of day. I’ve often admired baskets but never thought about making one. Yet, Britteny Cuevas of the Muscogee Nation came all the way from Oklahoma to spend the morning teaching curious folk how to weave a basket. Why not join in?
Baskets can be woven from materials ranging from pine straw to sawgrass and bamboo. We were using long strips of thin oval shaped reeds, probably a type of rattan, soaked in water to keep them flexible.
Cuevas or someone had already done what was probably the hardest part, getting a “spider” started, which is basically a circle of reeds woven together so that they splayed out in twos and threes from a central hub.
She showed us how to take a single strip “weaver,” fit one end into the base, and then work it back and forth around the “spider” strips, going around and around until it was used up, then it could be tucked in and another one started.
(Photo Susan Cartledge)
With many people for her to help, we were soon left on our own. I figured a nice tight weave would be better than loose one, but I didn’t realize until too late that the tighter the weave, the more quickly the basket closes up. Instead of a nice bowl, I ended up with a flat-bottomed pear shape that might hold a couple of pencils if I put rocks in the bottom.
I had no idea how to finish the top, so a gentleman who was obviously deep into the craft showed me how to tuck the ends under and pull them through for a couple of rounds, then cut off the excess.
In the process, he told me he wanted to start a school that taught basket weaving as therapy. “I’ve never had a bad day basket weaving,” he said.
But I couldn’t help but reflect on all the bad days the basket weavers had known. Along with Cuevas, John-John Brown had come from Oklahoma as a resource person to talk about Muskogee history and culture.
Brown is a cultural historian and educator for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Skilled in making canoes, bows, spears, atlatls, blowguns, and in flint napping – among other things – Brown was recently honored as a “living legend” for his contributions to preserving and passing on his people’s cultural heritage.
(Photo: Susan Cartledge)
Brown sat atop a picnic bench wearing jeans and a baseball cap with a single small feather hanging down the back. Affably, he said he had come in case we had ever wanted to ask a “real live Indian” any questions and not worry about causing offense. “You have to laugh,” he said.
Brown’s comments were laced with humor, but also with the acknowledgement that he could rarely visit places like Ocmulgee Mounds without finding time alone to pray and shed tears in memory of the abuse his ancestors suffered – rape and murder and pillaging in addition to the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma, during which thousands died.
Brown spoke of growing up with a traditionalist grandfather who taught him to pray to the Creator and dance through the night on Saturdays, while his Christian grandmother insisted they get up and attend a Baptist church the next morning.
“I’m a Southern Baptist traditionalist,” he joked, with “traditionalist” meaning he still holds to Native American beliefs and practices to honor the Creator in addition to Christian expressions of faith.
Brown described stomp dances held on Saturday nights during the summer at a designated dancing ground on family property. Participants form a ring and dance around a bonfire, which symbolizes the presence of the Creator. They move counterclockwise, so that their hearts are closest to the flame.
The dance promotes peace, he said: participants are not to join in if they harbor a grudge against anyone else.
One might expect Brown and others to feel perpetual bitterness against the descendants of the people who robbed his people of so much. I had the impression that he has learned to channel the pain through tears or remembrance, through grief rather than grievance.
I write this during the week when we observe Juneteenth, when people with a conscience remember how yet another people suffered ungodly abuse at the hands of others who somehow connected being white and powerful to having God on their side.
“Independence Day” for slaves in America was a step, but followed by many decades of oppression, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and mob violence. That is not a heritage for our country to be proud of, but one we must remember.
We know that repression continues wherever legislatures dominated by white supremacists (whether they admit it or not) enact voter suppression and gerrymandering laws so they can hold on to power. It likewise continues where legislators bar schoolteachers from teaching their students the truth about the uglier parts of our history, lest it cause some fragile white child to feel bad.
A friend recently mentioned that some extended family members had moved from California to a more conservative state so their children wouldn’t have to suffer from “white guilt” in school.
Guilt can be a very good thing when its purpose is to prompt responsibility. White folks like me may not have committed the crimes of our ancestors, but we benefitted from them, from the privilege that comes with being white, most often resulting in a stronger financial position than our Black neighbors and the Native Americans whose land we inhabit.
We can never make up for the sins of the past, but we can and should do far better in the present. If it takes some well-deserved “white guilt” to motivate more generous spirits and get us into the dance of reconciliation with our hearts closer to the Creator, so be it.
Professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and the Contributing Editor and Curriculum Writer at Good Faith Media.
