300th Year Reunification Of Skaru:re (Tuscarora) Nation @ Fort Neyuher:uke in Greene County
Keeping A Promise To My Dying Mother
I'm back to stitching to honor a promise to my dying mother to share the stories of my many mothers while dyeing cloth, quilting, crocheting and doing hand embroidery. In the last two years of my mother's life, she and I made bundles for dyeing cloth and recounted all her memories of natural dyeing with her mother and grandmother. "Making color on cloth," she told me describes the women in our family. Over and over Momma repeated that "dyeing fabric, sewing blankets and embellishing them with embroidery communicated our feelings, our struggles, our ups and downs, our joys, our sorrows, our loves and our broken hearts." My mother was proud of me as an artist, but this was the first and only time she asked me to use my creative hands for a specific purpose. So, I'm back where I was 50 years ago, living in the house and sleeping in the bed where I grew up, creating color on cloth using indigo, madder and marigolds, sewing indigenous fashion, dancing blankets and embellishing them with embroidery and beads. Fashion is a language and indigenous fashion is healing the wounds of 300 years of being a stranger on the land of my ancestors.