2024 Life Events
My Momma's dying prayers were that I share fiber art techniques passed down through generations in my family line. Our creative hands are attached to the land of our ancestors from Currituck to Kiawah along the Atlantic Ocean, and inland to Contentnea Creek Homeland in present day Wilson and Green Counties. Our homeland became The Carolina Colony. My bloodline held onto textile traditions from 1713 to 2024, when I carry our stories to what my great-grandfather called, "Freedom land over the big falling waters." He had never been but described a place where we would no longer have to hide in plain sight. This long journey is not just mine. This journey belongs to all of us struggling just to be ourselves living in a dominate culture that would prefer it if we just disappeared without a trace. But, we are part of the land. If we disappear, then the land as it is known disappears. This North Carolina Toisnot Tuscarora Geechee Gul is flying the coup to a large intertribal gathering on Hiawatha Island, and sharing our textile traditions. Ain't Life Grand!
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.