CLAREMORE, Okla. – Southeastern-style beadwork is experiencing a revival after nearly being lost due to loss of place and a dwindling number of beadwork artists.
Cherokee artist Martha Berry has been leading the revival for about 10 years. She spoke about the rise, lose and revival of traditional Southeastern and Cherokee beadwork recently at the Will Rogers Museum in Claremore at an event hosted by the Rogers County Cherokee Association.
Berry lives in Tyler, Texas, but her family is from Claremore and she grew up in Tulsa in the 1950s and 1960s. She credits her father for making her proud to be Cherokee.
“I very much wish my dad was still here with us. I’d like to think he’d be very proud today that I have brought this message of traditional beadwork that had been so forgotten and very nearly lost, back home,” she said.
Southeastern and Cherokee beadwork began with trade and intermarriage between Southeastern tribes and white settlers in the mid 1600s. Part of that trade included trading animal skins and other items for thread, steel needles, silk ribbons, scissors and glass beads that Southeastern tribes, including the Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Choctaw and Seminole, sewed onto clothing, bandolier bags, garters, moccasins and sashes.
Designs from pottery and other items created before contact with white settlers were incorporated into beadwork designs and those designs continued in another medium.
“It (beadwork) is a visual metaphor for the time in which it was created. What they did was take ancient designs and merged them with, what was then, state-of-the-art materials,” Berry explained.
Though scholars are intrigued by the “old beadwork” and the knowledge that beadwork preserves, the meaning of some of the iconographic images used by beadwork artists of the 18th and 19th centuries has been lost.
“We only know that they were very important because they were used over and over again. They were trying to preserve something and trying to pass it on,” Berry said.
By the time of the American Revolution in the mid 1770s, Southeastern tribes began to establish a tradition of beadwork. Speaking from the standpoint of the Cherokee bead workers, Berry said there was a “golden age” for Cherokee beadwork in the early 1800s.
Cherokee artists stopped creating beadwork art immediately following the forced removal of the Cherokee people in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, from Georgia and Tennessee.
“They had nothing. They had to build farms, they had to put roofs over their heads, they had to feed their children and they had to put in a crop. They didn’t have time to put in 225 hours making a bandolier bag,” Berry said.
Also, Berry believes, in trying to assimilate further with white culture, many Cherokee turned away from creating and wearing traditional clothing made with beadwork.
Very few artists’ names exist to know who created much of the bead artwork that remains today mostly in museums and private collections, Berry said. Because a name or tribe is not attached to many old beadwork pieces, it is difficult to be certain which tribe may have created a particular piece of Southeastern beadwork.
“Attributing tribes for the most part in Southeastern beadwork is a very dicey business, and so I’m careful about how I do that,” Berry explained.
Southeastern tribes sometimes used their beadwork crafts for diplomatic gift exchanges with white governments and exchanges with other tribes in the 1700s and 1800s.
“You took the finest piece of art or craft that represents your people and tells the story of your people. You gave your very best,” she said.
Some beaded items exist today because they were given to U.S. government leaders and representatives and preserved. Others ended up in museums.
“In the case of beadwork, if it were not for museums who the saw the value and preserved these pieces…we would have nothing to see,” she said.
As time passed into the 20th century only plains tribes were visibly doing beadwork, which is “very different” than Southeastern-style beadwork. This beadwork could be seen at powwows and in early TV westerns.
Those images created a “pan-Indian,” powwow look and the public, including Berry, thought all Indian people dressed like plains Indians.
“Cherokees like me who grew going to those movies, going to those powwows, seeing those images, thought that’s how all Native Americans dressed,” she said. “That’s what I thought when I started this. I learned to do plains beadwork and thought I was doing the beadwork of my grandmothers and that was my goal.”
Eventually, through research she found Southeastern beadwork designs and finally began recreating the true artwork of her ancestors. When she started, in her forties, she had few people to turn to who could help her learn Southeastern-style beadwork. Approximately 12 people were creating this style of beadwork at the close of the 20th century, Berry said. Of those master beaders, only two were Cherokee.
Two years ago she was asked to head the Cherokee Beadwork Revival Project that was intended to revive the tribe’s beadwork tradition. She organized a class at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah and invited Cherokee beaders interested in learning how to make Cherokee beadwork items. Twelve people showed up to learn from her.
In teaching beading, Berry explained she teaches new beaders how to bead small items like purses or sashes first.
“A bandolier bag takes about 225 hours to complete, and to get a new beader to stick with that is hard,” she said.
She admits beading a sash can also take a lot of time, so these days she helps her women students bead purses because along with being easier to complete, they are portable and may be given as gifts or sold.
“I’ve always said to revive this art form we’ve got to do three things; we’ve got to grow beaders, we have to grow collectors and we have to grow brokers in the form of museums and galleries.”
After 20 years of study and trial and error, Berry is able to bead bandolier bags, moccasins, sashes, small purses, belts and garters. Her beadwork art tells stories, and some of her work portrays Cherokee history.
She taught an advanced bead class in Tahlequah in early December with most the students having already taken her beginning class. She said some of her students have taken her class five times and one of them has taught a beadwork class. She said she is confident among those students there will be future Cherokee beadwork artists and teachers who cultivate even more beadwork artists.
“I never thought we’d get this far, so it never occurred to me that we should grow teachers, so we need to do that too,” she said.
When there are beadwork categories for traditional Cherokee beadwork at Indian art shows and when Cherokee and Southeastern beaders are a common sight at the Santa Fe market and places where traditionally only western art is shown, she said she will know Southeastern beadwork art has earned a place in the Indian art world.
“At that point we’ll know if our beaders go to those shows it’s because they feel they can win at those shows and they can sell art. If they can do that, that means we have educated the collectors and the brokers in between, and then that will mean we have done our job,” she said.
Cherokee beadwork artist Martha Berry is a Cherokee citizen. She is a member of the Cherokee Artists Association, Cherokee National Historical Society, Southeastern Cultural Society and is a charter member of the First Families of the Cherokee Nation.