Honoring our teachers, including the unknown maker

Sewing skills were a part of the labor that Indigenous women carried out very proudly, among many areas of expertise making clothing, textiles, baskets and boxes, using many materials from the local environment. The decorative work carried out on many of these items utilized dyed porcupine quills hundreds of years before Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region. At the same time, this item bears witness to the painful history of the Catholic mission and associated boarding school, the first in Michigan, and the last to close in the 1980s (https://umsi580.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/s/indian-boarding-schools-in-michigan/page/holychildhood). This item, which likely is associated with the expansive collection of items from the mid-19th associated with the mission located in the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien in Austria, speaks simultaneously to the destructive transformation and resilient and persistent adaptations of the Odawa (Around Lake Michigan). In the churches and boarding schools, Indigenous women’s skills were both exploited and transformed in the service of the church and in domestic curriculum. Instruction was experienced in fear and cruelty; however, this did not kill the spirit of traditional modes of intergenerational teaching and learning, which Yvonne Walker Keshick, a renowned Odawa quillworker describes as the genealogy of quillwork. She and her teacher before her, Susan Shagonaby, were inmates at Holy Childhood school, and both have provided leadership in preserving and sustaining the art of quillwork in their community. When Yvonne teaches quillwork to others she details many Odawa stories about porcupines and birch trees, their relationships to humans and their environment. The boarding schools tried to take these cultural stories, and erase the contributions of intergenerational teachers, however, they proved to be beyond the apprehension of a nonindigenous community. While we don’t know the name of the maker of this item, her legacy is a part of this genealogy of quillwork.