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From Bayou Teche to Fifth Avenue How Basket Diplomacy Saved the Chitimacha Indian Nation

Daniel H. Usner offers a cultural, political, and social history of the Chitimacha Tribe in South Louisiana and its struggle for political sovereignty. Between the 1890s and 1940s, Chitimacha Indian women in South Louisiana – with extraordinary baskets they created from rivercane – strategically built a network of allies that originated in a relationship with neighboring white women and that would eventually extend across the United States. Responding resourcefully to renewed interest in their basketry largely driven by the arts and crafts market and ethnographic collection, the Chitimachas were able to contact individuals and groups far from their home who possessed potential influence on government policy. Confronting at the same time perilous threats to their land, autonomy, and even th