American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Women’s traditional occupations, their arts and crafts, and their literature and philosophies are more often accretive than linear, more achronological than chronological, and more dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception than western culture in general is thought to be. Indeed, the patchwork quilt is the best material example I can think of to describe the plot and process of a traditional tribal narrative, and quilting is a non-Indian woman’s art, one that Indian women have taken to avidly and that they display in their ceremonies, rituals, and social gatherings as well as in their homes. —Paula Gunn Allen In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, when Nanapush thinks about his future death and burial he instructs Lulu, “So when my time comes, you and your mother should drag me off, wrap me up in quilts. Sing my songs and then bury me high in a tree.” Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. For example, in her novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko writes of “the old quilt” that Tayo’s mother provides for him while he sleeps on the earth. In Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie describes how Thomas Builds-the-Fire wraps Robert Johnson’s guitar “in a beautiful quilt” and gives “it a place of honor in his living room.” In Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, Tecumseh’s mother Helen works on a quilt that becomes less “geometric” and more “freehand” as she experiences disappointment and frustration in life. The quilt becomes progressively unusual and strange as she attaches objects to it such as chicken feet, hair, porcupine quills, earrings, needles, fishhooks, and razor blades.