Clad with the 'Hair of Trees': A History of Native American Spanish Moss Textile Industries

References

• ‘Costoro trovammo più bianchi de li passati, vestiti di certe erbe che stanno pendenti da li rami de l’alberi, quali tessano con varie corde di canapa silvestre, el capo nudo, ne la medesima forma de li altri’ [translation by the author]. See letter of Giovanni da Verazzano to Francis I of France dated 8 July 1524 in Luigi Firpo ed., Prime Relazioni di Navigatori Italiani sulla Scoperta dell’America: Colombo, Vespucci, Verazzano (Torino: Utet, 1966 ), p. 170.
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• The analysis carried out on textual and iconographic material was complemented by data gathered over nearly a month in South-East United States during the summer of 2007. This research was possible through a generous grant received by the Pasold Research Fund.
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• See, for example, James B. Petersen, A Most Indispensable Art: Native Fiber Industries from Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996 ); Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (London: Blackwell, 1999). For material specifically related to textiles, see Jane Schneider, ‘The Anthropology of Cloth’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 16 (1987), pp. 409–48; Annette G. Ericksen, Kathryn A. Jakes and Virginia S. Wimberley, ‘Prehistoric Textiles: Production, Function, Semiotics’, in P. B. Drooker and L. D. Webster eds, Beyond Cloth and Cordage; Archaeological Textile Research in the Americas (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), and Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider eds, Cloth and Human Experience (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
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• The verb ‘to cure’ is currently employed by the people residing in south-eastern United States to describe the process by which the harvested Spanish Moss gets converted into a usable product.
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• R. E. Garth, ‘The Ecology of Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides): its Growth and Distribution’, Ecology, 45, no. 3 (1964), pp. 470–81; Raymond J. Martinez, The Story of Spanish Moss and its Relatives (New Orleans: Home Publications: 1959); and W. T. Penfound and F. G. Delier, ‘On the Ecology of Spanish Moss’, Ecology, 28, no. 4 (1947 ), pp. 455–58.
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• Sources that mention Spanish Moss among Native Americans span from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Original accounts are contained in William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogules or Creek Confederacy and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of those Regions together with Observations of the Manners of the Indians (London, 1794); Nicholas Carteret, ‘Mr Carteret’s Relation’ [1670], The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement on Ashley River Prior to the Year 1676, in Langdon Cheves ed., Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, v (Charleston, 1897 ); Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and Bahama Islands, 2 vols (London, 1731–43 ); Cyclone Covey, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America (first published 1961, this edition Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Jonathan Dickenson, Narrative of a Shipwreck in the Gulf of Florida (Stanford, NY, 1803); Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, contenant la Découverte de ce vaste Pays; sa Description géographique; un Voyage dans les Terres; l’Histoire Naturelle: les Moeures, Côtumes & Religion des Naturels, avec leurs Origines; deux Voyages dans le Nord du nouveau Mexique, don’t un jusq’à la Mer du Sud; ornée de deux Cartes & de 40 Planches en Taille-douce (Paris: De Bure; La Veuve Delaguette; Lambert, 1758); Paul Louise Jacques Gaffarel, Histoire de la Floride Française (Paris: Librairie de Fermin-Didot, 1875); Genaro García, Dos Antiguas Relaciones de la Florida (Mexico: de J. Aguilar Vera y Comp., 1902); Thomas Hariot, Merveilleux et estrange rapport toutes fois fideles, des commoditez qui se trouvent en Virginia, des facons des naturels habitans d’icele, laquelle a esté nouvellement descouverte par les anglois que Messier Richard Greinvile Chevalier y mena en colonial an 1585 à la charge principale de Messire Walter Raleigh chevalier suprintendant des mines d’estain, favorisé par la Reyne d’Angleterre, et autorisé par ses letters patentes (Frankfurt am Mein, 1590); Benjamin Hawkins, ‘A Sketch of the Creek Country, in 1798 and 99’, Georgia Historical Society Collections, iii (Savannah, 1848); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina: Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel’d thro Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of their Customs, Manners etc. (London, 1709); Jacques Le Moyne, Narrative of Le Moyne, an Artist who Accompanied the French Expedition to Florida under Laudonnière, 1564 Translated from the Latin of De Bry (Boston, 1875); Stefan Lorant ed., The New World: the First Pictures of America Made by John White and Jacques Le Moyne and Engraved by Theodore De Bry with Contemporary Narratives of the Huguenot Settlement in Florida 1562–1565 and the Virginia Colony 1585–1590 (New York: Puell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946); Pierre Margry, Decouvertes et Etablissments des Francais dans l’Ouest et dans le Sud de l’Amerique Spetentrionale (1614–1754) Memoires et Documents Originaux, 4 vols (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1881). For recent research that refers to old material, see John C. Ewers ed., The Indians of Texas in 1830 by Jean Louis Berlandier (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969); Laura Laurencich-Minelli, ‘Oggetti Americani Studiati da Ulisse Aldrovandi’, Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnografia, 113 (1983), pp. 187–206; and Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo (Bologna: Grafis, 1992); John R. Swanton, ‘Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 73 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922).
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• Robin C. Brown, ‘Working Fiber’, in Florida’s First Peoples: 12,000 Years of Human History (Sarasota, Florida: Pineapple Press, 1994 ), pp. 86–87.
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• J. M. Adovasio, R. L. Andrews, D. C. Hyland and J. S. Illingworth, ‘Perishable Industries from the 4 Windover Bog: an Unexpected Window into the Florida Archaic’, North American Archaeologist, 22, no. 1 (2001 ), pp. 1–90; and R. L. Andrews and J. M. Adovasio, ‘The Origins of Fiber Perishables Production East of the Rockies’, in J. B. Petersen ed., A Most Indispensable Art: Native Fiber Industries from Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), pp. 30–49.
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• Brown, ‘Working Fiber’, pp. 86–93.
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• See J. B. Petersen, ‘The Study of Native Fiber Industries from Eastern North America: Resume and Prospect’, in Petersen ed., A Most Indispensable Art, pp. 1–29. A more specific survey of south-eastern Indians’ regional technologies can be found in the section ‘Arts and Crafts’ in Fred B. Kniffen, Hiram F. Gregory and George A. Stokes, The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana: from 1542 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987 ), pp. 137–71.
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• A. C. Whitford, ‘Textile Fibers Used in Eastern Aboriginal North America’, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 38, no. 1 (1946).
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• The Louisiana Acadians adopted the use of Spanish Moss in wattle and daub building materials in what today is called the ‘Louisiana bousillage’ following a technique that was developed by local Indians in prehistoric times. See, for example, Benjamin D. Maygarden, ‘Building in Colonial Louisiana: Creolization and the Survival of French Traditions’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 10, no. 3 (2006 ), pp. 211–39. See also David I. Bushnell, ‘The Account of Lamhatty’, American Anthropologist, 10, no. 3 (1908), pp. 568–74.
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• Daniel L. Simpkins and Dorothy J. Allard, ‘Isolation and Identification of Spanish Moss Fiber from a Sample of Stallings and Orange Series Ceramics’, American Antiquity, 6, no. 1 (1986 ), pp. 102–17.
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• John Lawson talks extensively about the various uses of Spanish Moss in his A New Voyage to Carolina (pp. 117, 190, 207). Further discussions of indigenous usage of the plant for domestic purposes can be found in John Swanton, ‘The Indians of South-Eastern United States’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 137 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1946 ), p. 247. For a later treatment of the subject, see Brown, ‘Working Fiber’, p. 91. Spanish Moss as indigenous medicine is discussed in Daniel E. Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1998), pp. 563, 673; and in Frank Speck, ‘A List of Plant Curatives Obtained from the Houma Indians of Louisiana’, Primitive Man, 14, no. 4 (1941), pp. 49–73. Technological uses of the plant can be found in Whitford, ‘Textile Fibers’.
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• A miniature of a dugout canoe with the forked pole used to harvest Spanish Moss made by Houma artist Antoine Billiot is in the Williamson Museum in Natchitoches, Louisiana. See Claude Medford, Jr, Hiram F. Gregory, D. Sepulvado, N. Cameron and J. Jones, The Old Ways Live: The Claude Medford Jr. Collection (Natchitoches, LA: Williamson Museum, Northwestern State University, 1990 ), pp. 55, 63.
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• See, for example, Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976 ), p. 264; and Jerald T. Milanich, The Timucua (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996), pp. 59–60.
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• This practice was widespread from the southern limits of Virginia to the south-western corners of Louisiana until the mid-eighteenth century. The earliest reports mention tufts or pads of Spanish Moss tied to the body through a system of leather thongs that prevented it from moving while the girl was walking. The wad may have had the function of a menstrual pad, but nothing other than the shape of the covering is known. The French founder of Louisiana Monsieur d’Iberville recorded it among the Bayogoula and Pascagoula girls in the lower Mississippi valley. John Lawson witnessed the same practice among pubescent girls of an unidentified group of Carolina Indians (possibly a Siouan tribe). References to this practice are found in Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, pp. 190–91; Hariot, Merveilleux et estrange rapport, table VIII; Margry, Decouvertes, vol. 4, p. 171; and in John Swanton, ‘Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 73 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922 ), p. 303.
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• C. C. Aldrich, M. W. Deblieux and F. B. Kniffen ‘The Spanish Moss Industry of Louisiana’, Economic Geography, 19, no. 4 (1943 ), pp. 347–57. A thriving industry based on the procurement, cure and sale of Spanish Moss flourished in the southern United States until it declined as a consequence of the invention of artificial materials in the second part of the twentieth century. Foams and other synthetic materials gradually replaced the processed plant for padding mattresses, chairs and eventually automobile seats (Jean Verret-Luster (Houma), pers. comm., Natchitoches, Louisiana, July 2007).
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• Brown, ‘Working Fiber’, pp. 89–91; and Susan Alt, ‘Spindle Whorls and Fiber Production at Early Cahokian Settlements’, South-Eastern Archaeology, 18, no. 2 (1999 ), pp. 124–34.
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• Hiram Peter Gregory, pers. comm., Natchitoches, Louisiana, July 2007.
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• Fred Kniffen, ‘The Western Cattle Complex: Notes on Differentiation and Diffusion’, Western Folklore, 12, no. 3 (1953 ), pp. 179–84.
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• Ken R. Knopp, ‘The Confederate Spanish Moss Saddle Blanket’, North South Trader’s Civil War, 23, no. 1 (1996 ), pp. 32–35. In colonial times technological knowledge was exchanged between people living in close proximity, for example, among Africans and Native American slaves that worked together in plantations and in the southern Bayous. Over the century following the Civil War Native Americans, African Americans and Cajuns living in and near the swamps made a living out of gathering the moss for commercial purposes. Koasati and Houma informants remember the post-Second World War period when their parents and grandparents used to harvest Spanish Moss for both domestic consumption and sale (Myrna Wilson (Koasati tribe), pers. comm., Natchitoches, Louisiana, July 2007).
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• See, for example, in the case discussed by Louise Hamby, ‘Wrapt with String’, Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, 5, no. 2 (2007 ), pp. 206–25. In some societies, what constitutes ‘garment’ can variably change across gender, age and social class lines. Often a single thread, a pubic covering or even body paint can be considered ‘garment’ in that it conveys socially relevant meanings that perform the same function of clothes and fashion. It is in this sense that the word garment is utilized in the context of this article as a synonym of the more recent ‘bodywear’.
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• William Henry Holmes, ‘Prehistoric Textile Art’, pl. IV; and John Swanton, ‘The Indians of South-Eastern United States’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 137 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1946 ), p. 476.
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• Julian Granberry, A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993 ), p. 115. In the Timucua language the word amuna equally describes cloth, yet with reference to tailored garments.
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• A short discussion of Timucua garments can be found in Jerald T. Milanich, ‘Timucua’, in Handbook of the North American Indians Vol.14, Southeast (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004 ), pp. 219–28. A description based on primary sources can be found in Josephine Paterek, Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994).
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• Patricia Rieff Anawalt, ‘Atuendos del México Antiguo’, Arqueologia Mexicana (special issue: Textiles del México de Ayer y Hoy), 19 (2005 ), pp. 10–19. Geupil or huipil is a short, square tunic made of two pieces of cotton sewn together along the shoulders that was used by Mexican Nahuatl women of the sixteenth century. This term may have described a Spanish Moss outfit that resembled a short poncho made of festoons spreading over the torso and shoulder as reported by Fray Andrés (see García, Dos Antiguas Relaciones, p. 193). His account appears translated in English by Swanton: ‘The dress of the women is in the style of a cloak (guepil) and skirts of the long moss (pastel) which grows on trees, made like a fringe. The cloak hangs from the neck to a point below the waist, and the skirts from the waist down to the ground’ (see John Swanton, ‘Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 73 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 346). Additional descriptions of forms of garments used by south-eastern Indian women before the eighteenth century can be found in John Hann, A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), and in the translation of colonial correspondence by Lucy L. Wenhold, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Letter of Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón, Bishop of Cuba, Describing the Indians and Indian Missions of Florida’, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 95, no. 16 (1936), p. 95.
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• Lorant ed., The New World, p. 113.
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• Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White 1577–1590: with Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects Vols 1 and 2 (London: The Trustees of the British Museum; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
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• Swanton, ‘Early History’, p. 346. For a recent definition of surplesse, see Robert E. Lewis and Mary F. Williams eds, Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992 ), p. 1122. A ‘surplesse’ is a loose-fitting liturgical garment usually worn over a long tunic.
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• George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, ii (first published 1844; this edition New York: Dover Publications, 1973), pl. 223; Lois Sherr Dubin, North American Jewelry and Adornment from Prehistory to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999), p. 213, pl. 403. A very clear image of the way this collar was worn can be appreciated in George Catlin’s 1834 two portraits of Tul-lock-císh-ko (Drinks the Juice of the Stone), Choctaw ball player part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections. Dubin published a modern rendition of this item.
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• Jean Verret-Luster, pers. comm., Natchitoches, Louisiana, July 2007. As a complement to her statement, Professor Gregory adds that Spanish Moss skirts had a short-lived resurgence in the 1970s, but the fad soon died out (Hiram Peter Gregory, pers. comm., Natchitoches, Louisiana, 2007).
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• Dickenson, Narrative of a Shipwreck, p. 93.
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• James Owen Dorsey and John R. Swanton, ‘A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages Accompanied with Thirty-One Biloxi Texts and Numerous Biloxi Phrases’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 47 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912 ), p. 198. Biloxi and Ofo are two extinct languages of the lower Mississippi valley of the Siouan stock. In the last existing Biloxi and Ofo Dictionary compiled by James Dorsey and John Swanton at the beginning of the twentieth century, the entry ‘Spanish Moss’ reports that in those two closely related languages the plant is called ayan’ nanhy’, that is a combination of the words ‘tree’ and ‘hair’ (see also p. 176 for these meanings). The authors explain that the second part of the name could be a metathesis from hin, that is more specifically ‘hair’.
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• John R. Swanton and Henry S. Halbert, ‘A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language by Cyrus Byington’, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 46 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915 ), p. 564 (but also pp. 211, 335). In Choctaw, a Muskogean language of the South-East USA, the word for Spanish Moss is Iti shumo which is composed by iti ‘tree’ and shumo ‘thistle down’. The Spanish Cabeza de Vaca who reported the use of Spanish Moss among the Karankawa of the Texas coast talks about ‘a wool that grows on trees’ (see Covey, Cabeza de Vaca, p. 63).
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• Geoffrey D. Kimball, Bob Abbey, Martha John and Ruth Poncho, Koasati Dictionary (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 ). Koasati belongs to the Muskogean language family and it is strongly linked to the Alabama language (alternatively called Coushatta). Often the two peoples speaking these languages are paired in the Alabama-Coushatta cluster.
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• Further confirmation of the use of this analogy among Muskogean-languages speakers was given to me by archaeologists working at the Mission San Luis in neighbouring Florida, who confirmed the use of this expression among the Apalachee Indians gathered at that mission around the eighteenth century.
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• David I. Bushnell, ‘The Use of Buffalo Hair by the North American Indians’, Man, 6 (1906), pp. 177–80; William Henry Holmes, ‘Prehistoric Textile Art’, pp. 25–26; and Rick Schulting, ‘The Hair of the Dog: the Identification of a Coast Salish Dog-Hair Blanket from Yale, British Columbia’, Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 18 (1994 ), pp. 57–76.
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• De la Luz Gutiérrez, ‘Los Nómadas de Siempre’, p. 61; and Meigs, The Kiliwa, p. 52. Human hair performs a significant role also in death rituals of Australian Aborigines. Among the Walpiri the women make strings of human hair to tie social relations and establish the reproduction of kinship bonds. See, for example, Barbara Glowczewski, ‘Death, Women, and “Value Production”: the Circulation of Hair Strings among the Walpiri of the Central Australian Desert’, Ethnology, 22, no. 3 (1983 ), pp. 225–39.
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• Recent scholarship has almost unanimously agreed that individuals who mixed and/or blended demeanour and behaviours of women and men formed a ‘third gender’ that existed on the basis of distinct occupations only performed by them. See, for example, William Roscoe, The Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (London: McMillan, 1998 ). For a critique of the concept, see Carolyn Epple, ‘Coming to Term with Navajo Nadleehi: a Critique of Berdache, “Gay”, “Alternate Gender”, and “Two Spirit”, American Ethnologist, 25, no. 2 (1998), pp. 267–90. More research is necessary to understand to what degree third-gendered people’s occupations were entirely separate from both genders, or if both the people and the tasks they performed were associated with the women’s sphere. Several ethnographic cases show that ‘third gender’ people’s social obligations and occupations were the same as the women’s because these individuals were often considered female kin. For a comparative overview, see Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Genders in Native American Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
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• Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, p. 31.
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• Fredrerick Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
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• Hulton, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne, fig. xvii, pl. 134; fig. xxxix, pl. 131. Two of the eight women wearing sashes are unmistakably associated with high rank. Three sashes appear in ritual contexts; ibid., fig. XL, pl. 132; fig. xix, pl. 111; fig. xxxiiii, pl. 126. Only in one ritual occasion in which Spanish Moss appears no sash is visible. Women engaged in ordinary operations never wear sashes; ibid., fig. xx, pl. 112; fig. xxi, pl. 113; fig. xxii, pl. 114; fig. xxii, pl. 115; fig. xxviii, pl. 120; fig. xxix, pl. 121; fig. xxxvii, pl. 129, and fig. xxxix, pl. 131. Although five of the sash-wearing women appear alongside a multitude of short-skirted ones, the rituals in which they take part involved the participation of élite individuals.
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• Ibid., p. 166.
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• Ibid.
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• Artist, Marie Dean, Houma, c. 1970; Williamson Museum, uncatalogued item.
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