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Aubrey Lauersdorf, Daniel H. Usner. Native American Women and the Burdens of Southern History., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 540–541, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae588
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Readers are introduced to several “burdens” in Daniel H. Usner’s book Native American Women and the Burdens of Southern History. Among these are the literal burdens that Indigenous women carried as they moved through the Lower Mississippi Valley. Women held their burdens in rivercane baskets they had crafted themselves. Even as the reasons for women’s mobility changed from the colonial period through the early twentieth century—they were traders, migrants, refugees, itinerant laborers, peddlers, craftswomen, travelers, and diplomats—their baskets remained a constant.
Traditionally, Usner explains, both Southern observers and Southern historians have pointed to women’s production, use, and sale of rivercane baskets as a sign of their diminished status within Indigenous communities (i.e., drudgery). Similarly, Southerners saw the persistence of Indigenous women’s basketmaking into the twentieth century as evidence of the decline and eventual extinction of Indigenous nations. Usner emphatically disagrees with these interpretations. To him, rivercane baskets represent neither drudgery nor decline but “the role that Indigenous women’s work and knowledge has played in shaping and reshaping relations with non-native southerners across centuries of time” (6).
