I no longer remember where I first saw images of Seminole / Miccosukee Indian patchwork, but by the mid-70s I was appropriating their design strategy in pillows, shirts, neckties and related applications,. Learning these systems of machine construction paved the way for all the work in strip-piecing that I'd launch into over the course of the 80s and 90s. This kind of appropriation by a non-Native maker is now widely (and rightly) frowned on, but we weren't so enlightened 50 years back.

I'd taken a couple of courses in graduate school on Native American history and culture, and it may have been in that context that my first awareness of this particular patchwork tradition was located. I do think in hindsight that I was suffering a bit from the "romance of the Native American” at the time, a complex of misperceptions and ignorance that has since morphed into a far more extensive and nuanced understanding of Native social and political history, and culture. Recently I was reading my dear friend Dr. Janet Berlo's latest book, NOT NATIVE AMERICAN ART: FAKES, REPLICAS, AND INVENTED TRADITIONS (U of Washington Press, 2023) and it had me feeling downright embarrassed about that appropriation. It was part of the journey, though, and I hope I can be forgiven. I did always credit the sources as well as my admiration of the original makers' inventiveness.

[In my defense, Janet herself responded as follows to my original Facebook post of those thoughts: “When you chastise yourself for ‘appropriation’ keep in mind that patchwork was, as you know, introduced to the Miccosukee and Seminole by missionaries. It is all part of a great cross-cultural exchange. Every patchwork innovation in the world has been taken up and transformed by someone else. Wrongful appropriation would be if you made a Seminole-syle patchwork jacket and tried to sell it." Well, I did do that, actually, but it was pretty short-lived, and definitely not lucrative, as I explain further on...]

Used primarily in clothing, Seminole patchwork elaborated on a simple methodology to arrive at sometimes dazzling and always colorful fields of machine-pieced "strata" stacked up the length of a skirt or around the circumference of a shirt or jacket. The improvised results are always melodic and tuneful, and as practiced by these makers in this particular place, assert a collective pride and authority characteristic of the art of all First Peoples. (Vintage postcard image sourced online.)

My essays into the practice quickly demonstrated to me the efficiency built into the method and its compatibility with the type of color experimentation and interplay that I was interested in pursuing. The banding structures weren't a fit for my objectives, but the basic idea of sewing long strips of fabric together to form a base from which pattern elements could be extracted and re-configured provided the opening I was looking for. Above, a small wall panel; below, two Seminole-style patchwork pillows.

For a very short while these improvisations in the Seminole patchwork style seemed as if they might constitute a useful revenue stream, and I did in fact make stuff to sell at local craft fairs and to friends and family. Like all craft work, though, it's labor-intensive, and schlepping work for a display set-up to a church basement or a commercial trade hall disabused me pretty quickly of any thoughts that I might further capitalize on this. I’d also realized that the standard structure of horizontal bands of patterning had became too familiar and limiting. That said, I did see how the basic idea might be adapted to multi-directional repeat formats functioning on a much larger scale, and that was the opening. I’ll always be grateful for the ingenuity of the Seminole-Miccosukee makers and the path it set me on.