Woven into Being

Between Melissa Darden’s hands, a thousand-year-old Chitimacha tradition continues on

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For thousands of years, the Chitimacha people have inhabited the Atchafalaya Basin and its surrounding lands between Lafayette and New Orleans. Today, the tribe continues to occupy a segment of this same land on a bend in the Bayou Teche near Charenton, where the Tribal Council’s first female Chairman Melissa Darden oversees issues like improving access to technology in a post-COVID world, local job growth, and various tribal enterprises—all with a mind focused on ensuring a prosperous future for the tribe and steadied by a tactile connection to the past through her mastery of traditional Chitimacha river cane basket weaving. 

As a girl, Darden tagged along with her sister to a basket weaving class being taught by their grandmother Lydia Darden and fellow tribe member Ada Thomas. Too young to be an official student, she would play at putting the cane together. 

The classes did not continue for long; the involved process of learning to weave traditional Chitimacha baskets, the women discovered, proved not well suited for the limited classroom format. The time it takes to learn the skills involved in each step must, by their nature, be spread out in varied increments throughout a month, a season, a lifetime. 

Gathering materials begins with a trip to the canebrakes to harvest the piya, the Chitimacha word for the cane used in weaving. Arundinaria gigantea, a native bamboo that grows in patches called canebrakes, has been used by the Chitimacha for millennia. Agriculture has decreased its abundance, but the tribe’s Cultural Department has re-established canebrakes on the reservation to ensure its availability for weaving.  

Once harvested, the cane is split, peeled, dried, and then some is dyed in the three traditional colors of red, black, and yellow. The rest retains its natural light brown color when dried. Once the cane is dyed, it is split and peeled again before it is ready to be woven into either a single weave or double weave basket. 

A learner must possess the drive to pursue one who knows, watch them, practice, get feedback, follow, and learn. Darden explained, “Nowadays when you’re teaching somebody something, you’re always explaining what you’re doing. My grandmother didn’t do that. You had to watch everything she did and hopefully pick it up.” 

Tribal legend tells us that the first Chitimacha weaver was a young girl who was walking down the road when The Holy Woman—an unseen deity—threw an unfinished basket at her with the simple directive, “Weave that basket! Finish it up!” The young girl completed the basket and later returned to the same road to learn more. She again encountered the voice of The Holy Woman, and over time she mastered the art by practicing it under her guidance. The echo of The Holy Woman’s direct, hands-on teaching methods lives on in the way that Darden learned from her grandmother. 

[Read this: The Rainmakers—The intersection of art and the spirit world.]

Darden would be the only attendee of those early basket weaving classes to become a true basket weaver, though the official journey began many years later. She was a young mother of three when a friend who was an antique dealer in nearby Baldwin noticed she “had the fingers for it” and encouraged her to learn with the promise that he would purchase every basket she could produce. She returned to her lessons, dedicating hours to watching her grandmother peel the cane, then doing it herself until she got it right. Once she’d learned one step in the process, she would move on to the next —watching, doing, and undoing until she mastered the skills. Her questions were met with succinct responses and nothing more. “If you asked a question because you didn’t get it, she would only answer what you asked. I’d ask, ‘How do you remember the patterns?’ and ‘The patterns are in your mind,’ would be the response.” 

Through watching, weaving, re-weaving and researching, Darden eventually developed, or perhaps discovered, the network of patterns in her mind. She and her brother John, also a basket weaver, would visit museums together to learn from the displayed baskets themselves, artifacts that hold the physical heritage of the Chitimacha people in patterns with names like “worm track,” “alligator entrails,” and “blackbird’s eye.” For millennia, the animals and plants of the Atchafalaya Basin region have woven their ways through the lives of the “People of Many Waters” and into the fifty known patterns of their traditional basketry, the various combinations of which form infinite creative possibilities.  

On a recent visit with Darden, she shared with me one of her favorite combinations of patterns, a series of perch circling while also forming a muscadine, with a bull’s eye at the center. I immediately saw the perch with their diamond shaped patterns and then the bulls’ eye in the center, but I didn’t see the muscadine. As I looked for a small grape-like shape in the complex patterns, she saw my confusion and repeated what her grandmother had told her, “You take the little round grape, put it in the palm of your hand, and just squash it, and it lays out in four pieces.” I saw it, and could almost taste the sweet juice of the broken skin.  

"She recalled asking her grandmother, 'How do you get it all the same size?'  The simple response was, 'It’s the tape measure in your eye.'"

Darden let me watch as she worked with cane in a small added-on section of her home, which she uses to keep the strong smells of the dyeing process out of the main house. She split a two-foot length of green cane with a strong forearm and a medium-sized kitchen knife, which she wedged, then twisted until it formed a slight crack in the cane, followed by the ripping of fibers. She repeated this until she had several strips of the size she wanted. She then put a cane strip between her teeth and peeled the inner layers away from the outer layer, which is the main material used for weaving. She explained that the strips would then be dried and cut again. She recalled asking her grandmother, “How do you get it all the same size?”  The simple response was, “It’s the tape measure in your eye.”  Though Darden didn’t have the ocular tape measure when she first asked the question, she surely has it now. As she worked on a double weave basket lid already in progress, I noticed the strips she was weaving all appeared to be precisely the same in width and thickness—tightly woven together, leaving no gaps. 

Chitimacha weavers originally created these baskets for utilitarian purposes around the home. They served as canisters, sewing baskets, and wall pockets. In the early 1900s, encouraged by interest in their basketry as art, the Chitimacha began selling to collectors. Darden’s grandmother was making baskets at a point in time when one of her creations was just as likely to be used for pea-picking in the garden as it was to be displayed on a collector’s shelf. By the time Darden began weaving, the value of a traditional Chitimacha woven basket had increased tremendously as the baskets became recognized as fine art, coveted by collectors worldwide. Currently, with only six Chitimacha weavers actively producing baskets, the creations are as sought-after as ever.  

Darden is a collector of Chitimacha baskets herself. She was initially driven by the desire to learn patterns from the older baskets, acquired at auctions and estate sales. But today her motives have become more about reclaiming her heritage. “I didn’t get any baskets handed down to me,” she said, showing me one of her grandmother’s, which she’d bought at an auction, still bearing her signature on freezer tape stuck to the bottom. “It’s kind of like bringing something home,” she said, pointing out a red cane woven around the hem of this single weave basket, another motif of her grandmother’s work—a Darden family mark which she also incorporates in her own baskets. 

As I watched Darden weave, her fingers pinched and twisted within the splayed ends of an unfinished lid—the dried cane creating a micro soundscape of concentrated rustling, like the sound of wind or footsteps in the canebrakes. She said, “I could sit here and weave a basket, and you could tear the house down around me and I’d never know it. It’s like I’m entering into another world. I get that intense with it.” Of course, she is more often drawn into the bigger world with her responsibilities as Chairman, mother, and grandmother. In these roles too, though, she is strengthened by this hands-on connection to the people who came before her, those who left their mark by taking the naturally-prolific river cane of the land and creating something useful and beautiful from it. All these years later, the tradition they heralded remains valuable not only for the woven creations that endure, but for the resulting heritage of tactile learning and problem-solving that is passed from generation to generation, creating a successful people who endure. 

Chitimacha baskets are on view to the public at the Chitimacha Tribal Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Lafayette Science Museum, and the Louisiana State Museum. 

To learn more about the basket weaving tradition or to inquire about purchasing one, visit chitimachabaskets.com.