From Bayou Teche to Fifth Avenue: How Basket Diplomacy Saved the Chitimacha Indian Nation

Daniel H. Usner offers a cultural, political, and social history of the Chitimacha Tribe in South Louisiana and its struggle for political sovereignty. Between the 1890s and 1940s, Chitimacha Indian women in South Louisiana--with extraordinary baskets they created from rivercane--strategically built a network of allies that originated in a relationship with neighboring white women and that would eventually extend across the United States. Responding resourcefully to renewed interest in thei...