Crafting Territory in the Choctaw Homelands

This article shows how isht ʋskufʋchi, Choctaw beaded sashes, resist easy classification as either traditional or purely reactive to colonial pressures. Instead, they embody Choctaw innovation, bridging ancestral cosmological knowledge and shifting geopolitical realities. By wearing sashes in treaty negotiations, Choctaw leaders signaled their positions within transcultural networks. While the sash materials—trade wool and glass beads—reflect colonial entanglements, their designs reference longstanding Southeastern Indigenous cosmologies, through spiraling serpent motifs of Mississippian shell gorgets and Choctaw ceramics. Tracing the conjunction of Indigenous making practices and colonial material culture, this article proposes methodologies for understanding Native North American arts, especially those of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—an era of profound transformation when Indigenous artistic traditions intersected with European and U.S. material worlds in ways that challenge conventional art historical categories.