This past fall, I attended a workshop to make cornhusk dolls. The workshop was held over a week of lunch hours at the Kumik, an place at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (DIAND) building in Gatineau, Quebec where elders are invited to give teachings and counsel for both interested INAC employees and the broader Ottawa/Gatineau community.
The workshop was led by Yvonne Thomas, a member of the Seneca Nation (Snipe Clan) from the Six Nations of the Grand River and her assistant, Barb Garlow. In addition to being a talented artist, Yvonne is the Executive Director of the Jake Thomas Learning Centre, an organization she co-founded with her late husband, hereditary Cayuga Chief and elder Jacob Thomas. The centre offers programs and educational resources that seek to preserve and promote traditional Hodenosaunee culture and language and encourage greater understandings of Hodenosaunee traditions.
When I found out about the workshop, I was excited. I had just spent a month in Washington DC, studying a collection of cornhusk dolls at the National Museum of Natural History through a program called the Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA). One of the aims of my project was to see if dolls from different Hodenosaunee communities might have been made in different ways. This project was related to my doctoral dissertation, which I’m working on now, that is focused on material culture collected by anthropologists from the Six Nations of the Grand River in the early twentieth century.
This workshop had in some ways brought me very close to the initial reason why I decided to study Hodenosuanee material culture and history. When I was a young teenager, my father told both my brother and I that we had family roots back to the Six Nations. It turned out that my father’s father, the grandfather I had never met, a man who was rarely spoken of in my family, had belonged to the Upper Cayuga community of the Grand River Reservation.
As time went on, no one talked much about this part of our family history. But this bit of knowledge about my ancestry left me with many questions, and when it came time for me to choose a doctoral dissertation topic, I was able to make my project an opportunity to learn about Hodenosaunee culture.
Yvonne and her assistant Barb spent the first day talking a bit about the history of cornhusk dolls, and the importance of corn in Hodenosaunee culture. In addition to its ceremonial uses, corn is considered one of the Three Sisters in traditional Hodenosaunee teachings (beans and squash are the other two), sacred plants respected as staple foods and sustainers of life. Over the week, we learned how to choose the best husks for doll making, how to soak the husks, dry them off, and put them together to make our dolls. The last few days were spent making the clothing for our dolls. Yvonne and Barb had prepared paper patterns for our dolls’ clothing that we used as we cut out pieces of cotton and felt for their tunics and leggings. We also gave our dolls hair. I’d seen older dolls in museums with hair made of cornsilk and some with human hair, but we gave our dolls hair of black woolen yarn, as is the tradition today.
In the process of making the dolls, Yvonne taught us about traditional clothing worn at Longhouse, and the importance of corn to Hodenosaunee culture. We spent a lot of time sharing, and laughing. While we went through the steps of making the dolls, Yvonne stressed the importance of taking our time and doing every step as best we could. I found it difficult not to rush at first, but as I settled into the pace, I found it quite relaxing. The process of making the dolls helped me to understand them in a new way. I learned that the significance of cornhusk dolls to Hodenosaunee culture is multi-layered, found in the process of their creation just as much as in the finished product, possibly more.
I ended up making two female dolls. One is dressed in traditional Hodenosaunee clothing, wearing a long tunic, skirt and leggings. The other wears a blue and white dress I crocheted after the workshop. The dress represents the sky, a reference to the Sky Woman, who gives birth to the twins Sapling and Flint in the Hodenosaunee story about the creation of Turtle Island.
At the workshop, Yvonne handed out a story by George Doxdater (Negwentdela a:ha) that explains why cornhusk dolls are faceless. According to the story, traveling warriors would carry faceless cornhusk dolls while on journeys that took them away from loved ones. When feeling lonely, the warrior would look at the doll and imagine the face of their loved one and would then feel a connection to them, a feeling of being bound together.
I too felt a connection while making dolls. In taking the damp husks in hand, folding, wrapping, in sewing the clothing, I felt I was learning about my own Hodenosaunee culture in a way that would never be found in any book, or by looking at a hundred more dolls in museums. To be able to say that I know how to make cornhusk dolls gives me pride. It connects me to other doll makers and I feel it is a small but significant connection to my own Hodenosaunee roots. Making dolls will give life to these roots today, and teaching about dolls will ensure their continuity in the future.
To read more about cornhusk dolls:
Donna Cole, "Cornhusk People," in Northeast Indian Quarterly (Vol. VII, No. 4, Winter 1990): 62-64.
Carol Cornelius, Iroquois Corn in a Culture-Based Curriculum: A Framework for
Respectfully Teaching About Other Cultures (New York: U of Albany Press, 1999).
George Doxdator, “Traditional Faceless Corn Husk Doll” (1980).
To learn more about KUMIK: http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ach/ev/kmk/index-eng.asp
To learn more about Jake Thomas Learning Centre: http://www.jakethomaslearningcentre.ca/
- Guest Writer Stacey L.
- images courtesy of Stacey L.
- please feel free to leave a comment or question!
