For thousands of years before 1492, peoples of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres exchanged materials and techniques for making things with their neighbors. After Columbus broke the Atlantic barrier in 1492, they were able to broaden those exchanges across the hemispheres. Such exchanges rarely resulted in one group's wholesale adoption of another's technology. Instead, each group selected materials and techniques from the other group, incorporating what it selected into customary practices. Such was the case with Native Americans living near New England colonists in the seventeenth century.

Among the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Pequots, and other Native peoples of southern New England, men and women each specialized in crafting objects for everyday use. Men made tobacco pipes from stone, ornaments from copper, and bows from wood. Women used the wild and domestic plants they harvested not only for preparing food but also to make baskets and other containers, fish traps, and mats to cover wigwams and line graves. English observers admired the scale and variety of women's products. One described an underground storage container that held sixty gallons of maize. Another saw baskets of "rushes;...others of maize husks; others of a kind of silk grass; others of a wild hemp; and some of barks of trees,...very neat and artificial, with the portraitures of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers upon them in colors."

Indian women employed a variety of techniques in crafting these objects. One author told how Massachusett Indian women made mats by stitching together long strips of sedge, a marsh grass, with "needles made of the splinter bones of a cranes leg, with threads made of...hemp." Another described Abenaki women's "dishes...of birch bark sewed with threads drawn from spruce and white cedar roots, and garnished on...the brims with glistening quills taken from the porcupine and dyed, some black, others red." Others elaborated on the several varieties of bark and plant fibers that women interwove to make wigwams--materials that combined to ensure that a house kept its occupants warm and dry while remaining light and flexible enough to be carried from place to place.

When English colonists arrived in New England beginning in 1620, they brought the practices and products of their own textile traditions. Many colonial families raised sheep for wool while others harvested flax, a plant used to make linen. Englishwomen used spinning wheels to make woolen yarn and linen thread, and both men and women operated looms to weave yarn and thread into cloth.

Over time Native American women incorporated these English materials into their traditional baskets. A few such baskets survive today in museums. For one, the weaver used long strips of bark as the warp, or long thread, which she stitched together with two different "wefts," or "woofs," one of red and blue wool and the second probably from cornhusks (see photo). The basic technique of "twining" the warp and wefts is found in New England baskets dating to a thousand years earlier; the use of wool, however, was new. The basket came into English hands during King Philip's War (1675-1676). A Native woman whose community was at peace with the colonists entered the English garrison town at what is now Cranston, Rhode Island, and asked a woman there for some milk. In return, the Indian woman gave her English benefactor the basket.

The story behind a second twined basket made of bark and wool has been lost. But it is clear that someone worked the wool into this basket after it was originally made. Archaeological evidence suggests that the addition of new materials to existing baskets was not exceptional. One Rhode Island site yielded seventy-three pieces of European cloth among the remains of sixty-six Indian baskets.

Besides incorporating European yarn and thread into familiar objects, Native Americans obtained finished European cloth, especially duffel, a woolen fabric that manufacturers dyed red or blue to suit Indian tastes. European traders furnished Native American customers with cloth as well as iron scissors, needles, and pins made to shape and sew it. In return, they obtained the material from which Indians made their own garments--beaver pelts. In these two-way exchanges of textiles, the English realized profits while Native Americans broadened ties of reciprocity (see Chapter 1) with the colonists.

English colonists and Indians shaped their newly acquired materials to their own tastes. The traders sold the pelts to European hatters, who cut and reworked them into beaver hats, a fashion rage in Europe. Native women used cloth in ways that were just as unfamiliar to Europeans. Mary Rowlandson, an Englishwoman captured by enemy Indians during King Philip's War, wrote a vivid description of what Americans would later call "the Indian fashion." As her captors danced during a ceremony, Rowlandson described the garb of her Narragansett "master" and Wampanoag "mistress":

He was dressed in his holland shirt [a common English shirt], with great laces sewed at the tail of it. His garters were hung round with shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. She had a kersey [coarse wool] coat covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward. Her arms from her elbows to her hands were covered with bracelets. There were handfuls of necklaces about her neck and several sorts of jewels in her ears. She had fine red stockings and white shoes, [and] her hair [was] powdered and face painted red.

In combining indigenous materials in distinctive styles, the dancers--like Native basket makers and textile artisans--acknowledged the colonists' presence while resisting assimilating to English culture. They affirmed the new, multicultural reality of New England life but defied colonial efforts to suppress their culture and their communities. Once again technological exchange had led people to change without abandoning familiar ways of making things and expressing cultural identity.