The Language of Symbols and the Unspoken – Sherri V. Cummings

While reading Bradley’s and Michael’s pieces, I began to realize that as historians of early America we are driven to examine the lives and experiences of our subjects on their own terms while navigating the silences and erasures of the colonial archive. By using nuanced methodologies, we are able to remove the lens of western discourse to shed new light on Native American and African American cultural practices and traditions. I was very intrigued by Bradley’s piece about the exhibit, Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West at the New York Historical Society and began to think deeply about the notion of religion and the American subsumption of Native American spiritual practices. Through elaborate beadwork, the cultural practices of Haudenosaunee people (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Seneca) continued to thrive. Moreover, Native American beadwork is marked with deep symbolism and spiritual significance and therefore, I wondered what Akwesasne Mohawk artist Niio Perkins was thinking when creating the beaded dress showcased in the exhibit. In other words, what significance, or spiritual meaning did the beadwork have for the artist, as well as for the wearer, of the beautifully embellished garments dress?

Figure 1. Ironwork showing the Sankofa adinkra symbol which means “to go back and get it.” It represents learning from the past and respecting where one came from. African Iron work in Brooklyn, NY. Adjoajo. Wikimedia Commons October 22, 2018.

This led me to the examination of everyday objects produced and used by African, African American and Native American men and women that were embellished with symbols, but often dismissed as decorative, like the wrought iron fences produced by African craftsmen during the colonial and antebellum eras and decorated with adinkra symbols. Many of these decorative fences produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can still be found in New York and New Orleans. These symbols, originating with the Gyaman people of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, are associated with Akan culture and represent complex concepts and principles relevant to everyday life. Even more so, the symbols conveyed a sense of shared identity and belonging among the enslaved and free(d) in a world where they were only seen for their labor.

Sherri V. Cummings is an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island College. Her research interests focus on the Atlantic World, Early African American History and Africana Intellectual History. Within this context, she is interested in the lives of African women and their descendants throughout the African diaspora.