Redemption Arc- telling America's Story through a Fiber Art Shawl
Redemption Arc (working title America 250) is a handwoven and handspun cowl-style shawl made for my local arts council’s annual open exhibit with the theme “America’s 250th Milestone.”
More than the spinning and weaving, the materials of Redemption Arc tell the story of America: Shetland wool and Navajo angora mohair from my farm, natural cotton, and mother of pearl buttons.
Settlers and Farmers: many of my ancestors came to the New World in the 16 and 1700’s from Scotland and Ireland. Some of them came of their own volition, some as servants, and there was at least one stow-away. Most of my people were subsistence farmers. They got off the boats, and if they weren’t indentured, they headed straight for the Appalachian mountains, which looked, and farmed, just like their ancestral homes.
With them they brought small, unimproved livestock, including primitive sheep breeds like Shetlands. Their wool was variable with some parts being good for outerwear, some next-to-skin soft, and some rough enough for blankets and rope. Additionally these sheep when slaughtered, produced a carcass small enough to be eaten before going rancid.
Leading up to the revolution, the restrictive wool act prohibited the colonies from exporting wool and allowed only British wool to be imported. In response, the Homespun Movement became a form of resistance and patriotism, and wearing american grown, spun, and woven cotton, linen, and wool was a badge of honor that was particularly accessible to women.
After the revolution, it became apparent that the primitive breeds of the mountain settlers could not keep up with the demand for wool. The Great Sheep Boom saw the rise of larger breeds with consistent fleeces and the decline of the primitive breeds. When TVA brought electricity and therefore refrigeration to the Tennessee Valley, farmers started favoring larger and heavier breeds of all livestock. By the mid-1900’s many of the early and unimproved breeds were in danger of extinction in America.
Indigenous Americans: Angora goats came to America in the early 1840’s and were quickly integrated into Navajo/Diné tribal life and weaving culture. The Diné farmed small herds of navajo churro sheep and angora goats for many years.
Because the Navajo resisted the settlers who were encroaching on their homelands, in 1863 the U.S. government ordered military actions led by Kit Carson and John Carlton along with 700 troops with instructions to destroy Navajo livestock. In 1865 approximately 9,000 Navajos were forced on the Long Walk of 300 miles to an interment camp at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. The Navajo way of life was altered from pastoral herders to sedentary prisoners. Terrible conditions here caused the death of many Navajo people. Ripple effects shot through their society rendering them ever more dependent on the US Government and non-agricultural sources of income. As their agrarian way of life declined, so did the health of their land and well-being of their people.
In 1868, a treaty was signed, and a reservation was established within a portion of Navajo Country (Diné’tah) and the Navajo returned to their homeland. By 1930 their mixed flocks grew to almost 575,000. The U.S. government then felt the flocks were causing premature siltation on a new dam being built on the Colorado River named Hoover Dam. In 1934, the federal government initiated a Stock Reduction and roughly 30% of each Navajo household’s goat’s, sheep and horses were slaughtered by government agents and piled in canyon ravines or burned. Slightly over 1 million goats, sheep and horses were killed during this era. Even today, you can still find remains of all those livestock exterminated.
A few Navajo families hid in the canyons and successfully maintained the original “old type” Navajo Angora Goats and Navajo Churro Sheep in these isolated areas where no other goat and sheep breeds were introduced. Angora Goats and Churro Sheep provided their families with meat and milk for food, sinew for thread and fiber for weaving that had sustained the Diné’ for centuries.
King Cotton and Enslaved People: no journey through American history is complete without discussing cotton. While the early settlers and colonies certainly enslaved humans, very little cotton was actually grown in early America, instead we used slave labor to grow tobacco and rice. However, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the end of the War of 1812 saw a boom in cotton farming and slavery in the United States. A commodity that could be easily stored and transported, cotton was exported and enslaved people were imported.
By 1850, cotton had become the South’s most important crop, with millions of enslaved people forced to produce it. By 1860, the United States supplied about two-thirds of the world’s cotton. A highly productive hybrid called Petit Gulf cotton allowed plantations to expand across the Deep South, leading slaveholders to forcibly move enslaved people to new areas—a migration remembered in the phrase “sold down the river.”
Enslaved people also did much of the difficult work of expanding cotton production. They cleared forests and swamps, prepared the land, planted and harvested cotton, and helped build new plantations. As soil became exhausted, white planters often moved to new territories, making enslaved labor a major force behind the westward expansion of the cotton economy.
The South’s dependence on cotton was matched by its dependence on slaves to harvest the cotton. Despite the rhetoric of the Revolution that “all men are created equal,” slavery not only endured in the American republic but formed the very foundation of the country’s economic success. Cotton and slavery occupied a central—and intertwined—place in the nineteenth-century economy.
Industry Labor and Natural Resources: Starting in the late 1880s, German immigrant John Boepple pioneered a freshwater mussel-shell button industry in Muscatine, Iowa, after discovering that Midwestern rivers were thick with mussels well-suited to button-making. By 1905, Muscatine had dozens of factories producing 1.5 billion buttons per year, and the industry doubled the town's size while devastating local mussel populations. Clammers harvested mussels using techniques like wading, ice-hole collection, and dragging crowfoot hooks along riverbeds, and as supplies near factories were depleted, they ranged farther afield, causing freshwater mussel populations to plummet. Discarded, hole-punched shells—dumped back into rivers after blanks were cut from them—still mark the scale of the harvest today.
In the early 1900s, button factory workers faced dangerous conditions—including fire hazards, unguarded machinery, and unsanitary workplaces—with no wage protections for women, who made up a large share of the workforce, and an estimated 2,500 children under fifteen illegally employed, some cleaning running machinery while breathing unfiltered shell dust. Workers also disputed unfair pay-weighing and counting systems and reported sexual harassment and coercion by employers. Though unions were slow to organize in the small, rural factories, workers formed the Muscatine Button Workers Protective Union in late 1910, prompting most manufacturers to lock out workers indefinitely—offering reinstatement only to those who renounced their union membership—in a conflict the press described alternately as a strike and a lockout.
The industry's collapse came from a mix of causes: overharvesting created supply shortages, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later deepened rivers and built dams that destroyed shallow-water mussel habitats, while increasing water pollution took a further toll—mussels being especially sensitive since they filter everything in the water over long lifespans, often decades. Because mussels reproduce by attaching as parasites to fish and grow slowly, their populations were especially vulnerable to overharvesting and to declines in fish populations. The rise of cheaper, easier-to-produce plastic buttons during and after World War II also hastened the industry's decline, with most Muscatine factories closing between the 1920s and 1960s.
Redemption Arc- All of the materials I used to make Redemption Art have dark histories, I recognize that. I recognize that America’s history is dark for all of its people except white, wealthy, men. But I would also argue that until recently, the american people fought for and were winning their own redemption arcs of civil and human rights. This can also be explored through my raw materials.
Shetland sheep populations as well as many heritage livestock breeds have made huge comebacks thanks in part to the efforts of small homesteads and subsistence farmers, artisans, and crafters. In the 1980’s there were less than 50 shetland sheep in North America. Now there are thousands and their fleeces are coveted by handspinners all over the world.
The Colored Angora Goat emerged outside the reservations and navajo communities as a recognized breed starting in the early 1980s, when Oregon breeder and handspinner Isa Jennings recognized value in the rare colored offspring occasionally produced by traditional white Angora goats—animals that had previously been culled from herds. After acquiring a faded red buck and a brown doe to test whether color could be sustained through breeding, Jennings partnered with Linda Mercer of Idaho, and together they traveled through the Navajo Nation in 1985 purchasing black, badger, an pinto angora goats. With these preserved genetics, the modern american Colored Angora Goat was born.
While white cotton dominated American agriculture, colored cotton remained largely a legend, though evidence suggests enslaved people may have grown it on small "truck patches" or used it in spinning and knitting, since its color made it less commercially desirable. Colored cotton resurfaced briefly during World War II when a dye shortage led farmers to grow green and brown varieties, but it fell out of favor again afterward because the fibers hadn't been bred for length.
Now, thanks in part to the very people whose lives and families were destroyed by cotton, naturally colored cotton is making a comeback. You can easily find seeds for blue, green, brown, and yellow cottons to grow in your own cotton patches.
And last, the same overharvesting that harmed mussels spurred early conservation efforts: in 1908 Congress established the Fairport Biological Station in Iowa to study and reintroduce mussels to the Mississippi River, and Boepple himself later worked there documenting mussel beds. Freshwater mussels remain endangered today, with several species believed extinct, though some populations have since returned to the Mississippi under state and federal protections.
Redemption Arc is made from Navajo Angora mohair from my beloved Arthur, naturally colored wool from the always gentle Marshmallow, naturally colored cotton, and vintage mother of pearl buttons. I spun three styles of yarn, coils, locks, and standard dk weight thick and thin. The shawl was woven cut strand strand style on an adjustable Spriggs triangle loom in the 3.6' setting.
If you'd like to see the entire process from blending fiber to spinning to weaving, check out the youtube video.
(placeholder for the video which I promise I'll get to! the videos on are on the FB too if you want to check them out on socials)
I am beyond thrilled to share that the Athens Area Council for the Arts (we call it the Arts Center), has selected Redemption Arc as part of their 2026 Open Exhibit. I know my work is non-tradition and probably doesn't qualify as fine art. But here I am- with a piece in a real gallery in my own town. Obviously my social commentary is a reflection of myself and not the Arts Center. But I do want to say that the Athens Area Council for the Arts is one of the leading institutions of my region's own redemption arc, and they are a bastion of hope and leadership.
The opening reception is this Friday, Oct 2 from 5-7 and you can see the exhibit from now until October 30th. Please stop by and show them some love.
