Creativity flows through artist Julia Marden’s veins, and has done so since childhood. Her creations are a direct tie to her Aquinnah Wampanoag heritage. Marden is perhaps best-known for her fine traditional “twined” basketry. She learned to weave baskets while working as an interpreter at the 17th century Wampanoag homesite at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums in the early 1990s. “I immediately took to weaving, and definitely believe it was genetic imprinting,” says Marden.
Twining is one of the oldest methods for fashioning bags, baskets, clothing, and garter leggings. Marden tells us, “Twining is found worldwide, going back as far as 7,000 BCE. It was nearly a lost art form in the Americas, due to the drastic changes in lifestyle because of disease, war, and reservations. We went from thriving to surviving, and didn’t have time for it.”
Marden first sketches geometric, floral, or figurative patterns inspired by Northeast Woodland nations on graph paper to decorate her flat-twined bags and soft-form baskets. Twining involves twisting weft, or crosswise, cords around a single or double vertical warp. The weft creates the design, while the warps remain stationary, providing the bag or basket its shape.
Marden often uses traditional shades of orange, yellow, red, brown, and black that evoke the colors of natural dyes, which, like the cordage, would typically have come from local resources. The cordage materials in this region include dogbane, milkweed, false nettle, and the inner bark of basswood.
Twining is a time-consuming process. Bags like Marden’s “Water Protectors” take her approximately six to eight weeks to complete. On one design, seven women in 18th century ribbon dresses march across the bag, one arm raised while the other carries a copper pail. The design honors the Water Walkers, indigenous women who carry an open water vessel over great distances, relay style, to raise awareness about endangered bodies of water. The movement is rooted in the traditional belief that women are responsible for caring for water. Historically, bags were ubiquitous, holding foods such as dried beans and corn, nuts, seeds, berries, and dried fish or meat.
Marden excels working in other art forms, such as fashioning burden straps, sashes, and leg garter sets, and painting cradleboards, pipe and flute bags, fan handles, and pouches. Her Horseshoe Crab shell bag is an intriguing Aquinnah Wampanoag work. She and her family processed the crabs themselves. Marden adorned it with a finger-woven strap, copper cones, and dyed deer-hair tassels. “I was fortunate enough to see an antique horseshoe crab bag when I was young, and I knew immediately that I would someday make one. I went off my memory from childhood.”
Marden also crafts striking wampum belts, which record events, seal treaties, and convey status. “That’s where I think the storyteller comes in for me,” she says. Marden’s parents were from the Island, and with plenty of family here, she recalls spending countless hours on Vineyard shores: “The Vineyard was my second home. I spent my childhood gathering the shells up off the beach. Creating wampum belts was on my bucket list.”
Over the years, Marden has beaded quite a few. One three-piece set is striking in its five-foot size and meaningful imagery. The first belt, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” illustrates how Europeans instituted papal bulls to justify Christian explorers’ claims on land and waterways, leading to the dispossession and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples. The second belt is “The Indian Removal Act,” which authorized President Andrew Jackson to forcibly remove 46,000 Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw from 25 million acres of their ancestral lands and grant them to white settlers. During the march to reservations in Oklahoma, about 4,000 indigenous people died from disease, starvation, and extreme weather.
About the third belt, “K*ll the Indian/Save the Man,” Marden explains, “‘Kill the Indian/Save the Man’ is a U.S. policy started in 1918 with the Indian Civilization Act. Government officials removed indigenous children from their homes and placed them in residential schools.” These institutions were established to purportedly civilize the Indians, to make them “good, useful, and law-abiding” members of society by crushing all indigenous aspects in the children. At some, such as the Kamloops Residential School in Canada, mass unmarked graves have been found.
“The policy was to kill our culture, language, religious beliefs — everything that made us who we are. This belt was not easy to create. It was very emotional bringing this story to life, but too important not to document.”
Perhaps Marden’s most intensive undertaking has been her stunning, full-size twined Turkey Feather Mantle. She learned about these at 35; hers is the first Aquinnah Wampanoag one made in 400 years. “Someone of high status would wear the mantle. They are the height of our twine work.” Approximately four feet long and six feet wide, this one took Marden about a year to construct, working on two rows a day, each row taking some two hours. Sorting the feathers for size and shape alone took about two months. The impressive work made its debut at the Aquinnah Cultural Center in 2023. It has traveled to other sites, and will eventually be displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Marden has already made her mark at the Museum of Fine Arts. In 2024, she was selected as the subject of one of Alan Michelson’s shimmering life-size sculptures for “The Knowledge Keepers” project — the museum’s new annual commission series, in which artists are invited to create works for the Huntington Avenue entrance. “What a huge honor to represent my nation as a knowledge keeper,” says Marden. “It’s hard to put in words.” After seeing the sculpture of herself, she shares, “I was having a hard time digesting that was me up there in platinum-gilded bronze.”
Along the same lines, Marden also received a Jennifer Easton Spirit Award. This prestigious annual award is given to between four and six indigenous artists who are knowledge keepers. “This is an equally huge honor,” Marden says. “It’s been an incredible year for me.”
Marden says of herself, “I’m a traditional artist, a bit of a storyteller, and a teacher of Wampanoag culture. It’s a responsibility to pass these things on. But it doesn’t feel like a responsibility. It’s an honor, and extremely important to inspire and keep these things alive. I honestly don’t know what I’d do with myself if I weren’t doing this. I would feel very unfulfilled. I was born to be an artist.”
For more information about Julia Marden, visit blog.teacollection.com/julia-marden.
