I am spending this 2021-22 year writing about genealogy and family history, and I am spending this year (the first of several, I hope) being trained as a weaver. Those undertakings — both of which are creative, both of which are intellectual — are constantly in conversation with each other in my brain. Here are some touchstones (or friction points?) as I navigate that conversation:

• Lee Burkhart, Tlingit artist, reflects in this segment of the documentary series Craft in America devoted to his cousin Nicholas Galanin’s work on how both he and Galanin grew up around the artistic practices of their fathers (Will Burkhart and Dave Galanin), and says, “It’s definitely in our family, in our blood.”

• In a November 2021 Instagram post, Tlingit weaver Lily Hope reflects on her weaving genealogy: how her mother and teacher Clarissa Rizal recommended her for a museum weaving commission, placing Hope within “a weaving-teaching lineage from Clara Benson to Jennie Thlunaut, to Clarissa Rizal, to one of her students: me.” She goes on to encourage Tlingit and perhaps all Indigenous weavers to “embrace this weaver life full time…. Bring your heart and hands back to the loom. It’s where we remember who we are…. Remember your roots. Remember tradition.”

• In a recent issue of sx salon on Caribbean texts and textiles, Jamaican artist and scholar Jacqueline Bishop positions her own artistic practice within the genealogical trajectory of her foremothers’ textile work: interviewing older family members about their own and each other’s textile work, documenting the objects through photos, reflecting on their aesthetic practices and her own. Bishop says, “I started seeing … how the layering of my own photographs was in fact very similar to the layering done in patchworks, and in fact how indebted I was to the aesthetic passed down by women in my family, more than perhaps I had realized.”

One could go on and on: it is not difficult to find examples of artists, artisans and craft practitioners explaining or at least contextualizing their practices within a familial or cultural lineage, and there are of course very good reasons to do so. I have done it myself: my introduction to the journal issue in which Bishop’s essay appears dedicates the issue to “the Caribbean women who inspired and nurtured my textile practice,” many of whom were my own foremothers. When it became clear that my creative impulses would be directed toward textile work, my mother speculated out loud about how I had arrived there: who in my lineage was a textile maker. Several candidates present themselves — but none of them are weavers.

I do not know, in familial or in cultural terms, why I am a weaver. I only know that I am one. Certain things across the course of my life have compelled me, grabbed hold of me and never, ever let me doubt that they were mine or I was theirs: the habit of reading, the Spanish language, my feelings about my spouse, and weaving. Not just textile practice broadly — although I do several things with textiles and fibre, and I enjoy all of them. But weaving, specifically: I am a weaver, and I cannot explain why. No one that I know of before me in my family line practised weaving, and it is — with some brief exceptions — not a craft with any significant footprint in Jamaica, where I grew up. I “discovered” weaving through an extracurricular activity at the college (in Canada) I attended as a teenager, and I fell instantly and deeply in love, and I have never recovered.

But why?

Now — some days later — I am crocheting Christmas ornaments and ruminating on crochet, which is the fibre practice that I perhaps saw around me most in Jamaica as a child. Both the process and the products were everywhere: doilies, antimacassars, edgings on hand-towels and table linens — an endless list of decorative niceties. But also more functional objects: handbags, baskets, and — iconically — Rasta tams. My beloved great-aunt Vida did a lot of crochet and indeed taught me to crochet. (She also tried to teach me to tat, but the translation of her right-handed method for my left-handed self left us, consistently and depressingly, with knots where there should have been loops.) Here’s the thing, though: I don’t crochet. I mean, obviously I do — but very rarely and for only short spurts, usually at the holidays when I want to make an ornament. The fibre practice most accessible to me both through my family and more generally in my culture — the one that should be in my blood, if anything is — is the one that I’m most ambivalent about: glad I can do it, largely not interested in doing it.

I’m wondering about three things, none of which I am yet ready to think through fully or propose definitive answers on, so I’ll just plant them here like seeds:

1) What this says about the idea of, the seductions of, the explanatory force of genealogy (or rather, the explanatory force we wish it to have, whoever that “we” represents). I want to wonder about this at the same time that I recognize — as I say above — the very good reasons for contextualizing making practices (and other practices) within traditions or lineages, both familial and cultural.

2) Whether I would be asking these questions if I regarded my weaving practice as art. No one (well, not many people) looks at an artist and says, “But why do you art? No one in your family arts.” We think of artists as sui generis, and of artisans or craft practitioners … differently, somehow. I am not at all persuaded by — although not entirely free of — the idea that art and craft are two different and mutually distinguishable things with a line (even a blurry line) between them, and this is just another instance of the weight that questionable distinction is allowed, or made, to bear.

3) Whether I would be chewing on these questions if I were white and North-America born as was the weaving space into which I first entered, and as are many of the weaving spaces in which I continue to find myself. As absurd as this now seems to me, I spent a while as a younger woman wondering whether I should weave, whether I was entitled to weave, without the certificate of … authenticity? … conveyed by someone(s) in my lineage (specific or general) who wove before me. This essay may be in part an attempt to assuage that younger woman’s anxiety, rather than simply dismissing it. Because there may be a genealogy to that anxiety as well: it may have roots, and ancestors.