The Business of Baskets: Weaving Economic Ties Between the Bethany Indian Mission, Ho-Chunk Families, and Lutheran Ladies' Aides in the Mid-Twentieth Century Midwest

Dr. Anna Peterson’s presentation will explore the ways Ho-Chunk women and their families negotiated the effects the Bethany Indian Mission had on their lives and took advantage of the opportunities it presented through the making and selling of black ash basketry. While Bethany missionaries often saw this work as unnecessarily burdensome and outside of the scope of their call, the basket weavers and their families put pressure on the Mission to act as a conduit between the basket makers and basket buyers. In this way, they used the Mission and its contacts to ensure ancestral basket weaving survived in the face of great adversity.