To Begin

Once Upon a Time, on one bitingly cold Missouri winter night, a young girl named Liz was sitting in the computer lab at Saint Charles Community College doing research on a paper for her Biological Anthropology class, and she was in tears. Her paper was on the relevance of sequencing the DNA of Ötzi the Iceman—the oldest known human mummy in the eastern hemisphere—alongside studies on the leather of his clothes as a method to provide insight on the process and timeline of livestock domestication in human history. You see, Ötzi appeared to have been a shepherd: his leggings were made of leather from domestic, as opposed to wild goats, firmly suggesting the existence of domesticated livestock at least as far back as 5,300 years ago! As often happens, though, her research had gone terribly awry sometime around dusk: what had begun with goat leather turned to goat hair, then turned to sheep and fleece, had accidentally tumbled headlong into a YouTube rabbit hole of Neolithic Scandinavian and Germanic fiber arts: both språng weaving and nålbinding. Both are lost, you see: språng is practiced independently of European traditions in the Americas and Southeast Asia (and therefore has been resoundingly ignored by the Western academic establishment) and the remaining practitioners of nålbinding are almost exclusively Scandinavian grandmas. The few that remember these techniques are desperately trying to pass them on before they die and the traditions are forgotten. This is women’s work passed down verbally—never written down in the annals of historical cannon. This work left few traces but for scraps of archaeology now discovered in the blessedly acidic peat bogs or alkaline soils throughout the north, or what artifacts can be gleaned from Egyptian tombs. Their knowledge died. The works of thousands of mothers and sisters before us were lost—their efforts forgotten, their trials unknown, and their love and care in making to provide for themselves and their loved ones was swept away, the last remnants of their voices silenced—and it was our fault for not learning while we could. Because of our ignorance in search of progress—of newer, faster, more predictable, mass-produced products—we let these ancestors die. We let them down. What are we worth if we can’t or choose not to acknowledge where we came from; who we are made of? Who loved and lived before us?