Quotes from Tiya Miles

Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

The history of Africans in America is brutal, but we have made art out of pain, sustaining our spirits with sunbursts of beauty, teaching ourselves how to rise the next day.

Be someone's muse.

wove spiritual beliefs, cultural values, and historical

Around the year 2000, women began to reclaim knitting and sewing circles as spaces of solidarity, to use handiwork as a social connector and form of giving, and to make political commentary through craft in a movement termed "craftivism."73 A knitting wave gave rise to the "pussy hat

South Carolina's history, punctuated by the sale of little children, might be read as a cautionary tale about how a self-centered ruling class could rely on racial prejudice in the service of unchecked capitalism and to the detriment of moral character.

Without Ruth, there would be no record.

Somehow, as the reading public has internalized narratives about American national and regional pasts, we have forgotten that Detroit is ancient, that Detroit is indigenous, and that Detroit has a long-standing black presence. We have misplaced the knowledge that most of the Midwest was French…We have never deeply considered the reality that slavery existed even in the Midwest…and in Canada where a 'mythology' of a black 'haven' holds sway.

This impulse to preserve past knowledge by hitching narrative explanation to items exhibits what Ulrich calls the 'mnemonic power of goods.' Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

And if those things are textiles, stories about women's lives seem to adhere with special tenacity, even as fabrics, because of their vulnerability to deterioration and frequent lack of attribution to a maker, have been among the last kinds of materials that historians look to in order to understand what has occurred, how, and why.

She sought to immediately address a hierarchy of needs: food, clothing, shelter, identity through lineage, and, most centrally, an affirmation of worthiness.

these women valued one another as kin and understood the transcendent worth of lineage.

For women, cloth also tended to represent the work of their hands, the female branches of family trees, and notions of the feminine ideal. Passing on a textile, then, symbolized women's ability, creativity, and continuance.

As one historian of slavery and capitalism concluded: "The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants