Knife handle carved out of an alligator’s jawbone by Bill Radford. Photo by Stephan Haggy.
Mountain Heritage Day celebrated the history and culture of Western North Carolina, with music, food and local artists selling their work.
Brothers and Cherokee artists, Bill and Rob Radford, keep some distance between their booths, as their work has a similar style, both with a focus on knives, pipes and gorgets. They carve knife handles from mostly antlers, also using alligator jawbones and wood with various designs for decoration and practical use.
They carve the pipes out of soapstone and are function, with Bill’s pipes having been used in ceremonies before. Cherokee gorgets are worn like a necklace and they make them by engraving traditional Cherokee symbols onto shells. Bill uses a dental tool, while Rob prefers a Dremel to create their engravings.
Cherokee gorgets made by Rob Radford. Photo by Stephan Haggy.
Louise Goings showed off her over 50 years of experience of basket-making by demonstrating the process. She started wedging her knife into a small piece of white oak along the first growth-ring and cutting down vertically into the wood, until she could pull it off.
With a long-thin strip of white oak, she begins to make it into a weave; manicuring the edges and shaving the wood down until smooth. She says the model basket they have will take 300 to 500 weaves, and already has been worked on for 12 hours. She explained basket-maker refers to completing the whole process, from cutting down the tree to the finished basket, where a weaver only does that part of the process.
Louise Goings scraping wood smooth for weaving. Photo by Stephan Haggy.
Ed Goings, the son of Louise Goings, had a display of his arrowheads he made from a variety of rocks. He mostly uses flint in his craft, to keep with tradition, and showed me the football-sized flint he carefully flakes off with a stone. The rougher flint arrowhead is contrasted with the smooth obsidian, which is a volcanic rock, like glass. After 35 years of practice, Ed Goings can make an arrow head in 20 to 30 minutes, but still remains humble as he recalls advice from a mentor, “never become an expert, always be learning.”
See a photo story with another staple of the Cherokee culture – stickball game.
