Beth Piatote’s “Beading lesson” is the thirteenth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and with it, we move from the 1990s to the 2000s.

Beth H Piatote

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Piatote. It simply says that she is Nez Perce and a Professor of Native American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Wikipedia provides a little more, but not much in terms of life history. It tells us that she is a scholar and author, that she is “a member of Chief Joseph’s Tribe and the Colville Confederated Tribes”. And it expands on her academic qualifications and achievements a bit more. It seems most of her writing is academic, but she has had one short story collection published, The beadworkers, published by CounterPoint Press in 2019.

“Beading lesson”

“Beading lesson” is the shortest story in the anthology. Blaisdell gives its original date as 2002, but the source for the story is a 2008 Oxford University Press anthology, Reckonings: Contemporary short fiction by Native American women. However, I believe, from the GoodReads description of The beadworkers, that the story was also included there.

GoodReads describes The beadworkers, starting with, “A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings, while ruminating on a fractured relationship”. This perfectly captures the setting of “Beading lesson”, but of course there’s much more to it. Before I get onto that, however, I’ll add that the collection sounds interestingly varied, as it includes stories set in the 1960s and 1890. GoodReads concludes its description/promo with “Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas”. I haven’t read the other stories, but my guess from reading “Beading lesson” is that the collection explores the cultural, social, political and economic role and implications of beadwork, and that it also uses the idea of beadwork literally, as a practice, and symbolically, to represent the wider culture.

So now, “Beading lesson”. The fractured relationship mentioned by GoodReads is with the aunt’s sister, that is, the niece’s mother. The story is told first person by the aunt, who gently and patiently shows her niece the intricacies of beading, as they make some earrings for the mother. However, as she passes on to her niece an important cultural skill, she also shares values and information that she believes are important for her niece to know. In other words, the skill teaching is part of wider mentoring, which is what all good skill teaching is about.

What makes this story interesting is the subject of this mentoring. It’s multifold – to pass on cultural traditions, to teach the niece some life-skills, and, eventually, maybe, to lead to a repair in the broken relationship with her sister. It appears that this sister, the youngest in her family, had been spoilt. As a result, she had not learnt the skills our narrator had learnt, and has lost culture. The aunt tells her niece:

I think sometimes she wishes she learnt to bead, but she didn’t want to when she was little. She was the youngest, so I think she was a little spoiled but don’t tell her I said that. She didn’t have to do things she didn’t want to, she didn’t even have to go to boarding school. 

The boarding school reference is intriguing. Our narrator is positive about her experience, when, quite often, such schools were sites of cultural loss.

As the lesson progresses, we learn that the narrator is passing on beadskills to men in prison, which gives them skill and pride. The subtle message here of course concerns Indigenous incarceration. We also learn that her beadwork has supported her in tough times, through times of “livin’ skinny”. And, we gain some insight into the politics of, let us say, “Indigenous arts and crafts”. The aunt tells her niece that when some people

buy your beadwork, they think it should last forever. Somebody’s car breaks down, he knows he got to take it to the shop, pay someone to get it goin’ again. But not with beadwork — not with something an Indian made. No, they bring it back 10 years later and they want you to fix it for free! They think because an Indian makes it, it’s got to last forever. Just think if the Indians did that with all the things the government made for us. Hey, you got to fix it for free! 

The use of vernacular for the aunt’s story could lull readers into thinking she is a sweet but simple old lady. However, as the story builds, it becomes increasingly clear that she knows exactly what she is about. We see her to be kind, wise, and generous, where it is warranted, but not stupid. She knows the value and importance of what she does, but she also knows exploitation and is resilient in its face. She knows that maintaining cultural practice is important to her people’s continuation. This a story in which the personal is quietly, but absolutely, infused with the political. It’s clever and delightful to read.

Beth H. Piatote
“Beading lesson” (orig. pub. 2002)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 100-103
ISBN: 9780486490953

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