CULLOWHEE – Isabel Driver knows how important the work she does is. As an intern with the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University, Driver etched 224 craftspeople into the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts’ craftsman database.
Isabel Driver (WCU photo)
Each of those folks have their own stories and their own skills, but among the hundreds she recorded, one was rather special.
Her name was Wakey.
Wakey, a Cherokee woman who was a weaver in the 1830s, was the 100,000th craftsperson to be entered in the MESDA database.
“I personally just felt that there is an explicit sort of necessity in making sure that we’re also doing our best to go further back, to continue honoring even those who we don’t have pictures of, those who we don’t fully understand,” Driver, who is also a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, said.
“I like to think that the work that I do in doing this sort of research will help future kids from my community, people like me, Native Americans, who grow up realizing ‘I don’t know anything about our people, about our history,’ and I’d like to change that, and I’d like to make it so that those kids have an easier access to records and information that I grew up not having.”
Driver, a 2023 WCU graduate, uncovered a range of craftspeople across Western North Carolina, an area that doesn’t have a lot of records of people before the Civil War.
Of the 224 Driver put in the database, 184 of them were white, 202 were male and 34% were blacksmiths. But Wakey was a rarity. She was among 22 females and 36 people listed as “Indian” that Driver found in her research.
And to find Wakey, Driver had to do some digging.
One of her biggest leads came when she talked with Andrew Denson, director of the Cherokee Studies program at WCU.
In search of census data for craftspeople before the Civil War, Denson pointed Driver to the Hunter Library, which has a transcription of the 1835 Henderson Roll, a listing of 16,000 Cherokee people living in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
“I know Dr. Denson’s help was paramount,” Driver said.
However, since it was a transcription, Driver couldn’t use it as a source, but after filing through the National Archive Digital Collection and microfilm, she was able to submit Wakey into the MESDA database, reaching a significant landmark in the Winston-Salem museum’s history.
“This milestone embodies more than a half century of dedication to discovering, preserving and sharing the rich stories of Southern artisans from across all eight of MESDA’s states and beyond,” said Kim May, the director of MESDA Research.
“We’ve certainly come a long way from the commencement of this program when our founder, Frank L. Horton began with only a few reels of microfilm, a typewriter, some index cards and a handful of known craftspeople/
And for the Mountain Heritage Center, which hired Driver with the help of a private donor, helping its partner in MESDA reach that milestone was special, too.
“It’s fantastic,” said MHC director Amber Albert. “With our internships at the Mountain Heritage Center, we always try to be project based but still have an exploratory component, so they can get a feel for all of the things that happen behind the scenes of a museum, but she came in with a very specific interest in research.”
Now, Driver is a digital archivist and transcription specialist with the Kituwah Preservation and Education Program in Cherokee. A lot of her time is spent digitizing documents and analog data and working to establish an archive for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
However, her work with MESDA isn’t finished. Soon, Driver and a few of her colleagues are planning to make a trip to the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, Tennessee as their research is still ongoing.
And as they continue that research, Driver would be happy to come across Wakey’s name once more.
“We’re hoping that maybe we’ll find her again,” Driver said.
- Western Carolina University release
