Inside the Chickasaw Dream Weavers of Mahota Textiles
Cowboys & Indians Magazine - Inside the little storefront on the picture-book-quaint main street of Sulphur, Oklahoma, the Mahota Textiles showroom is decorated with the ghostly silhouette of “Hatchet Woman.” Her body strides forward with a purpose, one hand wielding a hatchet as her long black hair trails in the wind behind her.
Legend has it that Chickasaw women began singing so loudly during the Battle of Ackia, or Aahíkki’ya’ as the Chickasaw say, that the French who attacked that day in 1736 became disoriented. The women ran into the throes of battle with hatchets, and the sight of these chorusing, ax-wielding women so frightened the French troops that they retreated.
Since that historic battle, which took place about four miles north of the town now called Tupelo, Mississippi, the Chickasaw Hatchet Woman has earned her place in history as part of the unconquered and unconquerable Chickasaw tribe.
Her legend lives on in the woven tapestries of Mahota Textiles, the first tribally owned textiles company in North America. Like the seasons, Mahota Textiles’ showroom changes often. Hatchet Woman will always have her place, but different artists’ work is highlighted seasonally, and the colors of the showroom reflect the temperature outside. In the back room, rolls upon rolls of fabric fill the space, waiting to be sewn into table runners, pillows, bedding, blankets, and more.
These aren’t your typical fabrics: Each is crafted from the history of the Southeastern Native American tribes, and the prices rival those found in high-end specialty boutiques. Interior designers and discerning shoppers flock to the little store in Sulphur, and while the prices might seem “rich,” the quality matches.
The store is modern, but the story of Mahota Textiles reaches far back into the threads of Chickasaw history. It begins with the kidnapping in 1736 of a young French girl in the Southeast who was known as French Nancy. She eventually became the bride of the Chickasaw warrior Alikuhlo Hosh, and they had a daughter.
That daughter bore the name Mahota. Hota was an old Choctaw word meaning “to separate by hand.” Items created by hand by the women of the Southeastern tribes were valued, and that history continues today through Mahota Textiles founder Margaret Roach Wheeler. As the great-great-granddaughter of the famed Mahota, she inherited that heritage and tradition.
Even her logo — five irregular concentric circles — pays homage to early hand-carved Native American glyphs discovered in caves and on rocks. “It represents five generations of Indigenous women,” Wheeler says. “Matrilineal societies of Southeastern tribes placed great value on works created by hand for loved ones and their community. Even their tools were created as beautiful objects in the belief that beauty and power were imparted to everything made from them.”
An honored weaver and artist herself, Wheeler created the textile company to honor the artistic spirit of Chickasaw women like Mahota; her daughter, Nancy Mahota; Wheeler’s grandmother Juel; and Wheeler’s mother, Rubey. With three centuries of Native American history and creative legacy behind her, Wheeler was destined, she says, to be a painter, sculptor, educator, Native historian, and award-winning weaver. It is this legacy of Indigenous makers that inspires the designs of the contemporary Chickasaw artisans of Mahota Textiles.
Mahota Textiles is owned and 100 percent supported by the Chickasaw Nation, says business manager Bethany McCord. “In researching the business, we found numerous Native American-owned textile companies, but none that were owned entirely by a tribe. We are the first. We are special in the fact that the Chickasaw Nation has a lot of LLCs, but nothing like this. It was a new venture for all of us, because the Chickasaws had never run a textile business.”
Born A Weaver
Margaret Roach Wheeler is small in stature but big in personality. Her talent, which she attributes to her mother and grandmother, has made her an award-winning weaver, fiber expert, and textile artist. She has studied at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as a research fellow and has shown works at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Arts and Design and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Wheeler was born in 1943 to her Choctaw father and Chickasaw mother. Her father was a teacher in rural Oklahoma, but when he was hired as a teacher with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1930s, the family traveled to other states. After spending her youth in South Dakota, Washington, and Montana, where her father served as a school administrator at Indian boarding schools, the family returned to Oklahoma.
“Growing up, I never knew [firsthand] about Oklahoma,” she says. “Both my grandfathers had died, but my mother’s mother lived with us, and we would go through her trunk of pictures and see photos of Oklahoma.”
Wheeler became a painter and a sculptor, selling paintings in high school before marrying her husband. She earned a bachelor’s degree in education and taught art for 10 years in Joplin, Missouri, before earning her master’s from Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, where she discovered her love of weaving.
“I started out in jewelry, and I hated it,” Wheeler says. “In my second semester, the jewelry teacher taught a fiber-arts class. The minute I sat down with the loom, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
Wheeler earned numerous awards, including Best of Class at the Heard Museum Indian Fair & Market, first place at Santa Fe Indian Market, and the Purchase awards at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis and Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. She is also a key figure at a weaver mentoring studio and was inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame in 2010.
Mahota Textiles is the true culmination of Wheeler’s passion for Southeastern Native American art. As an artist, she noticed the lack of representation for Southeastern tribes in the art world, and she made it her mission to bring that legacy to life and also showcase contemporary artists.
“We try to educate the people on Southeastern design,” she says. “I’ve been in Indian markets for years, and people say, ‘We love your Southwestern [design].’ I say, ‘No, I’m Southeastern.’ Our motifs are very different. We use more curves and circular arcs, and Southwestern designs are more stairsteps and diamonds.” The art and motifs of the Choctaws, Cherokees, Creek, Seminole, and other Southeastern tribes, she says, have a rich history that most art lovers haven’t been exposed to. Even the material — 100 percent cotton — reflects the heritage of the Southeastern tribes’ homelands before they were forcibly removed in the late 1800s and moved to Oklahoma.
“There was previously no representation of this artistic heritage,” she says. “But in the last 10 years, there have been series of exhibits that also represent the Southeast, and we are finally getting some representation as a textile business. We’re the only ones I know of that represent the Southeast in textiles.”
Growing Mahota
When Wheeler returned to Oklahoma, she taught, displayed, and sold her art at the Artesian Gallery and Studios in Sulphur. She had bigger plans to do designs on larger looms with computerized patterns. The swirling, curved designs epitomizing Southeastern tribal art are difficult to do on a floor loom, Wheeler says; computerized looms, however, make those challenging shapes easier to produce on fabric.
The then-manager of the Artesian Gallery, Joanna John, helped Wheeler write the initial business proposal for the textiles company. That plan went to Chickasaw Governor Bill Anoatubby in early 2017. Wheeler had already discovered the Oriole Mill in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and when the governor approved a trip to the mill in October 2017, the business seemed even more viable. “Before final approval, a Chickasaw ‘Shark Tank’ was created just for us,” McCord says. “We presented the final plan in April 2018.”
Mahota Textiles launched at the Chickasaw Annual Meeting and Festival in October 2018. After outgrowing the original mill, the company contracted with MTL Mill in Pennsylvania in June 2019. Mahota has been in its present “world headquarters” location in Sulphur since July 2019.
“We started off with three main products, which were blankets, purses, and pillows, because we wanted to start small and just see what worked,” McCord says. Success was immediate, and the offerings increased. “The quality of the workmanship and designs lured in discerning shoppers and fans, so the business ventured into silk scarves, cosmetic bags, and other houseware items like table runners.”
Seasonally, guest artists are brought in to create new designs and new themes. Usually, artists are well-known or up-and-coming Chickasaw artists, but other Southeastern tribal artists are also considered. “We want to highlight Southeastern tribal art from other tribes as well, but we have many wonderful Chickasaw artists that we want to showcase,” McCord says.
Today, Mahota Textiles is carried in more than 45 locations across the country, including the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington, D.C., the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in Palm Springs, California, to name a few. Each year, the company unveils a new collection featuring a different designer; Joanna Underwood-Blackburn, Billy Hensley, Dustin Illetewahke Mater, and Faithlyn Seawright are among past designers.
The featured designer for 2024 is Brenda Kingery, an Oklahoma native of Chickasaw descent whose work reflects her experiences of living and working in Uganda and Okinawa, Japan, as well as attending powwows in Oklahoma. She is also a founding member of Threads of Blessing, an organization encouraging women in developing countries to use their artistic skills to support themselves. Kingery herself has traveled to Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Uganda to inspire other Indigenous women. “Brenda is an exceptional Chickasaw artist, and her work has been shown around the world in places like Paris and Milan,” Wheeler says. “Her work is exquisite — it’s vibrant and so distinctive. She is the epitome of what Chickasaw modern art is, and I can’t say enough about her talent.”
With so much talent to showcase and dedication to the mission to bring the work of Southeastern designers and our stories to an ever-growing audience, Mahota continues to grow in reach and recognition. On the horizon: moving into interior design with custom fabric for clients like the Chickasaw Retreat and Conference Center in Sulphur and the First Americans Museum and the new Chickasaw Okana Resort & Indoor Waterpark in Oklahoma City.
“We’re makers of art, of story, the threads that connect the inspiration of our ancestors to all of us in the modern world,” Wheeler says. “These tell our stories; these create our brand.”
