Laura Walkingstick is an Eastern Band Cherokee artist and community-based art therapy
facilitator from Cherokee, North Carolina. Walkingstick creates narrative-based artwork inspired
by personal memory, Cherokee culture, storytelling, healing, and the resilience of Indigenous
people. Her work often explores themes of identity, family, historical memory, and emotional
experience. Working primarily with cornhusks (textiles) and ceramics, Walkingstick is drawn to
tactile, earthy mediums that connect to both tradition and lived experience. Through dolls,
sculptures, and mixed media artwork, her pieces act as vessels for story and reflection,
encouraging conversation, connection, and healing.
My work is grounded in Cherokee worldview, matrilineal teachings, and the lived experience of survival
across generations. I was raised by a full-blood Cherokee mother and a white mixed-American father,
but my upbringing was rooted in my Cherokee lineage. Through my mother, I was taught clan identity,
cultural responsibility, and the values carried by Cherokee women. My father, although not Cherokee,
encouraged me to know and honor my Cherokee heritage. Because of this, my identity formed with a
Cherokee core, even while growing up within American society.
I often describe this experience as being wrapped in a blanket. Inside the blanket, I am am Cherokee.
The blanket itself represents America, something that surrounds me, but does not define who I am at my
center. This metaphor becomes central to my work for this exhibition, which explores how Cherokee
people endured the American Revolution and how those same pressures continue to shape our lives
today.
For this project, I work with cornhusk as my primary material because of its deep cultural significance.
Cornhusk represents Cherokee agriculture, women’s labor, ancestral survival, and the responsibility to
sustain our people. Cherokee women worked the fields, fed entire communities, and carried the
knowledge necessary for survival. Corn itself comes from Selu, our First Mother, whose teachings
ensured sustainability and continuity. Husk becomes both protection and memory and a material that
feels familiar, organic, and deeply ancestral.
My work will represent me today, a contemporary Cherokee woman existing within the same inherited
constraints as my ancestors did. My figure will be wrapped in a American flag, symbolizing the external
forces imposed on Cherokee people beginning in the Revolutionary era. Yet what is wrapped is not
erased. The Cherokee core remains intact.
Surrounding the figure will be corn kernels wrapped by husks, blanketing the seeds like a mother to her
child. These seeds represent our people, our history, stories, and our future. Even when wrapped,
constrained, or pressured, Cherokee life continues to grow. The act of planting becomes an act of
resistance and hope.
The American Revolution did not bring freedom to Cherokee people. It brought burned towns, broken
treaties, and land loss. And yet, we are still here. My work speaks to that unrelenting presence honoring
the ancestors who endured those changes and acknowledging how their survival lives within us today.