EaRTh staff conducted an interview with Kim Shuck about being a bead artist trained in ancient Cherokee beadwork knowledge-technologies-practices (KTP).

EaRTh: You are a multi-talented person, as your identity is at least dual, and your talents are much greater than dual. You are also a bead artist. Could you tell us what being a bead artist is rooted in?

Kim Shuck: [holding up a baseball transformed with detailed bead artistry] Some of you will recognize that this is a baseball because I actually put a line where the stitching was. And what I do is I take baseballs that my partner used to use when he was coaching Little League and I strip the hide off of them, put hide that I can bead onto on them, and then do that. And I've done one for every year that we've been together, so there's a number of them around here. And they all have sort of funny baseball related names. So, that's a frog, and this ball is named a funny hop. They've all got names like that.

EaRTh: When did you first start doing beadwork? 

Kim Shuck: Nobody knows. Nobody knows when I first started weaving baskets either. It's not clear.

EaRTh: Did someone teach you? 

Kim Shuck: Clearly somebody had to have taught me. I feel like the vague memory of doing… maybe it was loom work first, loomed beadwork first. And then, you know, I'd go to powwows and my community would be dressed up and look beautiful and the stuff was expensive.

EaRTh: Can you give us context of what a powwow is? 

Kim Shuck: A powwow, yeah. So now people use that word to mean a meeting, but that's not what it is. I mean, it's also that. But a powwow is a dance that's got spiritual context, but also social context. It's where you go to hear what people have accomplished over the year or maybe meet the new baby or the new husband or wife or find out somebody's past or somebody's going to get married. You know, whatever it is, it's like it's a social contact, right? 

EaRTh: Is it particular to certain Native American nations? 

Original artwork by Kim Shuck (view 2): ‘Funny Hop,’ bead artistry on hide on baseball, 3 inch diameter (2013), photographed by Doug Salin in 2025.

Kim Shuck: No, and this is another kind of controversial thing I'm about to say, but the powwow comes out of the Wild West shows actually. The dances were traditional originally, but the outfits got bigger and flashier, because when they were performing — and a lot of people were forced to perform in Wild West shows — the farther away you got… you're not going to be right up on the beadwork to see it, so things had to get bigger so that more feathers, more things, more yarn, more fringe, more stuff, bigger motions, gestures. So, it evolved from there. I mean, now it's entirely ours again because there haven't really been Wild West shows for some time, or at least they don't call them that.

EaRTh: So, beadwork was part of the clothing of some Native American people? 

Kim Shuck: Yeah, fancy clothes. So, people think that beadwork didn't happen until Europeans traded glass beads with us. 

EaRTh: Yeah, I was wondering if you could enlighten us about that.

Kim Shuck: It's not that. There was always decorative stuff going on. So, there are all kinds of different traditions of woven pattern. 

EaRTh: Maybe shells? 

Kim Shuck: Shells in some parts of the country, freshwater pearls. My people [the Cherokee] used to do stuff with freshwater pearls, or drilled stone, or other things… create pattern like that. A lot of the patterning, at least in the Southeast, started out from a context of basketry patterns, of patterns on ceramic that also lent itself to basketry, but also not. So, the patternmaking goes in an arc as well. For over 500 years, we've been working with glass beads to create some of those patterns, and you can see there are different traditions. In a lot of different places. So, in the Southeast, there was a lot of beading done on stroud cloth, a wool broadcloth, which is sort of filled afterwards, so you don't see the woven surface so much. It looks like a big piece of felt, but it's actually a woven thing that's had the fibers affected. And then people would bead on it, and you can see those in old paintings, and you can see those traced in the work of Martha Berry, who did a lot of fundamental work in reclaiming a Cherokee accent in beadwork, if you can call it that.