Qiigam aygaaxsii
An extraordinarily fine twined basketry tradition using wild rye and beach grass, historically worked exclusively with a woman's own sharpened thumbnail as the only tool, capable of crowding over a thousand stitches into a single square inch and producing baskets so tightly woven they resemble linen cloth — widely regarded as among the finest basketry in the world.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not Applicable — the United States is not a State Party to the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage; no US technique can be formally ICH-inscribed regardless of significance.
The cutting, drilling, and stringing of white and purple beads from quahog clam and whelk shell into belts and strings that serve as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's living historical, legal, and diplomatic record, predating and central to…
Dolls hand-formed from dried corn husks, deliberately made without a face, taught to children alongside a Three Sisters origin legend warning against vanity and self-regard — a distinct and openly shared craft, separate from any restricted…
A colorful illuminated folk-art tradition combining an angular German blackletter script with hand-painted watercolor motifs — tulips, birds, hearts, and scrolls — used by Pennsylvania Germans primarily to create and decorate birth and…
Large-scale geometric star, sun, and moon paintings applied directly to the sides and gables of Pennsylvania German barns beginning around 1830, historically an agricultural and folk-artistic expression tied to farmers' almanac star-sign…
An older, geometric twined-weaving tradition originating among the Tsimshian and retained by Tlingit and Haida weavers, using bold black-and-white (with sparing color accents) angular patterns evoking lightning and spider webs, understood…
Red earthenware pottery decorated using two related techniques — sgraffito, in which a design is scratched through a white slip coating to reveal the red clay beneath, and slip-trailing, in which liquid slip is poured freehand through a…
Basketry from the Hirosaki area of Aomori Prefecture in which wild akebi vines, and wild-grape (yamabudo) bark, are harvested in autumn, dried, soaked, stripped of nodes and plaited by hand into handbags, trays and colanders in plain,…
Ringal (Himalayan dwarf bamboo, Drepanostachyum falcatum and Thamnocalamus spathiflorus) is the primary material for the traditional basketry and tool-making tradition of the hill communities of Uttarakhand.
The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) weaving tradition — the production of the distinctive Micronesian woven textiles (lava lavas and ceremonial cloth) from banana fiber, hibiscus fiber, and other plant sources across the four FSM…
Yaeyama jōfu (八重山上布) is a fine ramie cloth from Ishigaki and Taketomi in the Yaeyama Islands, Japan's far southwest.
The weaving of the couleuvre à manioc, a roughly 1.2-meter tubular, elastic press woven from arouman cane, used across French Guiana's Amerindian, Aluku (Maroon), and Creole communities to express toxic juice from grated bitter cassava.
Bashōfu (芭蕉布) is cloth woven from the fiber of the ito-bashō, a fiber banana (Musa liukiuensis).