Roots of Quilted Resistance

The NorthStar Resistance Quilts stand in a long lineage of textile-based resistance.

Stories have circulated suggesting that certain quilt patterns carried coded signals of safety and solidarity during the Civil War era. While historians largely regard these claims as unverified, the endurance of this narrative reveals something important: textile practice has long been imagined — and at times demonstrably enacted — as a space of covert agency and collective resistance.

Textile history provides many documented examples of collective quilt‑making functioning as political, social, and economic infrastructure. In the nineteenth century, abolitionist fundraising fairs mobilized quilts as tools for movement‑building — raising money, circulating political messages, and sustaining networks of resistance.

Fundraising quilts also appeared across other reform movements, where communities stitched together to support schools, mutual aid efforts, and local organizing. In the twentieth century, quilting cooperatives such as the Freedom Quilting Bee of Gee’s Bend in Alberta, Alabama transformed domestic skill into economic autonomy during the Civil Rights Movement. Across time and geography, communal quilt‑making has created space for solidarity, survival, and collective action, particularly for communities whose civic power was otherwise restricted.

The NorthStar Resistance Quilts situate themselves within this documented lineage of collective making as witness and resistance.

Every block in these two quilts is a Sawtooth Star — a form documented in late eighteenth-century quilts, including R. Porter’s 1777 example (now held at the American Museum & Gardens in Bath, England) and later printed in Farm and Fireside (1884). Its structure — a grounded center held by sharp, directional points — has been used for more than two centuries to communicate guidance, protection, and collective resolve.

Symbolic Associations

• Guidance & Navigation: The star has long been associated with orientation and direction — a visual reminder of bearing, moral alignment, and movement toward freedom.
• Protection & Honor: The geometry resonates with Native American star quilts used in ceremonies of life, war, and remembrance, where the star functions as a symbol of relationship, continuity, and respect.
• Political Expression: Star quilts and other quilt forms have appeared in abolitionist fundraising, suffrage organizing, labor movements, and peace activism, demonstrating the recurring role of textile practice in civic life.
• Regional Identity: The Minnesota state flag features a star form, placing this geometry at the center of the state’s visual identity.