PRESERVING A TREASURE

Qualla Arts & Crafts Mutual, Inc. is the nation’s oldest and foremost Native American cooperative. It is located on the Cherokee Indian Reservation known as the Qualla Boundary, at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

Founded in 1946 by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ artisans and craftspeople,  its beginnings dovetailed with the opening of the Park in 1940, which ushered in a boom of postwar growth of highways, family travels, and cultural tourism to the Qualla Boundary. At the same time, the arts and crafts made by Cherokee people increased in quality and quantity, and the simple laws of supply and demand created a growing need for a location to sell crafts year-round.

That need was met in the summer of 1946 when about sixty Cherokee craftspeople, with the help of Indian Service personnel formed the Qualla cooperative known as the Cherokee Indian Craft Co-op.  In 1949, the co-op as it was known locally, was juried into the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild.  The co-op received its current name Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, Inc., in the mid-1950s, and serves its original purpose – to “provide a year-round market for Cherokee handicrafts, to promote high standards of workmanship and design, to help craftspeople solve their problems, and to secure better prices for their craftwork.”