Basketry is one of the oldest and most widespread American Indian arts. Archaeological sites have yielded basketry specimens over ten thousand years old. Native peoples from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Aleutians to the Everglades, still create and use baskets today. Like their makers, American Indian baskets are remarkably diverse; manufacturing techniques, weaving material, shapes, and designs vary from tribe to tribe.
Generally, basketry was a women's art, but among some Indian peoples, such as the Pomos and the Yupiks, men wove as well, creating sturdy baskets that saw hard use as fish traps or pack baskets. Younger family members learned this skill from their elders, observing, copying, being gently corrected, and improving over years of practice until they, in turn, taught others.
Basket makers harvested, processed, and used a wide variety of native plants, ranging from large swamp canes to tall saguaro cactuses, from fine rye grass to sturdy black ash trees. In doing so, they utilized many different plant parts: stems, roots, bark, wood, shoots, leaves, and needles. The wealth of time, specialized knowledge, and skill necessary for gathering and preparing weaving material is an essential, but often unappreciated, component of American Indian basketry. As my grandmother, the Pomo weaver Lucy Smith, told me, "You just can't go to the store and get these things!"
Gathering basketry materials was usually a communal affair; families and friends talked and laughed while digging roots or stripping bark. Weavers collected limited amounts, taking care to leave enough behind to ensure plant regeneration for future harvests. People always gave thanks for what was taken; they said prayers, sang songs, or left small gifts of food or tobacco. The Pomo weaver Elsie Allen recalls that her mother "always approached sedge grass very slowly. She'd come and stand and say a prayer.... She'd always ask the Spirit to give her plenty of roots. Then she'd say, 'Thank you, Father,' before she dug."
Weavers gathered basketry materials at specific times of the year, carefully choosing materials with particular characteristics. Willow shoots, for instance, were harvested in early spring after the buds had broken, but before they had fully leafed, when they were flexible and the bark slipped off easily. Only willow shoots that were long, straight, slender, and free of lateral branches were suitable.
Basket makers utilized a number of horticultural methods, including pruning, controlled burning, soil cultivation, and weeding, to optimize the production of desirable plant features. These practices, necessary to produce usable basketry materials, also benefited plants. Pruning redbud, for example, increased its vigor and productivity and curbed insect infestations, while stimulating the growth of long, straight, strong shoots. Basketry plants flourished generation after generation precisely because of human manipulation, rather than by purely natural growth processes. These horticultural techniques demonstrate weavers' intimate knowledge of the plants around them, and are but one example of the sophistication of Native American land use and management.
Once gathered, basketry materials were cleaned and prepared for use through various techniques including debarking, splitting, soaking, dyeing, pounding, sun bleaching, drying, steaming, boiling, cooking over fires, and baking in earth ovens. Weavers had to size their materials so that they were uniform in width and diameter, an exacting and time-consuming task necessary to ensure the regular and even appearance of the finished basket.
Most baskets were decorated, often with elaborate geometric designs depicting various environmental features, such as quail topknots, lightning, or shark's teeth. The finished basket, with its complexities of spacing, balance, symmetry, and placement of design elements onto a three-dimensional framework, had to be conceptualized at the start. Nothing was written; the weaver carried this intricate image in her mind even as she focused on the technical demands of basket construction.
Native American peoples utilized three general basket-construction techniques—plaiting, twining, and coiling—in a vast and varied array. In plaiting, the warp and weft elements pass over and under each other at right angles. In twining, two or more horizontal weft elements are twisted around vertical warp elements. In coiling, the foundation continuously spirals upward while being bound together by a sewing element.
Aboriginally, basketry was imbued with great economic and social significance, and baskets proved indispensable to everyday life. They were necessary in gathering, preparing, storing, cooking, and serving food; there were berry baskets, eel baskets, cornmeal sifters, mush-boiling baskets, water jugs, and food platters. Nuu-Chah-Nulth (or Nootka) babies napped in basketry cradles; Western Apache children played with toy baskets; Yokuts women gambled with walnut dice on basketry trays. A Navajo bride and groom ate cornmeal from a special basketry tray; Hopi women threw baskets to observers as they danced in the village plaza; Tlingit shamans stored eagle down in cylindrical baskets.
With increasing white contact, European manufactured items, generally easier to obtain than baskets, began to replace baskets in everyday native life; pots, pans, boxes, plates, and gunnysacks became ubiquitous domestic utensils. In turn, some weavers incorporated European goods into their basketry, ornamenting baskets with glass beads, coloring weaving material with aniline dyes, or using wool yarn and silk embroidery floss as decorative weaving elements. European goods also inspired new designs and forms. Weavers shaped baskets in the form of top hats, teakettles, and wine goblets; they included flour-sack fabric motifs, china patterns, and English letters in their basket designs.
White contact also introduced native peoples to a cash economy. Due to white interest in native arts, a commercial market for "Indian curios" made it possible for native weavers to earn money selling their baskets to nonnatives. This market reached its apex from 1890 to 1910. Collecting Indian baskets was a popular middle-class hobby, and it was fashionable to have "a number of Indian baskets strewn around the parlor," as one enthusiast wrote. Tourists often purchased these baskets while traveling through "Indian country," whether via steamship in Alaska or the railroad in the Southwest.
At a time when Native women had few choices of occupation, basket making provided a welcome and significant source of income. It also allowed weavers to preserve and practice important cultural traditions in the midst of tremendous cultural change. Prior to the commercial basket market, weavers produced only what was needed for their families' use. The extensive nonnative demand for Indian baskets, however, caused a surge in basket production. Contrary to dealers' rhetoric, Indian basketry at this time was not a "dying art" but thrived as never before.
Weavers created baskets using new techniques, new forms, and new designs, expressly to appeal to nonnative tastes and needs. In some cases, weavers created new types of functional baskets for white buyers, such as the potato-harvesting splint baskets woven by the Micmacs. More commonly, however, the main function of commercial Indian baskets was aesthetic, not utilitarian, and buyers valued them as objects of beauty and curiosity. Miniaturized versions of traditional baskets became especially popular with both weavers and buyers, requiring less time and material to make, while being less expensive and easier to transport.
World War I and the Great Depression led to a marked decline in the American Indian basketry market. For several decades there was a hiatus in basket making as native women turned to other means of livelihood, and few had time to learn and undertake the demanding process of weaving baskets.
Recently, Native American basketry has experienced a resurgence, the result of a renewed admiration of American Indian art by nonnatives, and of American Indian peoples' rekindled pride in their heritage. A new generation of weavers is learning the old skills, revitalizing the craft in places where it had virtually disappeared.
Contemporary native weavers are creating baskets as much to express ethnic identity and cultural heritage as to earn money. Baskets today are woven as gifts for family and friends, for display or use around the house, and for use in traditional ceremonies, which are themselves being revived. The California weaver Jennifer Bates declares, "Making baskets is a way I can help my family maintain their heritage as Miwok Indians. Gathering the different plants, at places where my relatives always have, gives us a tangible link with our ancestors. Knowing the correct time of the year to gather each different plant keeps us aware of the changing seasons of the earth, just as our ancestors were aware of them. Making the baskets gives us time to spend together as a family, remembering the past and planning for the future."
Currently, American Indian basketry faces a number of challenges. Many native peoples live in cities and pursue professional careers, making it difficult to obtain basketry materials and to find the time to weave. Modern land use threatens the future of Indian basketry through the destruction of native basketry plants' habitats: building development, overgrazing, logging, agriculture, and gravel mining have destroyed gathering sites used by generations of basket weavers, while air, water, and ground pollution damage remaining plants.
As plants become more scarce, weavers must travel greater and greater distances to collect materials. Surviving concentrations of basketry plants frequently exist on nontribal lands, either public or private, where pesticide and herbicide spraying are common practices. Weavers often do not know if, or when, a gathering area has been sprayed, and many fear becoming seriously ill from working with toxic plant materials, since these sprays contain known carcinogens. In addition, traditional collecting practices, like controlled burning, often conflict with property restrictions.
American Indian basket makers are facing new challenges with remarkable creativity. Some weavers transplant and raise basketry plants in backyard suburban gardens. Many are joining together to form organizations, such as the Maine Basketweavers Alliance and the California Indian Basketweavers Association, to recognize and support both experienced and beginning weavers, as well as to educate land-use agencies.
American Indian basketry has survived for thousands of years in an unbroken continuity of practice, a vital artistic tradition incorporating both traditional values and social change. Indian baskets, no less than the peoples who create them, are beautiful and enduring.
Beverly R. Ortiz, Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians "Contemporary California Indian Basketweavers and the Environment," ed. Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson (Menlo Park, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1993); Frank W. Porter III, ed., The Art of Native American Basketry: A Living Legacy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Sarah Peabody Turnbaugh and William A. Turnbaugh, Indian Baskets (West Chester, Pa.: Schiffer Publishing, 1986).
Sherrie Smith-Ferri
(Dry Creek Pomo/Bodega Miwok)
Grace Hudson Museum
Ukiah, California
