S9 E8: The Art of Basket Weaving

[Music] there's this idea in the Western perspective that something can't be high art if it has a function it has to be entirely functionless in order to have value and native people don't think that way things that have a purpose have the greatest value and everything is part of a context everything is part of a whole and the idea of Western art is so individualistic and so isolated our basketry is an art form because you can't escape the fact of the aesthetic elements there are so much human ingenuity and aesthetic expression it is art but it is also function [Music] baskets when you look at them across time you can almost have a conversation with the maker you can see them making decisions deciding on particular materials or a particular technique looking at a basket is being able to in some way a sort of talking across time and admire masters of work to this day California and basketry is some of the most sought-after basketry in the art world you see examples of it at auctions or at these sort of like large markets that you can go to people are really always looking for the weaving that's been done in California there was a lot of explorers and missionaries who came to California very early on you're talking like the 1700s and they were wanting to categorize California Indians as primitive hunter-gatherers and they kept saying you know they're a very primitive culture and very simple but then they would always have these little caveats in their writings where they would say except they make these beautiful baskets it's very interesting to see that happen for them because they can't understand in their mind how we're able to do that but to me that just shows that you know their view of us as primitive hunter-gatherers is so wrong and that was never who we were as the people we hunted we gathered we were also mothers and fathers we were also doctors and we were also botanists and biologists and all of those things mathematicians all those things you can see in our basketry [Laughter] [Music] they're California Indian baskets in museums all over the world because it's really seen as the most technically difficult the most aesthetically beautiful and even in some cases the most practical or technologically advanced for pre-contact people the people who were the finest basket makers were often asked to make special ceremonial baskets basketry hats things that were worn in ceremony are used in ceremony those objects weren't made by just anybody there were people who could execute those design elements motifs beautifully and those objects were revered if you ever have tried to make a basket then you start to have a great deal more respect for how difficult it is you know it's a three dimensional object and you are having to layout designs on that object and have them work with that shape you hold that design in your in your mind so you're not writing it down you're not graphing it out you just have to be able in your mind to see the finished product and then break it down into all the different steps along the way which is actually a lot of math in geometry [Music] most of them have to do with native relationships with the natural environment and with their belief in the spiritual world so oftentimes they were generally abstracted they were rarely representational and some family groups would have a certain design element so you can see a basket know what family that had originated from as artists today have license to make things up and to call things forth from their own spiritual understanding we see that two [Music] baskets were the primary tools of life you can hunt with baskets fish with baskets you could carry things with baskets you could cook with baskets you harvested food you processed food you made beautiful things to give as gifts baskets pervaded daily life what you needed to survive but also in many ways and what you enjoy doing - and I think really one of the reasons we were able to do that here was because of that variety of plants California is one of the spots in the whole world that has kind of the most diverse plant communities and so you have this really cornucopia of plants that you can choose from to make your baskets there's this very broad different way that basketry looks across California because we're all so different from each other and we also come different spaces different environments basketry plants across the state are very diverse tribes use baskets across the state in very different ways and they look very different usually you can tell a basket from Hoopa your crew country based on the types of materials that are used like hazel Woodward a fern bear grass all those types of plants that are specific to the Pacific North Coast other places like the Chumash they use to lead and they make these amazing boats a batouly but you know that's from that area in the same with como baskets they're very well known for their feather baskets a basket is so much more than just the product it's a year or more of tending your gathering places and singing to those plants and all the stories and songs around that particular place in that particular plant and the stewardship that goes along with being a weaver is immense you tend to those things that are going to give of themselves so that you can practice your art it's not going to air and brothers and buying and buying some brushes and going home and you know it's it's really a lifelong learning it's cultural it's biological it's you know it's scientific when you have to gather and process and dye your own materials it's it's a much more complex artistic endeavor so I have to start at the top of the Thule there's so many put my hand on them when I want and then I follow it down to the base and that's where I cut otherwise your eyes can't see it one of my favorite plants to use for waving is to leaf it's the best plant it filters it provides habitat for birds it's useful for all kinds of stuff people love it it's beautiful it smells beautiful it looks beautiful it's hearty it comes back fast but it's one of the few basket plants that absolutely needs to be in water we're weaving in an environment that has a landscape challenge right now there's not enough water there's not enough land that has usable materials in the basketry world we talk a lot about access oh do you have access to your materials oh I lost the access to my materials last year you know maybe a landowner barred me from going in or maybe the two least and that I usually go to is dead and dry now so that's a big topic for conversation between weavers sometimes I'll go back to the place I picked from before and it's gone someone built a house on it or everything's dead because there was no rain that year so I have to try to find a new place there's all kinds of things that are really blocking our access and sometimes it's not a physical fence it can be pesticides it can be laws it can be many things the cradles for the babies that we make I've probably changed the most of anything I weave this is the basic frame it's made out of willow and then it has these oak slats that go across our ancestors didn't use this as a baby cradle they used it as a baby carrier so this is a finished smooched Amash cradle board and now it has Lupe's got loops that run down the sides and it's like a shoestring binder and you put the baby in and this is truly that I gathered today for us when you change from thinking about basketry and weaving as strictly functional and recognize that even in the function there's art how far can you stretch that art you could stretch it anywhere you want my joy as an artist is to start combining and stretching my thoughts about my weaving what colonization everything changes it's an invasion of who we are as a people it's an attempted destruction of who we are in Southern California they had to deal with both the missionaries and the mexican-american war and Rancho system on top of that so they had like three constant pressures of destruction coming against them with the establishment of the Spanish missions many of the artists many of the women Weaver's no longer had the freedom to go and gather in their traditional places and so in some cases they were forced to use whatever was available to them on mission grounds so access and the freedom to gather and and to participate in traditional activities was all that halted in the coastal communities where the missions were present each sej runner needs to be split down the center lengthwise so I make a little slit with a knife at one end and then just carefully split it down the center and now I need to remove the bark after I've put back the ground covered up where I've dug then I sing this song that's very simple it's very much like our traditional songs are built and it is telling the sedges thank you the sedges are beautiful and it's a beautiful such place which it is suitably shooter whoo-hoo a good army she with the harsher ooh she drew me she told me she who eat the heart - good night oh my gosh you do [Music] Ohlone baskets are very rare today it's because of the early impact of the Spanish missions the mission here mission San Carlos and Carmel was only the second mission established and that was in 1770 here and the fact that some of our most spectacular baskets ended up being taken to Europe by early European visitors I want to bring these various types of baskets back that we don't have when I knew that I wanted to start making our basketry I first had to figure out what our basketry actually was you know a lot of things changed and likewise with museums it was much more common in those days for the doors to be closed to a regular person someone with no PhD behind their name and yet they had a cultural connection and so through these meetings and you know getting to know people and having them understand that access became easy it actually is fairly standard practice now through research from ethnographic materials the old drawings for example of some early visitors I'm able to find these little bits of information put the pieces of the puzzle together and then see what they look like have that beauty because I want people to see up close and personal the beauty the intricacy because I think when people have something tangible to look at to hold it's going to bring respect to our ancestors and this kind of coiled weaving this is a three rod coiled basket as opposed to a single rod or a one rod these two sticks that are sitting side-by-side and then the third one is sitting on top of those two in the little groove so that's the case for the whole coiling process which means that there are three sticks like this to side by side and one sitting on top in the row below that I've already wrapped and stitched wrapped and stitched now I'm wrapping and stitching this current row obviously I have to anchor it to something so I'm anchoring it to the row below by poking a hole with an awl running the stitch through pulling it tight but when I push my all in to make a hole I am trying to pick up that top stick from the row below so there's not really any space and I'm just basically having to muscle my way through the row below in order to making stitch so basketry is not for wimps I have come to specialize in doing feathered basketry the majority of our feathered baskets that we know of especially the ones with the little disc shell beads have as the background feather mostly acorn woodpecker feathers and there's a migratory bird act that actually prohibits the collecting of or even possession of most bird feathers definitely is a little bit of a problem for a person who wants to whe with feathers and so I ended up looking online and looking at chicken feathers I buy these chicken feathers I just dye them and then I have to clip clip clip in snip snip snip so that has been my adaptation to the modern world and it's laws and regulations and lack of accessibility for me it's so important whatever I bring back I want it to be real I don't want it to be pretend I don't want to like create something new based on a stereotype I want it to be real one honor our ancestors by doing it their way because that's what it's all about it's about the connection with the past doing things the way they did so that we can carry it on not make up something new and pretend like it was theirs a lot of times it's the thing that we don't have that becomes so intensely important to us because of their absence and that's how it's been for us for a lot of cultural things including our baskets I think in Northern California what they say about us is we were relatively late to the colonization aspect of what was going on in history [Music] most of the people who came for the gold rush really came between 18-49 and 1856 so within that six seven year period the culture was almost completely wiped out there was almost a full genocide here at one time the state offered a bounty of $100 for scalped for a mound and $50 for a woman and $25.00 for a girl or an infant it wasn't just the great influx of people that devastated the culture and of course there was a lot of murder and discrimination but it was the destruction of the land and everything that our tribal people here used for life all of the plants and animals everything was completely devastated and gone at the time of the gold rush it started with the gold rush but then as people came and settled just the expansion westward was another another blow to the people if you wanted to simplify it you see this trajectory from native people making baskets for native use to native people experiencing cataclysmic change in their worlds huge numbers of their community members dying loss of their homes lots of violence lots of displacement very few people are able to survive and once they do they're looking at how are we going to live [Music] Salvage ethnography defines a period after initial contact and the upheaval that came along with that anthropologists primarily gathering as much cultural materials from indigenous communities all over the world but here in North America gathering those materials and shipping them to places like the Smithsonian it involved mostly looting some purchasing from communities that were in distress there was a notion among the anthropologists that native cultures were all dying and that they needed to collect this material so that they could tell their story once they were extinct unearthing burials in cemeteries of people who had just recently passed you know you name it they collected not only objects but human remains starting from first contact they were collecting and not collecting in a way that sort of said we want to pay homage to how great this is but in a way of like we don't think you guys are going to be around that long so we want to make sure we have all of these things one of the things that they need to do is for the first time have a source of money make a living and in different ways since they're not able to live off the natural world around them anymore they're gonna have to start buying food they're gonna have to start buying clothes a lot of the things that baskets were used for are replaced by new goods like dishes and pots and pans and boxes and bags you know all of these kind of household things you know those all used to be baskets baskets start losing some of their jobs and daily life in a sense the sale of baskets starts you often become a way for native people to make money and that is something that everybody needs now and there are very few opportunities other opportunities to do that all of us that native people are making baskets to be able to sell to non-native people in baskets changed as a result of that less utilitarian and much more decorative the design elements start taking on a more sort of Victorian much more representative so you see flowers you see words you see someone's name right the person that the baskets being made for you'll see bottles that are covered with basketry or you'll see a woven teapot that obviously could never be used or little teacups that would never be actually used and then the materials too so you see an introduction of of commercial materials and commercial dyes one of the things you start to see is things do get smaller for the market it made sense for collectors they're easier to ship they're easier to display and they're cute I mean there's this whole kind of cuteness factor to the little sort of small scale things that people have always liked so this is our smallest basket and I've seen a number smaller than that it's got a design on it so it means that somebody has started and stops two different kinds of material I have no idea how the ladies did it totally market-driven and you can sell it for quite a bit people wanted to have the best and they wanted their collection to be special unique so they were trying to find measures of that so they started to do things like count the stitches per linear inch this is that kind of a technique called three rod coiling these coils they would sort of count how many per linear inch so the finer it was the more it was valued you know there's no again no utility to making it really really fine takes a ton more time to prepare the materials that finally there are large large stores that pop up during this period of time of just people buying basket after basket that they can find bringing them into stores and then reselling them to people they called the curio period when baskets became very vogue to collect aristocrats and everyday people were collecting baskets in that period it went all the way to the depression it was very vogue to have them up in your house to have a cabinet full of Native American baskets and there was newspaper articles there were books written then the Smithsonian came out with the basket edition in 1902 so there's a lot of other materials that influence the market at that time too I remember my folks buying their first basket for $100 in the 1960s that was more than our house payment then and it took a lot to spend $100 then on a basket so the market was so varied from the very rich collecting to the beginner collector like my father was this was our spare bedroom of my house growing up as a kid with my parents personal basket collection which I still have a number of these baskets myself collecting baskets is a very personal thing I think it is in the art world - it's what you like and if people are drawn to them and see the aesthetic beauty of baskets they're gonna collect because that's what's in their heart they were master mathematicians to keep that design element in their head and the stitch count there was no graph paper there was nothing written down it was all up here and that just comes from experience these baskets here are from my personal collection and I brought these like as an example because I know who made these baskets which makes a big difference because in the past a lot of collectors you know including my father didn't keep names on baskets so it was really tough to attribute baskets to makers these I know this is leona bowman which is i believe she's a mona weaver that this was a christmas gift in 1947 so this is really a good weave for that period and then this is probably a little earlier than 1930s or so and this was made by Mary Sampson on but you can see it's like a next step up and weaving the the design element the fineness of the weave even though Leona Bowman made some really fine baskets - this is just an example of weaving and then this is mrs. dick Francisco and you can see the quality just really jumps up when you get into a mrs. dick francisco basket or a mary two-panel basket with which the stitch count really comes up because you know for native baskets you go by stitch count and coil count for the fineness of the weave and just seeing them here you can see the progression of the fineness of the weave and that is what a collector is looking for stitch count and coil count on a coil basket I look at basketry as not only an art form but representing a culture I cut all the red off the bottom so that I can use that for pattern material I'm dyeing black and this been in there for two or three weeks the quality of a basket to me is the workmanship there's some baskets here that have a very plain pattern but the workmanship is good so the value is good if you find a basket with good workmanship and good patterns you've hit the ultimate diamonds and triangles were very common this big basket here flares out and therefore the motif can be exact now it doesn't slant very much but you see a slight slant there that tells you what direction it coils if a cause right him the stitches are gonna be open to the left and that affects a hole we V Siler so what you do is you try to avoid a line on the left side [Music] [Music] [Music] the people in what is now Baja California the pipelines and the communities we all spoke the same language and we were cousins if you will pretty much the same people the international border was drawn and the TPI people from north of the border were barred from California and indeed up until about 40 years ago that border more less precluded the Kumi had people from entering the United States 25 26 years I started when I was 7 8 years old working in busted so when I come to the u.s. I learned here with Justin farmers along with him to just assume I deal grass so from there I never stuck I was in collect like have a for five months because when I collected I collect a lot I'm very fast collecting Junkers I'm trying to get off the brown right here jaundice is very important to get the brown that's the one that make you know all the different colors in the back okay how much collected a whole bunch good bunch right here good read root for the junk I think is the red color but then when you want white that's when you use sumac order grass which will be picking up later but Reds probably the hardest because you only get so little bit but but it's always that nice red color I'm surprised I think it's not the hay but fresh some people think we buy all the stuff at Walmart we buy the stuff of Michaels no we don't buy the stuff some people don't know about basket they say oh where you buy the material so you know how you gonna collect my own materials we're gonna try and look for the dear brass who's the black junkies right here but I'm gonna suck it right there and then I'm gonna get up the junk is the long junker so I'm gonna split that you then I use like I don't know if 2030 stick I just split it and then soak it in water [Music] [Music] [Music] and then you gotta wait for like an hour to get ready so after that you work on your baskets whatever that comes on my head I start doing it like one time I was working on packet and I was a flower force and I was thinking I think on my mom might think on my hands and I say okay boss album don't know I'm getting alone they're not nice no more and that's the story I put it on the back two ladies right here one here one here and then from there I started like chill rattlesnake you know one is my mom and the other one is my hand so that one is like when there was like good people you know talking each other and the another one is because when they was fighting before so it's like I'm gonna start another basket first to take so long to do a basket like that will good story I'm so proud of myself you know doing that and then I'm going to do it when I'm not I mean I wanna say like when I cannot see but I'm gonna give my glasses until working I feel like a basket is art you know for all the people who make basket does art when you stress and then you get your basket and you're weaving don't that stress you have you stable on the back when do art pain or something like that you know that's just so much work if people don't see that all those detail you know they have on own paintings but you know same on the back you can see a so beautiful that back but you don't see how much detail they have I'm sure other Weaver's have talked about this that it's something that is almost meditative and there's a great deal of teaching about how you want to be in a good place when you're making a basket because the basket is going to embody kind of your being at that time and so a lot of Weaver's will put something away if they're upset or angry or frustrated you just don't want to work at that time and it also calls for a great deal of for lack of a better word of what I've learned to call pickiness perfection you have to be paying so much attention to the details in terms of the material and things have to be perfect you know there really has to be kind of a compulsiveness to get everything exactly right or else it won't work and that does mean that you really have to be detail-oriented and quality oriented now we've got an incredible resurgence in traditional basket-making the quality the return to traditional materials return to traditional forms and the attention to detail and making those materials for the love of making art those materials are being taken care of by those those same women who are weaving in there and they're bringing back the songs and the stories and people like my cousin tea mush you know she's she's in the archives and she's visiting with with those traditional baskets that are in museum collections to to really learn from them and their whole purpose is to revitalize it for the next generation and so they're teaching they're not only gathering all of this information and making their own art but they're also sharing it with the community and in the most generous beautiful ways every culture around the world changes innovates moves forward and if they don't their culture dies Weaver's here in California were under actually a lot of pressure not to change not to innovate not to move forward from the outside world so we've got anthropologists over our shoulder we've got basket experts over our shoulders we've got buyers and sellers and anthropologists and museums and everyone's looking if you take one step outside of this sort of box that they've decided is traditional then what you're doing to them isn't true basketry isn't true tradition what's hard for us is as a weaver my obligation isn't to them it's to my community my obligation is to make sure that whatever changes happen in our communities that I respond to them and help our culture move forward my favorite moment as a weaver is when I have to innovate I have to change something so I'll look at this object that I'm making and I'm like how am I gonna fix this problem how am I gonna change this and fix the problem I weave for the needs of my community but every once in a while I weave because I want to so you also have a need as an artist and we make our hoods out of Julie it's always out of Tilly whether it's got this decorative element or it's smooth or I put shells on it or ribbons it's always truly but it doesn't have to be what if I wove a hood out of coil basketry another style basketry that we do but I shaped it like a hood I could get patterns into that hood I'm still weaving exactly the way I weave all the time I haven't changed anything it passes my question of does it connect me the landscape not nearly reducing new materials or things that wouldn't work so that's my next challenge our story has always been what do we need to do to make sure that we are always here and how can we make plans for always being here and it might have just been very few it could have been you know as little as like one to two people that are holding on to one aspect of it but that was what we knew we had to do to make sure that it was there for future generations that's such an inherent part of being an indigenous person - it's like you take the tools of colonization right you take all these things that you have to work with now because this isn't the way it has been and isn't the way it used to be this isn't what our ancestors had anyone but you take it and then you use those things the colonization has given you and then bring it back to our traditions grow our own basketry material we you know advocate for ourselves through policy decisions we write books we become academics we perpetuate our traditional ecological knowledge so I think that's a very powerful thing we are a forward-thinking people we were never making plans not to be here and alive and sovereign and self determining we were never under the impression that we were dying or on our way out so so our plans were always for the future and thinking about the next generation of the generation after that yeah my favorite part is just knowing that this is where my auntie's and my people been gathering for a long time as you can see here my whole family is here my wife is here my children my grandkids when we start cleaning these off then that's when we start telling stories and talking about the old people and the times that we were out here with our auntie's and it's just it's a connection this outer husk comes off and that little white center in there that's actually the root so all this husk has to be cleaned off and just that little white root in the middle is really what we're after that's an average-sized bulrush root [Applause] we don't manage the land or the animals here we survive because of what they offer us and some people talk about take you know and they and they and they say it in a polite way well for us the very word take just doesn't sit well with us it's again it's like we're managing we're taking something we receive what the land offers us I don't know I was probably about eighteen and I was living on the reservation right next to my auntie Laura summer so just one day we were sitting down there talking and visiting with her and I said you know auntie I said uh I think I might want to try to start a basket and so she reached down and grabbed a bundle of roots and tied me a starting knot I started weaving they are still my teachers they teach me everyday I still call upon them and ask them to help me and teach me and they do Auntie Laura somersault is my great-aunt and she is Dry Creek pomo and waffle and auntie Mabel is my great-aunt as well and she is Cache Creek pomo and Wynton they are the real deal they are I mean if you want to be an Indian you want to be like them there's a deep part inside me that wants to let them know that you know what they went through to be able to keep these traditions and our culture alive isn't going to be wasted you know I feel strong that this is what's right for me and for my family so I forced my children to learn how to do this I don't force them to do it but I made them learn how and then if they want to do it they can it's all those stories it's all those traditions of early days through those stories and through those experiences my grandchildren who might never have met them in person feel as if they know them and in fact they do through those stories and through those memories my grandkids are able to interact with their ancestors [Music] we-we've with four strands and the color is on the bottom and then you have the root on top and so when you weave around your stick it's on top there and it's not in the back your colors on the bottom Weaver on top which shows only thing the root on the back side and then there's another tribe that has that word they do a double twist and you have the design inside and then outside I'd like to see the Hat hello hi Deanna I'm fine yes I am okay we'll see you when you get here what's up my teacher when she taught me she's that I'm teaching us so that you keep our culture going so I'm doing it it's rewarding it makes you feel good okay now you just you bring this forward then you'll just stick your root in there like that bring it down underneath some next Weaver it's gotta go under then these go like that and then when you go around you add a stick with that one and this one so this is some of the stuff that we got off the river and then you take that outside layer off that's it then we have these great big ones you get them split and that's all you do split it scrape it that's the process when I see them out there gathering without being taken off then I know that they're on their wave and they really have interest but what I wanted to be able to come out here and know the seasons how to gather how to prepare you don't just pick this up and start weaving with it you got a season it for a year you know all that stuff has to be learned museums like the Met and the DeYoung are starting to incorporate traditional work that might have earlier been considered ethnographic or primitive arts or crafts because it had a utilitarian use or because it was made with natural products we're seeing an integration into the American galleries at the Met and for the longest time those of us who are Native and Native art enthusiasts or Native art scholars have been wondering why we are separate from American art or why we are separate from contemporary art and we're starting to see a blurring of those lines thank goodness it's a long time coming I remember one time I took my daughter to the Art Museum in San Francisco and there was a display of California Indian baskets and she just looked at me and said are we famous like she kind of didn't have this idea that like baskets were this great collectible item in her mind that's it's this thing that you use in ceremony but there has always been a sustained art market for California basketry sometimes I think to the detriment of actual living Californian people at first when I started going to these shows where they would have like large collectors who were selling off items I would get very sad about them because much of what was for sale are things that you would hope would somehow find their way back home to be able to use I think as I've participated more in them I've started to see sort of like the importance of our interventionist living native people to be in the spaces collectors have started to look for us I mean when we show up they kind of go oh we have this beautiful hat and you know it's gonna fit you and we know you're gonna wear it and they start to think of them in very different ways and we've been able to do that just by being in those spaces just sort of saying like we're actually using these things and they mean something to us the aspect of us is living people's in those spaces I think have become very important today you'll see Weaver's that are not just from one travel tradition but from several tribal traditions that are mixing and matching or Weaver's that are from one tribal tradition that are living somewhere else and so they're using those materials with their home style of weaving methods so much more just like the world today it's much more diverse and multicultural California and basketry is moving with the times I do think that now when you have modern Weaver's they are very much participating in like an art market they're bringing their modern work and they're selling it to people and I think it's also a really powerful way of showing that our artwork is very modern to this time that we can make adaptations that allow us to participate in a sort of like modern art market and that these designs and this way that we make things really stands the test of time [Music] [Music] [Music] art bound is made possible in part by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs the California Arts Council and others

Channel: KCET

Views: 97,759

Keywords: kcet, southern california, Native American, Artbound, Basket Weaving, California Indian Basketweavers Association, Autry Museum of the American West, fine art, craft

Id: DAm1OaW84pM

Length: 56min 34sec (3394 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018