The record • Basketry and the engineered coast
The barrel by the door is the least impressive thing in the boathouse until you know what it is. Split cedar roots, pulled in spring, dried through summer, now soaking back toward flexibility. Everything a basket will ever be is decided by how the roots are treated before a single stitch goes in.
The coil
The signature Coast Salish basket is coiled cedar root, the coil stitched round on round with fine root strands drawn through awl holes and pulled tight. Done right it is watertight, and better than watertight. These baskets cooked. Water boiled in them with red-hot stones dropped in and swapped as they cooled. On the coil rides the tradition’s most distinctive move, imbrication, strips of beargrass, horsetail root, and cherry bark folded under each stitch so the pattern shingles across the surface. It is so closely identified with Salish coiled work that seeing it is close to reading a signature (Haeberlin, Teit & Roberts, 1928; Whatcom Museum, n.d.).
The proof across two thousand years
Waterlogged archaeological sites preserve basketry that dry ground destroys, and the Salish Sea’s wet sites hold woven work at roughly 4,500, 3,000, and 2,000 years old. The Suquamish weaver Ed Carriere, raised by his great-grandmother Julia Jacob and taught by her hands, studied the 2,000-year-old baskets from the Biderbost site and replicated them, and the techniques match what she taught him (Carriere & Croes, 2018). He weaves what he calls an Archaeology Basket, layering the styles of three ancient horizons into one pack basket, and in 2023, at eighty-nine, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow. Continuity is usually an argument. In his hands it is a demonstration.
Lummi country carried the thread too. Fran James, born on Portage Island in 1924, and her son Bill James, tsi’li’xw, hereditary chief of the Lummi Nation, taught cedar and wool for decades, and many weavers working today stand one teacher away from them.
What the baskets were for
A basket is one visible node of an engineered coast. The open-weave clam basket pairs with the clam garden, rock-walled beach terraces that multiplied shellfish yields, and in 2022 the Swinomish community built the first modern clam garden in the United States, thirty-three tons of rock passed hand to hand (Groesbeck et al., 2014; Northwest Treaty Tribes, 2022). Burden baskets belong to the camas prairies, gardens the size of landscapes that surveyors mistook for wild meadows. And over it all stands the reef net, the Straits Salish salmon technology banned in Canada for a century and revived in living memory through Lummi and W̱SÁNEĆ kinship (Claxton, 2015). The Reading Shelf’s sixth reading holds the whole braid.
One label to retire on your way out. Museums are full of Salish baskets marked “artist unknown.” The honest label, which some museums now use, is “artist once known.” The weaver had a name. The collector did not write it down.
[CO-AUTHOR: gathering protocols and teaching programs appropriate to name.]
References
Carriere, E., & Croes, D. R. (2018). Re-awakening ancient Salish Sea basketry (JONA Memoir 15). Northwest Anthropology. [AMAZON LINK]
Claxton, N. X. (2015). To fish as formerly: A resurgent journey back to the Saanich reef net fishery (Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria). https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/6614
Groesbeck, A. S., Rowell, K., Lepofsky, D., & Salomon, A. K. (2014). Ancient clam gardens increased shellfish production. PLOS ONE, 9(3), e91235. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0091235
Haeberlin, H. K., Teit, J. A., & Roberts, H. H. (1928). Coiled basketry in British Columbia and surrounding region. In Forty-first annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (pp. 119-484). Smithsonian Institution.
Northwest Treaty Tribes. (2022). Swinomish clam garden lays a foundation for future generations of harvest. https://nwtreatytribes.org/swinomish-clam-garden-lays-a-foundation-for-future-generations-of-harvest/
Whatcom Museum. (n.d.). Coast Salish baskets (Virtual exhibit). https://www.whatcommuseum.org/virtual_exhibit/universal_exhibit/vex19/index.htm