NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 6 of 8

Guide, Week 6. The Coil and the Clam Garden

Start with this week’s Reading before diving into this Guide.

Three ways to use this guide. If you are in a live class, read before seminar and bring the questions with you. If you are working around a missed class, write your responses to the thinking questions and you have done the week. If you are fully self-guided, take the questions at your own pace.

Key terms

Coiled cedar-root basketry: the Salish signature technique, watertight enough to boil water with hot stones.
Imbrication: beargrass, horsetail root, and cherry bark folded under each stitch. It is decoration so closely identified with Salish coiled work that it reads like a signature.
Wet site: waterlogged archaeology that preserves fiber. Salish Sea basketry survives at roughly 4,500, 3,000, and 2,000 years old.
Biderbost: the Snoqualmie-area site whose 2,000-year-old baskets Ed Carriere studied and replicated.
Generationally linked archaeology: Carriere and Croes’s method of matching ancient technique to what a living weaver’s own teacher taught.
Fran James and Bill James (tsi'li'xw): Lummi weavers whose decades of teaching carried the thread to a generation of weavers around the Salish Sea.
Clam garden: rock-walled intertidal terraces, tested at roughly four times the butter clam yield of wild beaches.
sxwo'le / reef net: the Straits Salish salmon technology, banned in Canada in 1916, revived through Lummi and W̱SÁNEĆ kinship in 2014.
Artist once known: the museum label correction. The weaver had a name, and the collector failed to record it.

Thinking questions

Ed Carriere can weave the styles of 4,500, 3,000, and 2,000 years ago into one basket, and his techniques match what his great-grandmother taught him. What does continuity proven at the level of the stitch do to the word “prehistoric”? What would the equivalent demonstration be in your own family’s knowledge?
Fran and Bill James taught for decades in Lummi country. Map your own distance from a knowledge lineage that matters to you, through your teachers and their teachers. What responsibilities come with being one or two links from a lineage like that?
A clam garden quadruples yield and looks, to a settler surveyor, like a natural beach. Camas prairies looked like wild meadows. What other engineered Indigenous systems are misread as “nature,” and who benefits from the misreading?
The reef net was banned for a century and came back through relatives across a border. Compare this to the weaving revival of Week 5. What do the two revivals share in method? What does the border mean, and not mean, in Salish country?
Stand (virtually) in front of an unattributed basket at the Whatcom Museum. Write its label twice, once as “artist unknown” and once honestly. What changes in the visitor, and in the institution, between the two?

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR block. Gathering rights, family basketry lineages, and reef net histories are the community's own to teach.]

Sources for deeper reading

Re-Awakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry [AMAZON LINK], Claxton’s open-access dissertation To Fish as Formerly, the Groesbeck clam garden study, and the Whatcom Museum’s virtual basket exhibit.