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

The Coil and the Clam Garden: Baskets and the Knowledge They Hold

Baskets that boiled water, a decoration technique the Salish nearly kept to themselves, weaving matched across two thousand years, and the food systems the baskets were built for. Plus two Lummi teachers a generation of weavers knew by name.

If Week 5 was about wool, this week is about roots, bark, and grass, and about the single most quietly astonishing demonstration of cultural continuity anywhere in this course.

Coil, stitch, boil

The signature Coast Salish basket is coiled cedar root. Split cedar roots are bundled into a coil. The coil is stitched to the round below with a fine root strand drawn through awl holes and pulled tight, and the basket climbs row by row (Haeberlin, Teit & Roberts, 1928; Whatcom Museum, n.d.). Done well, the result is watertight, and more than watertight. Coast Salish cooks boiled water in baskets, dropping in red-hot stones and swapping them with tongs as they cooled. A basket was the stove and the stockpot (UBC Indigenous Foundations, n.d.; Whatcom Museum, n.d.). Coiling of this kind is the Salish signature on the coast. The Northern nations twined in spruce root instead, and the great 1928 Bureau of American Ethnology study locates coiled work squarely with Salish peoples, interior and coast (Haeberlin et al., 1928).

On the coil rides imbrication, the tradition’s most distinctive decorative move. Strips of beargrass, horsetail root, and wild cherry bark are folded under each stitch so the pattern sits on the surface like shingles of light and dark (Whatcom Museum, n.d.; Haeberlin et al., 1928). It is a technique so closely identified with Salish coiled basketry that seeing it is close to reading a signature. Alongside coiling ran plaiting for mats and bases, and twining in several variants, with designs worked in false embroidery or overlay (Whatcom Museum, n.d.). Forms followed work. Open-weave clam baskets that rinsed and drained in the surf, burden baskets carried on a tumpline across the forehead, soft berry baskets that folded flat, cradle baskets (Whatcom Museum, n.d.).

Two thousand years, stitch for stitch

Wet archaeology is generous to basketry. Waterlogged, oxygen-starved sites preserve fiber that dry ground destroys. From the Fraser delta to the Snoqualmie River, wet sites have yielded Salish Sea basketry at roughly 4,500, 3,000, and 2,000 years old (Carriere & Croes, 2018). The Biderbost site near the Snoqualmie preserved 2,000-year-old baskets, including pack baskets, now at the Burke Museum.

Enter Ed Carriere, Suquamish, born 1934, raised by his great-grandmother Julia Jacob, who was herself raised in the Old Man House longhouse you met in Week 4. She taught him split cedar limb-and-root basketry as a boy, and he made clam baskets his life’s specialty, over six hundred of them (National Endowment for the Arts, 2023). Working with the archaeologist Dale Croes, Carriere studied the Biderbost baskets and replicated them, technique by technique, and the comparative analysis runs the other direction too. The ancient work matches the methods Julia Jacob taught him (Carriere & Croes, 2018). Carriere weaves what he calls an Archaeology Basket, layering the weaves of 4,500, 3,000, and 2,000 years ago into a single pack basket. One is at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, another in the American Museum of Natural History’s renovated Northwest Coast Hall. In 2023, at eighty-nine, he was named an NEA National Heritage Fellow, the nation’s highest honor in the traditional arts (National Endowment for the Arts, 2023). The claim “our practices go back thousands of years” is often said loosely. Here it is demonstrated at the level of the individual stitch, in one man’s hands, traced through one named great-grandmother.

The Lummi thread

Lummi country held the thread too. Fran James, born on Portage Island in 1924, was a Lummi weaver of cedar and wool whose work entered the Burke, the Seattle Art Museum, and collections worldwide, and who taught from the 1970s until her death in 2013. Her son Bill James, tsi'li'xw, hereditary chief of the Lummi Nation, language teacher and historian, taught beside her (Seattle Times, 2013, 2020). And they taught constantly. Community classes and college courses, where and how to gather, how to prepare, how to weave, year after year, including the Weavers Teaching Weavers gatherings (Tribal College Journal, n.d.). Many weavers working around the Salish Sea today are separated from Fran James by a single teacher. That is what a living tradition looks like. Not a display case, a lineage.

The basket is a food system

Now widen the lens, because a basket is one visible node of an engineered landscape. Consider what the baskets were for.

Clams. The open-weave clam basket pairs with the clam garden, the rock-walled intertidal terraces built and tended for centuries around the Salish Sea. Modern ecology has tested them. Gardens produced roughly four times the butter clams and twice the littlenecks of unmodified beaches (Groesbeck, Rowell, Lepofsky & Salomon, 2014). Mariculture, in the strict sense, long before the word. And the practice is no longer past tense. In August 2022 the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community built the first modern clam garden in the United States, thirty-three tons of rock passed hand to hand into a two-hundred-foot wall at Kukutali Preserve (Northwest Treaty Tribes, 2022; Washington Sea Grant, n.d.).

Camas. Burden baskets and digging sticks belong to the camas economy. Prairies hoed, weeded of toxic look-alikes, burned to keep them open, harvested by women and children, the bulbs pit-cooked and traded (HistoryLink, n.d.). A camas prairie is a garden the size of a landscape, invisible to anyone who assumes agriculture must look like Europe’s.

Salmon. And above all, the reef net, sxwo'le [ORTHO], the signature fishing technology of the Straits Salish, including Lummi. An artificial reef of anchored lines guides sockeye up into a net suspended between two canoes. Selective, nearly bycatch-free, owned and operated by families at named locations (Claxton, 2015). The state and the canneries stripped the reef-net grounds after the treaties, and Canada outlawed the method outright in 1916. It did not die. At Lummi, Larry Kinley worked to bring sxwo'le back until his death in 2018, aboard a rig named Spirit of Sxwo'le, and his wife Ellie Kinley carries the license today, the only one of Washington’s twelve reef net permits in Indigenous hands as of the mid-2020s (Native News Online, 2023; Seattle Times, n.d.). Across the border, the W̱SÁNEĆ scholar Nick Claxton led the first Saanich reef net set in a century in 2014, at the hereditary location, with Lummi relatives helping (Claxton, 2015). Look at the loop. A fishing technology outlawed for a hundred years, restored across a border through kinship.

Artist once known

Finish in the museum. The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham holds well over a hundred Coast Salish baskets, most of them collected without the maker’s name (Whatcom Museum, n.d.). The label used to say “artist unknown.” Some museums, the Heard among them, now write “artist once known,” which is honest. The weaver had a name. The collector did not think it worth writing down. Every named lineage in this reading, Julia Jacob to Ed Carriere, Fran James to the weavers she taught, is a repair of exactly that erasure. When you stand in front of an unattributed basket, you now know what to see. Not anonymous craft, but a specific woman’s authorship, misplaced by someone else.

The through-line is that a Salish basket is compressed knowledge. Knowledge of materials, of technique with a five-figure age, and of engineered ecosystems, clam terrace and camas prairie and reef net, that fed the people who wove it. The museums lost the names. The communities did not lose the knowledge.

Looking ahead: Next week the course stops at a door and explains why it will not open it. What is sacred, who protects it, and why not-sharing is itself a tradition with a history and a law.

For key terms and reflection questions, see this week’s Weekly Guide.

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