Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala 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's so much human ingenuity and aesthetic expression. It is art, but it is also function. 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 ways, sort of talk across time and admire masters of work.
To this day, Californian 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.
They're 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 a 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. There are 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 a 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 or 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 lay out Designs on that object and have them work with that shape. You hold that design 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 and geometry. 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 could see a basket and 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 too. Baskets were the primary tools of life. You could 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 kind of what you enjoyed doing too. 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 also different from each other and we also come from 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, Yurok, or Karuk country based on the types of materials that are used like hazel, woodwardia, fern, bare grass, all those types of plants that are specific to the Pacific North Coast.
Other places like the Chumash, they use Thule and they make these amazing boats out of Thule. But you know that it's from that area. And 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 and 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 Aaron Brothers and buying some brushes and going home and you know it's really a lifelong learning.
It's cultural, it's biological, it's um you know it's scientific. When you have to gather and process and Dye your own materials. It's a much more complex artistic endeavor.
So I have to start at the top of the tule. There's so many. Put my hand on the one 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 weaving is tule. 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 hardy, 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 tule stand that I usually go to is dead and dry now. So that's... 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.
So there's all kinds of things. 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 Shmoo-ich-choo-mosh cradleboard. And now it has loops. It's got loops that run down the sides and it's like a shoestring binder and you put the baby in.
And this is Thule 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 can stretch it anywhere you want. My joy as an artist is to start combining and stretching my thoughts about my weaving. With 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 weavers 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 but halted in the coastal communities where the missions were present. Each sedge 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 sedge place, which it is. Ui da shuru, shuru.
Mee shee, hui hui, mee shee. Ui hui da tukutnut. Ui hui da shuru, shuru.
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, 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. In 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, two 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 awl 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 make each 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 weave with feathers. And so I ended up looking online and looking at chicken feathers. I buy these chicken feathers. I have to dye them. And then I have to clip, clip, clip and snip, snip, snip.
So that has been my adaptation. to the modern world and its 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. I want to 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. Most of the people who came for the Gold Rush really came between 1849 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 per scalp for a man and $50 for a woman and $25 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 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 world. 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.
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 going to have to They start buying food. They're going to 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 in daily life in a sense.
The sale of baskets starts to 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 a sudden, Native people are making baskets to be able to sell to non-native people. And baskets change 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 basket's 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 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 stopped 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 a 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 finely.
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 influenced 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 too.
It's what you like. And if people are drawn to them and see the aesthetic beauty of baskets, they're going to 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 mono weaver. But 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, the 1930s or so. And this was made by Mary Sampson.
But you can see it's like a next step up in weaving. The design element, the fineness of the weave, even though Leona Bowman made some really fine baskets too. 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. DeFrancisco basket or a Mary Tupino basket 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 coiled basket. I look at basketry as not only an art form, but representing a culture. I cut off the red off the bottom so that I can use that for pattern material.
I'm dying black. And it's been in there for two or three weeks. The quality of a basket to me is the workmanship. There are 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 it coils right-handed, the stitches are going to be up and to the left, and that affects the whole weaving style.
So what you do is you try to avoid a line on the left side. The people in what is now Baja California, the Paipais and the Kumeyaays, 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 T'Pai people from north of the border were barred from California. And indeed, up until about 40 years ago, that border more or less precluded the Kumeyaay people from entering the United States. I've been weaving for a long time, more than 25, 26 years. I started when I was 7, 8 years old, working in baskets.
So when I come to the U.S., I learn here with Justin Farmer. I learn with him too, just the sumac, deer grass. So from there, I never stopped.
I go and collect like every four or five months because when I collect it, I collect a lot. I'm very fast collecting junkets. I'm trying to get all the brown right here. Junkets, it's very important to get the brown. That's the one that makes, you know, all the different colors in the basket.
How are you doing? How are you doing? How much junk have you been collecting?
A whole bunch? No, a bit. Good bunch right here. Good red root for the junk that gives the red colour. But then when you want white, that's when you use sumac or deer grass, which we'll be picking up later.
But red's probably the hardest because you only get so little of it. But it's always that nice red color. I got the good stuff. Yeah, I know.
You got more than me. I'm surprised. I think it's not that heavy, but it's still fresh. It has water in it.
Some people think we buy all that stuff at Walmart. We buy that stuff at Michael's. No, we don't buy that stuff. Some people, they don't know about basket.
They all say, oh, where you buy your material? I say, no. I go and collect my own materials. We're going to try to look for the deer grass. Here's the black junkies right here.
So I'm going to soak it right there, and then I'm going to get the junkies, the long junkies. So I'm going to split that too. Then I use, like, I don't know, 20, 30 sticks. I just split it and then soak it in water.. And then you gotta wait for like an hour to get ready.
So after that, you work on your basket. Whatever that comes on my head, I start doing it. Like one time, I was working on basket, and that was a flower first.
And I was thinking, ah. I think of my mom, I think of my aunt, and I say, OK. Both of them, they're not getting along. They're not nice no more.
And that's the story I put it on the basket. Two ladies right here, one here, one here. And then from there, I start putting, like, two rattlesnake.
You know, one is my mom, and the other one is my aunt. So that one is, like, when there was, like, good people, you know, talking to each other. And then the other one is because when there was fighting before. So it's like, I'm going to start another basket.
But it should take so long to do a basket like that with story, you know? 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'm going to say like when I cannot see, but I'm going to keep my glasses still working.
I feel like basket is art, you know, for all the people who make basket, that's art. When you stress and then you get your basket and you're weaving, all that stress you have is then go on the basket. When you do art, paint or something like that, you know, that's so much work, too. People don't see that all those details, you know, they have on a painting, but, you know, same on the basket.
You can see it's so beautiful, that basket, but you don't see how much detail they have. I'm sure other weavers 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 weavers 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 same women who are weaving, and they're bringing back the songs and the stories. And people like my cousin Tima, you know, she's in the archives, and she's visiting with those traditional baskets that are in museum collections to really learn from them. 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 in the most generous, beautiful ways.
Every culture around the world changes, innovates, moves forward. And if they don't, their culture dies. Weavers here in California, we're 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 going to fix this problem?
How am I going to 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 tule. It's always out of tule. Whether it's got this decorative element or it's smooth or I put put shells on it or ribbons, it's always tuli.
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 to the landscape?
I'm not introducing 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 too. 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 to deal with. But you take it and then you use those things that colonization has given you and then bring it back to our traditions. Meaning we 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... and self-determining. We were never under the impression that we were dying or on our way out. So our plans were always for the future and thinking about the next generation and the generation after that. Yeah, my favorite part is just knowing that this is where my aunties and my people have 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'll start telling stories and talking about the old people and the times that we were out here with our aunties.
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 size bulrush root. 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 say it in a polite way. Well, for us, the very word take just doesn't sit well with us. 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 18. And I was living on the reservation right next to my auntie Laura Somersall.
Just one day we were sitting down there talking and visiting with her and I said, you know auntie, I said, 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 every day. I still call up on them and ask them to... help me and teach me and they do.
Auntie Laura Summersall is my great aunt and she is Dry Creek Pomo and Wapo and Auntie Mabel is my great aunt as well and she is Cache Creek Pomo and Wintun. 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 what they went through to be able to keep these traditions and our culture alive isn't going to be wasted. 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.
We weave 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 color's on the bottom and the weaver on top, which shows only thing the root on the backside. And then there's another tribe that has it where they do a double twist and you have the design inside in and outside. I'd like to see that.
Hello? Hi Deanna. I'm fine. Yes I am.
Okay, we'll see you when you get here. That's what my teacher, when she taught me, she said, I'm teaching you 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, and then you just stick your root in there like that. Bring it down underneath your next weaver.
It's got to 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 you 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 me taking them, then I know that they're on their wave, and they really have the interest.
But what I want them 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've got to season it for a year. You know, all that stuff has to be learned.
Museums like the Met and the de Young are starting to incorporate traditional work that might have earlier been considered ethnographic or primitive arts or craft 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, it's this thing that you use in ceremony. But there has always been a sustained art market for California Indian basketry. Sometimes I think to the detriment of actual living California Indian 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 intervention as living Native people to be in those spaces.
Collectors have started to look for us. I mean, when we show up, they kind of go, We have this beautiful hat and we 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 by sort of saying like we're actually using these things and they mean something to us. The aspect of us as living peoples in those spaces I think have become very important.
Today you'll see weavers that are not just from one tribal tradition but from several tribal traditions that are mixing and matching or weavers 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. It's much more just like the world today. It's much more diverse and multicultural. Californian basketry is moving with the times.
I do think that now when you have modern weavers 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. 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.