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Description

Oblong, coiled cedar root basket with rounded sides that flare outwards slightly at the rim. The top two coils of the basket form handles on the shorter sides of the basket. Exterior walls are decorated with a dark brown and reddish brown imbrication in a zigzag pattern with brown triangles lining the bottom.

Specific Techniques

This basket is fully imbricated with a bold, checkered, zigzag pattern applied at the same time that the basket was being built from the base up. To form the base, prepared cedar roots were coiled around thin and pliable slats of wood split off a sapling cedar tree, and for the sides, roots were coiled around a bundled core of finely split cedar-root fibres.

History Of Use

The maker of this cedar-root storage basket, whose name was not recorded with it, likely received her teachings from her mother and grandmothers, beginning in childhood as she watched her elders work. She in turn would have carried the responsibility of passing the inherited knowledge and skills to her own daughters and granddaughters. This would have included gathering the necessary roots and plant materials on the land, preparing and dying them, constructing the baskets and applying significant patterns with both artistry and mathematical precision, and knowing how to make certain basket types to serve specific functions or be suited for sale or trade.

Iconographic Meaning

This basket is a functional expression of ecological, genealogical, cultural, and technical knowledge, and of the maker's personal creativity [Karen Duffek, 2019].