In the considerable literature on Pacific Northwest Native American cultures and arts, the study of basketry has held only a small place. The present volume makes a particularly significant contribution by providing ten authoritative essays by Native and non-Native specialists who have been engaged with basketry study for decades and participated in important intercultural collaborations to share and develop their knowledge. As the title indicates, the book focuses geographically on western Washington’s Olympic Peninsula (home to eight tribes) and extends over a broad temporal scope (nearly 3000 years, with major attention to the period since 1850). It draws on anthropological fieldwork, oral history, personal experience, archival resources, archaeology, and life science to familiarize readers with the baskets, their fundamental role in the cultures in which they have been made and used, the extensive knowledge that underlies their creation, and a range of factors that have affected, and at times threatened, the continuity of basketry traditions. Much of the information given is historical, but the essays make clear that baskets speak to vital matters today—first and foremost to Native cultural identity and ongoing cultural resilience; and then to environmental issues, such as conservation and sustainable living, to which Native traditional knowledge and practice can be fruitfully brought to bear.
Jacilee Wray, the volume’s editor, is an anthropologist with the National Park Service (NPS) at Olympic National Park on the peninsula. The volume is one exemplary outcome of the NPS ethnography program, based on policies about which Wray and several colleagues have written elsewhere, articulating the agency’s responsibility to local communities that have traditional connections to parklands. Initiated in recent decades in the wake of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and other relevant groundbreaking national legislation, the NPS policies include directives for welcoming Native peoples, among others, to maintain traditional access to sacred places and special resources within park boundaries. Further, they call for consultation and cooperative undertakings with these populations to record their histories with the parklands and to preserve park resources for future generations.[1]
The book opens with a foreword by NPS Director Jonathan B. Jarvis evoking the agency’s new spirit of partnership with Native Americans. In her introduction, Wray orients readers to the peninsula’s tribes and their basketry; and in chapters 1 and 2, she examines in detail the local effects of a pair of closely related broader developments since 1850: 1) the growth of scholarly and popular attention to the basket maker as artist, and 2) the rise of a European-American art market for decorative basket styles. The latter chapter considers especially the role of the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935.
Chapters 3 through 7 focus on specific tribal basketry traditions: respectively, those of the Klallam Nation (which includes three federally recognized tribes), the Twana people (who live in a cluster of communities that includes the Skokomish), and the Quinault, Quileute and Hoh, and Makah peoples. These chapters take various approaches and highlight different timeframes, in keeping with their various authors’ particular fields of expertise, but what stands out in each case is the depth of expertise itself. For example, Jay V. Powell, the author of chapter 6, has conducted linguistic research among the Quileute and Hoh tribes for forty years; Wray says of the chapter, “No other in-depth knowledge of so many terms for basketry exists on the peninsula, or likely anywhere” (8). Likewise, in chapter 3, coauthors Jamie Valadez, Kathy Duncan, and Marie Hebert write from their personal knowledge and experience as Klallam Nation members and basketmakers; their statements are brought together by Karen James, an anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Klallam, in an essay that effectively conveys the richness of Native perspectives on Native art. Other authors previously wrote oral history–based books on particular tribal basket traditions: Joan Megan Jones (chapter 5) wrote in 1977 on Quinault baskets, for the tribe; and Nile Thompson and Caroline Marr (coauthors of chapters 4 and 7) wrote in 1983 on Twana baskets. The inclusion of these scholars’ chapters makes available once more their valuable findings, especially the insights of master basketmakers who have since passed on.
The final three chapters present other aspects of basketry research, and similarly note Native and non-Native collaborations. In chapter 8, Dale Croes reports that, during archaeological excavation of a site on the peninsula, he consulted with local tribal basketmakers to record their comments about basketry and cordage samples; subsequently, the basketmakers replicated the original samples and reconstructed complete basket forms for display in their tribal museum. In chapter 9, ecologists Daniela Shebitz and Caren Crandell report on concerns—and efforts to address them—shared by conservationists and basketmakers about the health of natural habitats where materials used in basketmaking are found: this is jeopardized, as they explain, not only by development associated with white settlement of the region, but also by illegal harvest, utilizing methods that damage plants, for the floral trade. Chapter 10, with contributions by seven tribal basketmakers and two chapter authors, looks at Olympic Peninsula basketry today, and highlights once more Native perspectives and experience.
The chapters are supplemented by more than 120 black-and-white photographs and illustrations, two appendices—one explaining basket construction techniques, the other listing historic (pre-1960s) basket weavers by name, dates, tribe, place of longest residence, and family relations—and a bibliography that includes both major works and little-known archival references.
Though serious, the book is written for a general audience and will appeal to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests, including Native peoples of the area—who will surely treasure it—park visitors, scholars in many fields, and laypeople and educators throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. For those who want to know more about contemporary Native cultures of the peninsula, I would add that the book complements several other fine resources. Among these is, first, Jacilee Wray’s earlier book, Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are (2002), which consists of tribal leaders’ statements edited by Wray at the tribes’ request; second, the heritage driving tour Olympic Peninsula Loop (2007 [1999]), a three-disc CD-and-guidebook package by folklorist Jens Lund presenting traditional music and narratives from local residents, the fourth release in the Washington Heritage Corridor Tour series Lund established; and third, filmmaker Katie Jennings’ marvelous, deeply moving documentary Teachings of the Tree People: The Work of Bruce Miller (2006), featuring the late, beloved Skokomish spiritual leader and 2004 National Heritage Fellow. Any of these can be used with the present volume, in classroom teaching or in one’s own study, to increase appreciation of Native American life on the Olympic Peninsula.
Note
[1] Jacilee Wray, Alexa Roberts, Allison Peña, and Shirley J. Fiske, “Creating Policy for the National Park Service: Addressing Native Americans and Other Traditionally Associated Peoples,” The George Wright Forum 26/3 (2009):43–50.
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[Review length: 1125 words • Review posted on March 27, 2013]