The Chemawa American, February 01, 1914, Page 5, Image 5

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THE CHEMAWA AMERICAN
Basketry is the mother of all loom and bead work and the decorative
genius of the red woman may be seen in many samples of this day,
found around tepees and wigwams of the villages.
The first shuttles were women’s fingers, and this is proved by the
fine specimens found in ancient ruins, and there are many niceties of
technique to which the machine device cannot yet aspire.
In making her baskets the Indian woman used a steel or bone gauge
to regulate the width of her weft, and used steel or bone awls for sew­
ing. In manufacturing her baskets the Indian woman ransacked the
three kingdoms of nature —mineral, animal and vegetable. Some na­
tions used clay inside the baskets as a lining to render them fireproof;
but the Columbia river Indian women did not do this as a rule, leaving
them with only the cedar bast lining exposed.
Many Indians of today use commercial dyes with which to color de­
signs on their baskets, but the women of the older race did not resort
to this means of beautifying their handiwork. These latter, as do
some of the present day basket weavers, went to the woods for their
colors, resorting to the Oregon grape and yellow tree lichten. Maiden
hair stems make a beautiful shade of brown in the baskets. Twisted
tule roots dyed in mud results in a black material which form one of
the designs of the baskets. Cattails make the white designs often,
while the squaw grass found in the high altitudes is used extensively.
This latter plant forms the zigzag designs often seen on modern baskets.
The Indian women of today knows just the right time at which the
various basket material is ripe for gathering. She may be seen during
the entire season searching for tides, for cedar bast, for fern roots and
stems of the various plants she uses for dyeing the beautiful, soft colors
she finds to her liking. These plants must be gathered at just the right
time and prepared by peeling, splitting, yarning or twisting, braiding,
soaking, gauging, and coloring.
Hazel stalks, the young shoots that spring up from the ground that
has been burned over, are often used in basketry.
The woman basketmaker is an artist, the creator of forms; the patterns
are in her soul in memory and imagination, mountain, waterfalls, lakes
and forest tales or myths. The tools with which she works are the crud­
est, only a rough knife, a pointed bone, but the combination in which
they are used evolves a thing of beauty and a joy forever to the collec­
tor of basketry.
Imbrication work of the Klickitats, the Yakimas and Spokanes in their
coil baskets is beautiful, an art to be preserved if possible. The found­
ation of the basket is in ceder or spruce root, while the sewing is done
with the outer and touhger part of the root; the stitches pass over the up­
per bundle of splints and are locked with those underneath. On the out-