page_title: Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas
section_title: Basketry
hierarchical_section_title: Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas / Modern and contemporary / Basketry
caption_attribution_description: English: Traditional Yaghan basket, woven by Abuela Cristina Calderón
context_page_description: Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.
  Indigenous American visual arts include portable arts, such as painting, basketry, textiles, or photography, as well as monumental works, such as architecture, land art, public sculpture, or murals. Some Indigenous artforms coincide with Western art forms; however, some, such as porcupine quillwork or birchbark biting are unique to the Americas.
  Indigenous art of the Americas has been collected by Europeans since sustained contact in 1492 and joined collections in cabinet of curiosities and early museums. More conservative Western art museums have classified Indigenous art of the Americas within arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with precontact artwork classified as pre-Columbian art, a term that sometimes refers to only precontact art by Indigenous peoples of Latin America.
context_section_description: Basket weaving is one of the ancient and most-widespread art forms in the Americas. From coiled sea lyme grass baskets in Nunavut to bark baskets in Tierra del Fuego, Native artists weave baskets from a wide range of materials. Typically baskets are made of vegetable fibers, but Tohono O'odham are known for their horsehair baskets and Inupiaq artists weave baskets from baleen, filtering plates of certain whales. Grand Traverse Band Kelly Church, Wasco-Wishram Pat Gold, and Eastern Band Cherokee Joel Queen all weave baskets from copper sheets or wire, and Mi'kmaq-Onondaga conceptual artist Gail Tremblay weaves baskets in the traditional fancywork patterns of her tribes from exposed film. Basketry can take many forms. Haida artist Lisa Telford uses cedar bark to weave both traditional functional baskets and impractical but beautiful cedar evening gowns and high-heeled shoes.
  A range of native grasses provides material for Arctic baskets, as does baleen, which is a 20th-century development. Baleen baskets are typically embellished with walrus ivory carvings. Cedar bark is often used in northwest coastal baskets. Throughout the Great Lakes and northeast, black ash and sweetgrass are woven into fancy work, featuring "porcupine" points, or decorated as strawberries. Bark baskets are traditional for gathering berries. Rivercane is the preferred material in the Southeast, and Chitimachas are regarded as the finest rivercane weavers. In Oklahoma, rivercane is prized but rare so baskets are typically made of honeysuckle or buckbrush runners. Coiled baskets are popular in the southwest and the Hopi and Apache in particular are known for pictorial coiled basketry plaques. The Tohono O'odham are well known for their basket-weaving prowess, and evidenced by the success of Annie Antone and Terrol Dew Johnson.
  California and Great Basin tribes are considered some of the finest basket weavers in the world. Juncus is a common material in southern California, while sedge, willow, redbud, and devil's claw are also used. Pomo basket weavers are known to weave 60–100 stitches per inch and their rounded, coiled baskets adorned with quail's topknots, feathers, abalone, and clamshell discs are known as "treasure baskets". Three of the most celebrated Californian basket weavers were Elsie Allen (Pomo), Laura Somersal (Wappo), and the late Pomo-Patwin medicine woman, Mabel McKay, known for her biography, Weaving the Dream. Louisa Keyser was a highly influential Washoe basket weaver.
  A complex technique called "doubleweave," which involves continuously weaving both an inside and outside surface is shared by the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chitimacha, Tarahumara, and Venezuelan tribes. Mike Dart, Cherokee Nation, is a contemporary practitioner of this technique. The Tarahumara, or Raramuri, of Copper Canyon, Mexico typically weave with pine needles and sotol. In Panama, Embera-Wounaan peoples are renowned for their pictoral chunga palm baskets, known as hösig di, colored in vivid full-spectrum of natural dyes.
  Yanomamo basket weavers of the Venezuelan Amazon paint their woven tray and burden baskets with geometric designs in charcoal and onto, a red berry. While in most tribes the basket weavers are often women, among the Waura tribe in Brazil, men weave baskets. They weave a wide range of styles, but the largest are called mayaku, which can be two feet wide and feature tight weaves with an impressive array of designs.
  Today basket weaving often leads to environmental activism. Indiscriminate pesticide spraying endangers basket weavers' health. The black ash tree, used by basket weavers from Michigan to Maine, is threatened by the emerald ash borer. Basket weaver Kelly Church has organized two conferences about the threat and teaches children how to harvest black ash seeds. Many native plants that basket weavers use are endangered. Rivercane only grows in 2% of its original territory. Cherokee basket weaver and ethnobotanist, Shawna Cain is working with her tribe to form the Cherokee Nation Native Plant Society. Tohono O'odham basket weaver Terrol Dew Johnso
caption: Traditional Yahgan basket, woven by Abuela Cristina Calderón, Chile, photo by Jim Cadwell
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