[gentle music]
- I'm the great-great-granddaughter
of Mary Francisco, one of the best Pomo basket weavers
that ever lived.
I never met my great-grandma,
and I didn't have any living weaving teachers.
When I was nine years old,
I went on a school camping trip.
We had a presenter come talk about baskets
and they showed some of theirs,
and they talked about their type.
And that night, we camped under a willow tree
and I had a dream.
I was walking to a house that's not there anymore
and my great-grandma was there,
and she told me to sit on her lap.
And she put her hands like this and I put my hands like that,
and she said, "You know, you can weave.
You have my hands; you can weave."
I woke up the next day, and that willow tree that
we were camping under looked very different.
I was able to look at this willow tree
with basket maker's eyes, so I harvested.
I wove a little basket that day,
and I've been harvesting and weaving ever since then.
We are in northern California,
a couple hours north of San Francisco Bay area.
This is my home reservation.
This is my home, Rancheria.
And this is really what we consider the heartland
of Pomo country.
- Pomo peoples were not ever one nation, one tribe.
That is a convenient term that anthropologists gave
to what were really many independent peoples.
We all live in what's today Sonoma County,
Mendocino County, Lake County, California.
Pomo people made baskets using more types
of weaving techniques than anybody else ever has,
and that was possible in part because it's an area that is
one of the most botanically diverse in the world.
Baskets were the essential tool of life.
From birth to death, from hunting and fishing
to gathering and cooking,
Pomo baskets are the best in the world,
and that's throughout time and throughout space.
And the basis of that judgment
is really the sheer technical virtuosity.
- I'm taking this redbud.
This is one of the main materials that we use
for weaving in Pomo baskets, and I harvest it.
This is from this year, from October.
You split that big branch into half
and then you have to thin it even finer,
and you have to get rid of all these little knots.
I'm basically just splitting it over and over again
until I get it the thickness that I want
and the width that I want.
With redbud, it's very important to have the bark on one side
and the beautiful white, cream color on the inside.
I'm gonna do a whole bunch of them and coil them,
and then I actually have to dry for six months to a year
before you can weave with them.
So what I'm doing this year, I will weave with next year.
So you have to plan ahead.
- Baskets are the plants.
You have to have good materials
before you can make really fine baskets.
The thing about plants is they're not exact, you know.
They're pretty shaggy, and to do really fine basketry,
it has to be precisely the same.
Same diameter, same taper, same width.
If you don't have it, it will not work.
You have to get something that's imprecise
and make it perfect, and that is,
it is just something that is so difficult to do.
Really, by the time you sit down and start weaving,
you are almost finished in terms of the amount of time
that you're going to spend and the activities
that you need to produce that piece.
- Corine: I always watch the daffodils.
Once the daffodils come all the way up
and start to die back, then the sedge root is ready.
Almost all of the tan color that you see in Pomo baskets
is made with the sedge root.
To process sedge, you have to have a patch.
We actually transplanted this patch.
Its normal location is along river beds
or in loamy soil along the redwoods.
They just look like tufts of grass,
and I'm gonna use a digging stick,
and I'm gonna dig down into the soil to find the root.
Okay, stick your hand right here.
You feel that? - Yeah.
- That's a root.
And then I'm gonna follow the root
until it comes to the end.
If you get there too soon, it's too wet and muddy
and your roots are too short.
If you wait too long, you're fighting snakes and spiders,
and that's not fun.
A pretty universal Pomo legend is that Spider Woman,
who lives in the sedge root, helped us learn how to weave.
And so out of respect for her,
once she's in the sedge root, we don't go and bother her.
Good job.
- It's fairly sophisticated environmental knowledge
because you can only process material
at a particular point of the year.
You have to understand what are the signs
you're looking for, what is that plant really doing.
You know how to split it? - I don't.
- I will show you.
- My grandma used to say, "You know, you can't go
"to a store and find it,
but you also can't go outside and just find it."
It's this collaboration of you and the plants
working together to provide you, as a basket maker,
the kind of material that you need.
This is why we developed the gardens here
at the Grace Hudson Museum.
- Corine: We transplanted the basketry materials last year,
so this is really the first year of focused training.
No flowers came out. - No, no.
- It's going straight for leaves.
- Yeah.
- Corine: The Grace Hudson is a really good resource
for the whole community in northern California.
- Sherrie: The artist Grace Hudson was born in 1865
nearby to Ukiah, out in the country, as we say here.
Her career is a series of oil portraits
of Pomo Indian people.
She lived during a very difficult time
for Native people in this area.
Native people throughout California.
And really, she sincerely thought that
Pomo people were not gonna survive.
She had seen so many people die from disease,
from starvation, from violence.
People are displaced,
so she was really trying to preserve something
that she thought was going to disappear.
Grace Hudson thankfully was wrong.
Pomo people are still around today.
- Corine: The Grace Hudson's a great resource.
You can go there and ask to touch
and hold the baskets.
The oils from your hands and from your face
are good for your baskets.
When I get to hold old baskets,
I snuggle them because it's so good for them.
They're living things.
- This is the oldest basket in our collection.
We know it's at least 150 years old
because we know that it was given as a gift
to Grace Hudson's family in 1860
when they moved to Potter Valley.
Pomo baskets, besides being the stuff of everyday life,
had a lot of social currency.
They were given as gifts at significant life events
and to cement ties and friendships.
- In northern California, we like to do sitting cradles,
which is a u-shape.
And the baby's butt goes here,
okay, so they sit like it's a, like it's a swing.
This is made out of willow.
This is peeled and unpeeled willow, and this support rod
is in each one of these, is made out of split black oak,
which is extremely strong.
The rim, and it's not a handle.
It's made out of oak.
It's very important spiritually.
Our staple food supply is acorns,
so it's a way of tying our plant family to the basket.
You don't make cradles until the baby's actually born,
so that baby has a ton of influence
on where you harvest, what the season is,
how you put it together.
If that baby's, like,
if you're already feeling something special for that baby,
you put it in the basket.
I put love in every stitch, and every single stick
is a conscious choice for a cradle.
Every single basket on the table today,
you guys could make.
This is all the technique that you know.
You're masters of this weave.
This is a education program focused at children.
Little kids can't weave on their own,
so they have to bring a grown-up.
So at this point, I'm having more grown-ups
and elders weaving, but they still bring the kids.
When you're starting to separate them into individuals,
then you add another spoke.
I like to teach basketry
because it connects us all as humans.
- Are you missing the black one? - I'm not.
- First, I taught Natives from all over the country and Canada.
Three more red ones, yeah.
And then I went to Lebanon and taught basketry,
and I've been to Europe and taught basketry,
and what I realized is that it doesn't matter
what tribe on the planet you are from.
You all still made baskets.
Everyone already has a basket in them,
and I'm just helping them to bring it out.
We had a fire last year.
It ripped through our valley.
We had winds of upwards of 75 miles an hour
and the humidity was nothing.
It was a firestorm.
We lost kids and elders.
It was very impactful.
We lost something like 15% of the homes
that we have in our valley.
When I see a friend who lost their entire house,
they also lost all the oak trees
that I harvest cradle basket rims from,
or when I drive down and the vineyard,
all the redbud that I harvested, they're all gone.
My basket garden totally burnt down and we lost a lot,
but we actually pulled our community together.
We have these classes so that community members can come
and literally weave what they lost.
My intention is to heal the land
and the community, and that's what we're doing here.
This is art.
It's culturally relevant.
It's historically significant.
It's more than that.
This is how we connect to our land.
[gentle music]