The Basket Maker - The Backbone of the Native American Culture

The world is full of baskets. There are little baskets, giant baskets, basket's made out of reeds, and plastic laundry baskets. It is nearly impossible to walk into any house without seeing some kind of basket. What we seldom stop to think about is what the baskets in our homes say about us. People who have a house with lots of little baskets are people who like to have an unusual place to keep the small but important things in their life.

Basket weaving is a form of usable art. In today's modern era there is no longer a need to actually spend the time gathering reeds, soaking them in water, and then painstakingly weave them into a basket. In today's world there are machines and factories that will do the same thing. Just because the technology exist to mass produce baskets doesn't mean that basket makers are no longer weaving reeds into works of art.

Basket makers would have been the unsung hero of the typical Native American tribe. While the hunters, warriors, shamans, and chiefs were the tribe members that the entire tribe looked up to, the member that songs were sung to and stories were told about, the tribe would have fallen apart without its basket weavers.

The tribes basket makers would have typically been women and children as well as the men who where either injured or to old to go out on hunts. The basket makers would have sent children, probably very young children, to gather a variety of reeds, grasses and other types of vegetation. Once the basket making materials were gathered the basket makers would then painstakingly work to create a basket. The size of the basket would have been determined by whatever the tribe needed at the time.

The tribe's basket makers would have been easy to identity simply by looking at their hands. The reeds and vegetation used to create the baskets had to be soaked. If the reeds got to dry they would crack and break during the weaving process. The basket maker would have spent a large part of their day with their hands submerged in water. The constant friction of the reeds against the weaver's palms and fingers would have raised calluses on the person's skin, hardening the skin until their hands were just as work roughened as the tribes warriors. The sharp edges of the reeds would have also given the basket weaver's hands a variety of small cuts, similar to paper cuts. The fingers of a good basket weaver would have been very limber and agile.

The baskets the basket weaver made had to be durable, especially if the basket weaver was a part of a plains tribe that was constantly on the move following the buffalo herds to different grazing areas. The baskets this type of tribes used were needed to carry food and valuables from one camp to another. The baskets had to be durable to hold up to the rigorous travel. Mended baskets were still usable but they weren't as good as the ones that hadn't been repaired.

While the lodge tribes weren't as hard on their baskets as the plains tribes, the baskets still had to be top quality. Lodge tribes used the baskets for storage, food, and as water barrels. The baskets had to be water tight and strong enough to discourage pests.

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