Pacific Northwest Coast Native American Weaving

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Ursula McGee
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1 Pacific Northwest Coast Native American Weaving

2 Oldest PNWC artworks found: 5,000 year-old basketry fragments in SE Alaska Same weaving techniques as 19 th century

5 Weaving Terms Vertical strands warp (framework, sometimes stiffer) Horizontal strands - weft (generally a little more flexible, sometimes wrap around the warp)

6 Weaving Techniques Plaiting Coiling

7 plaiting

8 Plaiting (checker weave) Warps and wefts are equally pliable and wide Often checkerboard-like result Weft crosses over and under one warp at a time Can be diagonal (bias) weave

9 With diagonal weave

10 Many twined baskets have plaited bottoms. The bottom plaiting is split into smaller strands and become the warp of the twined basket

12 Kwakwaka wakw Checker plaited, open weave

13 Basic plaiting Plaiting twilling pattern Diagonal plaiting

14 Twilling Plaiting, but weft crosses more than one warp at a time, for decorative effect Over two under two Over one under three

15 Harvesting inner cedar bark for weaving

24 Wearing cedar bark clothes

25 Southern Kwakwaka wakw woman spinning cedar bark while rocking a baby. (Franz Boas & George Hunt in background.)

26 Other weaving materials

27 Split spruce root used as warp (and sometimes weft too) especially in Tlingit and Haida basketry. Roots could be up to 20 feet long & were dug carefully so the tree was not damaged; only one root would be taken from a tree. Cured. Soaked until pliable, then split carefully into thin strips before weaving.

28 I used to go with my grandmother once in awhile, gathering cedar roots or cedar limbs for basketry. The best place to look for them is in shady places, and I remember if there was an old rotten log, she used to go there and get all the roots from that tree. It would be all along, following the log. Sometimes those roots would be eighteen or twenty feet long. She used to take them and cut the up into about four-foot lengths and pack them down the beach. -Martha George, Suquamish

29 Other weaving materials Grasses: swampgrass, reed canary grass, bear grass Horsetail rhizomes Nettles (spun for nets and twine) Cattails and tules Dog wool (Coast Salish) and mountain goat wool

30 Coast Salish woman spinning dog wool

32 Skokomish basket weaver, Edward S. Curtis photo

33 Baskets started from the bottom weft strands. These are all warp strands.

34 Twining Most common type of weaving in NWC 2 or 3 weft strands intertwined around warp, over each other weft alternates over front and back of warp variations occur based on number of weft strands crossing different numbers of warp strands, and the angles of the warps

35 One weft twines around one warp

36 2-strand twining: 2 wefts wrap around 1 warp, one in front & one in back From Burke museum

39 Tlingit spruce root basket. Twined with dyed overlay and with same-colored embroidery

40 OVERLAY From Burke museum

41 Natural and dyed spruce root. Twined

43 False embroidery colors and pattern are seen only on the outside (true embroidery is done after the basket is woven, and is visible on the inside too.) in colored grasses or maidenhair fern; grasses are wound around the wefts over plain twining Overlay similar process, but stitches slant the same way as the rest of the twining Tlingit. Spruce root warp and main weft.

45 From Burke museum

For white: grasses boiled then dried in sun for black: soaked in black mud from sulphur springs or in horsetail roots, or charcoal or steeping hemlock or cherry bark with iron, sometimes for a year

46 For white: grasses boiled then dried in sun for black: soaked in black mud from sulphur springs or in horsetail roots, or charcoal or steeping hemlock or cherry bark with iron, sometimes for a year Brown: willow bark Purplish black (blue gray) from huckleberries or blueberries Bluegreen: boiling copper and hemlock bark in urine Red from steeping in urine and alder, hemlock bark, cranberries, nettle, red ocher or sea-urchin juice. Yellow: steeped in lichen (wolf moss) or Oregon grape root

48 Tlingit

49 False Embroidery Yellow: steeping in lichen (wolf moss) Tlingit

51 Haida weaving hat

54 Isabella Edenshaw hat 1892

57 Potlatch hat with woven rings (skils)

58 Designs created by covering two warp pieces with a weft. Haida berry basket

59 All spruce root 2003

60 Woven by Haida expert. Probably painted by a child. Would take about 90 hours to weave, not including preparing materials

62 Tlingit Rattle top basket

64 Fern fronds pattern

65 Only basketry tools: Knives for splitting roots Awls to push weft strands tightly together or make holes between strands

66 Tsimshian Tsimshian basket

67 Tsimshian. red cedar bark and canary grass

69 Nuu-chah-nulth (& Makah) baskets (wrapped twining)

70 Wrapped twining Two warps, one vertical and one horizontal, form a latticework Weft wraps (often diagonally) around the intersections of the vertical and horizontal warps

72 Thunderbird Lightning snake Whale hunters

79 Whaler s Hat ( Macquinna Hat ) Originally overlay twining

80 Nuu-chah-nulth Chief Maquinna of Nootka Sound, print by Tomas de Suria

83 Open twining

85 Nuu-chah-nulth clam basket

86 Clam Basket Kwakwaka'wakw

87 Coast Salish baskets

88 1890s Quinault. Twined with overlay

89 Twana baskets Skokomish, Hood Canal area Using cedar bark or beargrass warps and cattail wefts Often have Wolves, little dogs and/or little birds Scalloped rim Humans in vertical rows

90 Wolves with tails down, Dogs with tails up

93 Wasco-Wishram style Southern (Coast) Salish, from Columbia River region, including inland Often depict people in X-ray style and/or frontally and with diamond-shaped heads with raised shoulders Often dogs with upturned tails, centrally located; belief in dogs as intermediaries between humans and animals Plain and wrapped twining with overlay

95 Root-gathering bag Collected by Lewis and Clark

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101 birds Identified as condors

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105 Coiling Commonly used in Coast Salish regions Coils of plant fibers are sewn together Basket bottom made first, then spirals upwards to form sides

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107 The awl pierces a hole in each coil. Then the sewing element is threaded through the hole, sewing coils together.

108 Imbrication -Decorative grass or root is folded under each sewing stitch -Imbrication folds resemble corn kernels

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110 Coiled and imbricated (Cowlitz)

111 Berry basket (Cowlitz, Yakama)

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113 Klickitat, cedar bark burden basket

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115 Eulachon net. Usually nettle fiber. here mountain goat wool.

116 Blanket Weaving Upright looms with two upright poles (stuck in the ground) connected by one or two horizontal poles In the North, all hand-twining with only one horizontal pole In the south, twilled or twined around warp on loom with two horizontal poles

117 Tlingit all twining one horizontal pole

118 Coast Salish

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122 Coast Salish spindle whorls

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129 Detail of Susan Point s 16-foot spindle whorl

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137 Chilkat blankets

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143 Weaving a chilkat blanket with the aid of a patternboard

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Pacific Northwest Coast Native American Architecture: House Types, Uses, and Symbolism

Pacific Northwest Coast Native American Architecture: House Types, Uses, and Symbolism Nuu-chah-nulth Village of Yuquot (Friendly Cove) 1778 drawing by John Webber, with Capt. Cook Nuu-chah-nulth house