Willow and the Basketmakers

The story of a broken connection with the natural world which caused a cultural loss, and how it started mending.

Mar 13, 2022

Lake Tahoe, Photo by Samatha Sheppard on Unsplash

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This time, I’m sharing a story told me by Susan Evans Hagen, who lived and worked in the Lake Tahoe area, which sits on the California/Nevada state line. Her friendship with two Native American women and her role as a museum director gave her a unique perspective on the loss of cultural traditions.

Special thanks go to Susan Evans Hagen, former Director of the Lake Tahoe Museum (of the Lake Tahoe Historical Society) in the mid ‘80s and JoAnn Adams Conner, former President of that museum, for their contributions to this article.

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, the indigenous women of the Lake Tahoe region had a close relationship with willows. Women were the basket weavers, collecting the willow branches when they were dormant, then preparing and weaving them into essential baskets to harvest, carry, cook, and store food and water.

They were part of a Native American group known as the Washoe, a peaceful hunter/gatherer tribe who called themselves Wa She Shu, “The people from here.” Their tribe lived up in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe in warmer months, then traveled down to the Great Basin region of Carson Valley, Nevada before winter snows covered the mountains.

This is the true story of how the Washoe women lost—and then refound—a vital connection to their heritage and history.

It all began with the willow gathering. Washoe women would traditionally sing to the willows (Salix spp.) as they harvested and tended them, pulling off dead wood and collecting green branches and twigs. The labor-intensive craft of basketmaking was passed from mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter.

Washoe baskets were primarily functional and so well crafted they could even hold water. The weavers made coils of willow strands in a laborious process where the branches were stripped apart before being wrapped and woven. Sometimes redbud or bracken fern was used for dye and darker parts of the design.

The Washoe baskets had many shapes, sizes and uses: cooking and storage bowls, water bowls, winnowing trays, cradleboards to carry babies, cones, ceremonial, and burden baskets for carrying loads. The baskets took months to a year to construct, so were cherished items.

Below, Washoe elder Joanne Martinez explains how her ancestors used the baskets. (58 seconds long)

A world torn asunder in the 1800s

The Washoe tribe had lived in balance with their land for hundreds of generations, but their lives began to change quickly by 1860.

The Nevada Silver Rush had started and prospectors flooded into the region to mine for silver. They were followed by settlers and ranchers who took over the Washoe lands, cut down thousands of trees to build boom towns and silver mines, and cut the people off from the regions where they gathered native foods and willows for basketmaking.

By 1900, barbed-wire fences closed off more land, many natives were killed, and hunger beset the tribe. The Washoe women who visited the places where their people had gathered food and basket materials for 4,000 years or more were chased away by the new land “owners.”

The willow shrubs, which live near streams and lakes where their roots can drink deeply, were trampled down by cattle herds seeking water and teams of horses drawing heavy wagons.

Since willow baskets provided the means to collect, store and prepare foods, the tribe’s loss of willows compounded their hunger and forced changes upon them.

Almost a century later

In the mid 1980s, Susan Evans Hagen became the Director of the Lake Tahoe Museum (of the Lake Tahoe Historical Society). As she reviewed the collection of historical artifacts, she was drawn to the beautiful baskets and asked, “Where are the Washoe people who designed these?”

She was referred to a couple of older women from the Washoe tribe, two sisters who still had a memory of hearing their mothers and grandmothers talk about basketmaking. Theresa Smokey Jackson and her younger sister Joanne Martinez (in the YouTube above) became friends with the museum director Susan Evans Hagen.

The native women told her of lands long locked away from willow gathering by ranchers with large spreads of private property. They also spoke of willows sprayed with toxic chemicals or growing near creeks that had become polluted by mining spill and tailings. Leviathan Creek, running through Washoe lands, was degraded by a sulfur mine run from the 1860s through the 1960s, and turned into a poisonous EPA toxic Superfund site.

Basketmaking traditionally involved three points of contact to weave three strands—two hands and the mouth. Earlier generations of basketmakers had become ill after handling willow branches from polluted sites, so gathering had stopped, and basket creation had ended.

The craft and knowledge slowly slipped from the culture. The women expressed their sorrow at this loss of their heritage, artistic expression, and connection to their grandmothers and their land.

Susan Evans Hagen decided to contact ranchers to see if any would provide safe willow-gathering for these native women. The ranchers were initially skeptical, except for one woman rancher named Shirley Celio Taylor, who said she had never sprayed willows and had a section of land where the Washoe women were welcome to come harvest at any time. They planned a trip.

An emotional homecoming

During the first visit for willow gathering, Susan Evans Hagen, her two young sons, and three native women showed up, along with the rancher. The native women, Theresa Smokey Jackson and her younger sister Joanne Martinez, along with their niece, were invited to harvest any plants or willow they wanted.

When they first arrived, the three native women were hesitant. Tentatively, they wandered slowly around a few acres, occasionally cocking their heads as if listening carefully. Their paths seemed random, sometimes joining or crisscrossing, sometimes separating out to a solitary walk.

The sound of the breeze mingled with the soft murmurs of the women as they looked at plants. “Oh, I remember you from my grandmother’s days,” one of them chuckled, reaching out to a bush. They examined various plants, touching them and talking to them softly.

They were very affected to be back on ancestral land. Their eyes gleamed with unshed tears and their voices trembled with emotion. They widened their exploring after about 20 minutes, weaving paths through these “off-limit” tribal lands for the first time in decades as they prepared to gather willow.

After a while, they started humming as they walked. The humming gradually changed to parts of a gathering song they weren’t aware that they knew. They looked at each other in surprise when the song arose. The native women eventually joined hands and sang together as they walked. They invited the museum director to walk with them and took her hand.

It was as if they felt a homecoming, a call back from the land that their Washoe ancestors had walked on for thousands of years. The women were all moved to tears by the deep connection they were feeling.

Later, Susan Evans Hagen asked the women how they knew the song they were singing. “We don’t know,” one admitted. “It just came to us from our grandmothers…the plants…the land.” The remembering was pulled up, perhaps by being on the land with elders when they were children 60 years earlier, perhaps by the land calling its people back.

The roots of Washoe basketmaking for these women slowly began to regrow. They formed alliances with an additional rancher who had willows, relearned basketmaking techniques from the memory banks of a few elders and other tribes. It was a long, slow process to regain a lost artisan skill. Today, there are a few Washoe basket makers weaving again, thanks to their own ingenuity and efforts like this to support them.

Current master Washoe willow-weaver Sue Coleman learned from her mother, Theresa Smokey Jackson, one of the native women present at the emotional homecoming.

Sue Coleman said most women don’t follow the tradition because it’s a complex and labor-intensive process, from material gathering and preparation to actual planning and months of weaving. It’s rough on the hands because they’re “always in the water.” But she admitted she continued the practice to help keep the knowledge alive for her tribal heritage and to honor her mother. “It’s a very spiritual thing for me,” she added in an interview published about a decade ago.

The bonds forged over many generations

People who have lived in one place for hundreds of generations, as Native American tribes have done, are intimately intertwined with the plants of their region. They develop a deep awareness of the cycles of the plant world and know when things are out of sync, or if a plant can address some human need, such as medicine, food, or other useful purpose.

Willows are just one example of this close human-plant bond. When the Washoe women were barred from the lake and streamsides where willows lived, when tribal members were killed off, the willows also suffered, as no one tended them or cared about preserving them for future generations. The bond of the relationship became broken, but the mending was now beginning.

As we move further into the 21st century, it’s essential to recognize where broken relationships exist between the plant and the human world. Whether it’s forest destruction, using toxic chemicals, or separating native people from their ancestral lands and plant communities, broken relationships harm us all.

Mending those relationships is much like weaving baskets—it may be time-consuming, but it puts the Earth’s order back into balance. A Washoe prayer reminds us that we live, not in a world of separation, but in a world of connection and kinship.

We are one.
You, me, him, her, the fishes, the birds, the rocks, the Earth, the air,
We are all in this universe one.
From a Washoe prayer, as reported by Sierra Sun

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Did you know? One of most famous basket makers in the world was a Washoe woman named Dat-So-La-Lee, born around 1829. She helped design a new style of basket that turned in at the top, called degikup. Her artistic and precisely-designed willow baskets are now preserved in museums all over the world, including the Smithsonian. Examples of later style baskets.

California indigenous basket-weavers created many artistic styles with a variety of plant materials. Here is a video.

Mother E