“Culture means learning from each other and sharing,” says master basketmaker Leah Brady, from the Elko Band of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone. She has just returned from showing work in the Elko [Nevada] County Fair, and a living room table is covered with baskets made of willow, cedar, reeds and other natural materials that she exhibited there. A doll Brady uses for classes and demonstrations holds miniature versions of these items.
The room’s walls are hung and its shelves stacked with more works—by Brady, by several generations of her family and by additional artisans from Western Shoshone, Northern Paiute, Goshute and other tribes. Each item’s material and use tells the story of the millennia-old relationship between indigenous people and rugged landscape of the Great Basin, so-called because precipitation and snowmelt stay there, as though in a giant vessel, rather than running into the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. The region encompasses Nevada and portions of surrounding states.
Brady points out a conical basket and a winnowing tray, both of which she made from willow. “We used baskets like this one to collect pine cones, whose nuts were a staple of our diet, and carry them back to camp. There, we placed the cones on a winnowing tray and added hot embers.” Heating the cones made them brittle, so they could be crushed and the nut meats removed.
Next, Brady’s people placed just the nuts on the tray and added more glowing embers. “This parched the nuts, so we could store them or grind them into flour that we added to soups and gravies.” The cook had to work fast—pushing embers and nuts around the tray with a stick—or end up with burnt nuts or a hole in the tray, Brady says.
Depending on their use, some containers, like the pine-nut basket, are loosely woven. Others are so tightly crafted they hold water or the tiny seeds of desert plants, another dietary staple. Similar techniques were used in building houses, often a dome-shaped frame, similar to a sweat lodge, covered with woven mats of tule.
The ongoing relationship to the land and its bounty is so intimate, basketmakers of the region experience continual warning signs of climate change. Gathering and preparing willow has changed, Brady says. “We used to collect branches in the fall and leave them outside all winter. They would dry in the cold air, and we could strip them into thread as needed.” Today’s warmer, moister winters mean willow branches do not air-dry thoroughly and must be kept in a freezer before being processed.
“Here’s another climate-change issue,” Brady says, holding up a slender willow branch with tiny white spots. The spots are a new phenomenon, associated with bugs boring into stressed willow trees. These days, bugs are also found in pine cones in places where the trees did not get enough water, the cones dried out, and bugs found a foothold, Brady says.
She bites down on the end of a willow frond to steady it and pulls off three narrow strips of willow bark. This creates the precursor for willow thread. “By holding one of the stem strips with my teeth, I can use both hands to pull with an even tension and ensure that the strips are the same thickness,” she says. Next, she will scrape and coil the strips. When she is ready to weave, she will soak them in water for about 30 minutes and peel off any unneeded residual fiber. This process produces paper-thin, approximately quarter-inch-wide willow-bark thread.
The practice of holding willow in the mouth means basketmakers may experience yet another new problem. “If my mouth starts tingling, I know the willow has been sprayed with a pesticide or other chemical,” Brady says. “Some basketmakers report getting blisters in their mouths. We have to travel a long way to find willow in areas that are remote enough to have escaped spraying.”
In addition to making exquisitely crafted baskets that are sought after by high-end collectors (prices range into the thousands of dollars), Brady continually imparts her people’s ancient cultural practices to others. She has given innumerable demonstrations on traditional Western Shoshone arts for reservation cultural and senior centers, school kids and the general public. She teaches basketry to tribal members through the Great Basin Native Basketweavers Association, which she co-founded.
Brady serves on the board of the Heritage Alliance of the California Trail Interpretive Center, in Elko, Nevada, and helped develop a public-school curriculum called Celebrating Nevada Indians. She is retired from a career as a teacher in the public schools, then a labor organizer for the Nevada Education Association. Her illustrious family includes her paternal great-grandmother, the famed Western Shoshone basketmaker Mary Hall; her mother, Elizabeth Brady, who was widely admired for her basketry; and her sister, Lois Whitney, yet another family member with a prominent career in basketmaking.
You can find Brady’s work, and that of other prominent artisans, at crafts markets in the region; check whiteknifeshoshone.com for information. Upcoming is the Humboldt River Rendezvous and Native Market, October 21 and 22, 2017, at the California Trail Interpretive Center; go to www.californiatrailcenter.org for more.
You will have to go to Nevada to find Brady’s pieces, though. She does not have an online catalog, for fear she would end up creating dozens or even hundreds of the items, taking the joy out of the process. “I don’t want my art to become a chore,” she says. She pages through a notebook of photographs of her work. It has changed over the years to reflect her experimentation with new materials and techniques, making each piece one of a kind.
The items reminds her of a story from her people’s history—the moment when her greatgrandparents saw white people for the first time or origin stories recounting her people’s journey in a basket from what is now California to the Great Basin. Says Brady, “I do my art because I enjoy it and want to share it with others.”