In her home in Ketchikan, Holly Churchill-Burns demonstrates the art of weaving a Haida hat from spruce roots. When she was a child, she says that she often had to help her mother, Delores Churchill-Peratrovich, gather roots and cedar bark, and that she made early attempts at basket-weaving. At that time she was a less enthusiastic weaver than her sister, April Churchill-Varnell. Now, however, she has begun to feel that she, too, wants to continue this tradition of her Haida family. She was inspired, in part, by an exhibition of contemporary basket-weaving in Alaska dedicated to her grandmother, Selina Peratrovich, a Haida woman from Masset.
