Photo Gallery

Thanks to the twined-weaving technique, this Nootka whale-hunting hat is waterproof. Jessie Webster (born 1909), a Nootka artist in Ahousat, located on Flores Island, wove this fine piece out of cedar bark fiber and dyed grasses. According to her account, this is a Maquinna hat, named after the powerful chief of the Mowachaht Nootka at the time of contact with James Cook. (26 cm; MOA)
MOA = Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

A small, densely woven basket with lid. The material is dyed and undyed sweet grass, interwoven to create a scene with water birds and a whaling canoe hunting a killer whale. The basket was acquired from the Makah in 1880. (Ø 24 cm, VM)
VM = Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich

Around 1900 this little basket was the property of the Thompson River Salish, an Inland Salish group who lived in the area where the Thompson flows into the Fraser River. They carried on an active trade with the Stalo Halkomelem, who lived further down the Fraser River, and so acquired this basket. A Stalo woman wove it out of cedar roots, dyed grasses and bark fibers. (16 cm, NMM)
NMM = National Museum of Man, Ottawa

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.