Indigenous basket weaver honors ancestral teachers in McMinnville exhibit

“Hands of the Ancestors” is an exhibit currently taking place at Linfield University’s Miller Fine Arts Center in McMinnville. It showcases the work of Stephanie Craig, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and a seventh-generation basket weaver and artist. Oregon ArtsWatch recently profiled Craig and her exhibit, which is on display until May 2.

Craig spends nine months of the year locating and harvesting traditional materials such as hazel, rushes, bigleaf maple and western red cedar from across the state. She uses them to shape baskets and other woven items with the aid of tools like an antler awl and kupin, a traditional digging stick. But “Hands of the Ancestors” offers visitors more than just a window into Craig’s skills and artistry. It opens up a bridge linking the past to the present and future with an array of family photos and texts honoring the elders who taught Craig the Kalapuya tradition of basket weaving and the new generations Craig teaches today, including her 4-year-old daughter.

Craig joins us to talk about the exhibit and the messages of resilience and Native pride embedded in her work.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with an Oregon artist who sees herself as a kind of bridge between the past and the future. Stephanie Craig is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and a seventh-generation basket weaver and artist. Her solo show, which is on display right now at Linfield University’s Miller Fine Arts Center in McMinnville, has her own work and baskets made by her forebears. It also includes an array of family photos and texts that honor the elders who passed down her tribe’s artistic and cultural traditions.

Stephanie Craig joins me now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Stephanie Craig: Hello, thank you for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. The name of the exhibit is “Hands of the Ancestors.” What does that title mean to you?

Craig: Oh, it means a lot. It means the future of our people, the future of my daughter. It’s bringing my elders, my ancestors and our tribal ancestors forward, and letting them know that we are still carrying on their life ways and their traditions that they have dreamt about wanting to continue. Resilience.

Miller: I’m fascinated by the fact that the very first thing that you mentioned was not the past, but the future. As I said that the title’s “Hands of the Ancestors,” but you said what first comes to mind is the future and your daughter. Why is that?

Craig: So traditionally and culturally, we’re always thinking of the future, the future of our grandchildren, of our children, our great grandchildren. We’re always looking seven generations ahead and wanting to make sure that either our first foods or traditional foods, or our weaving or carving materials, are going to be taken care of so that they will return for the next generations. I like to think of the future. I’ve always thought that way. Up until I had a daughter, my goal was to make sure that I could have one student that held on interest into weaving and continued – then I did my job as a teacher, as a life ways practitioner. And now my daughter, so my daughter is my number one priority right now to continue.

Miller: I want to hear more about her in just a second, but I do want to go a little bit into the past. What are some of your earliest memories involving weaving, either yourself or seeing other people doing it?

Craig: Oh, wow. My very first earliest memory of anything – I spent a lot of time with my chich and her family, my mother’s mother’s family, out in Grand Ronde on the reservation. There was baskets that my great great great grandma made, my great great grandma made, that were being used every day. My elders, I’d sit and listen, and they’d start talking Chinook, our tribal language, and telling stories of gathering and using baskets. It was amazing.

I grew up on a farm, so being a farmer’s daughter I was always playing the stuff outside. And it just kind of came natural.

Miller: When did you start learning how to weave yourself?

Craig: I would say my first official class or workshop that I took, I don’t even know if I was a teenager yet. Maybe middle school. I did Girl Scouts and stuff, 4-H, so I was always around doing crafty things. But one of my first Native teachers … I wasn’t driving, I don’t think I was in middle school yet.

Miller: Before the weaving now, my understanding is that a hugely important part of the process is collecting materials. What goes through your mind when you’re out somewhere in Oregon, collecting various kinds of materials that will eventually become a basket?

Craig: Oh, I get excited. I’m like a little kid in a candy store. I think of what plant … Say I’m out gathering western redcedar, I’m thinking is it gonna be clothing? Will it be bark for skirts or capes? Will it turn into a basket? Will it be used for making bark baskets? Plants, I think about them and just wonder what they’ll turn out to be.

I’ve learned to not put really super high expectations with, “I’m gathering this today and it’s gonna be made into this,” because many times, any weaver knows, you’re making something and it doesn’t always turn out to be what you want it to be.

Miller: Because the material itself physically wants to be something?

Craig: I think so, yeah. But also with the weaver, the connection that you have. If you have patience while you’re weaving, or if you’re stressed, or if you’re anxious, if you’re calm and restful, or if you’re sad, in pain and hurting. All those emotions reflect in the weaver’s weaving, so that also plays a part in the final outcome of the shape of the basket.

Miller: Do you feel like you can read that? If you knew nothing about who made a basket or what tradition they came from, I’m curious how you read a basket for the first time?

Craig: Oh, it’s a crazy, amazing … I don’t know where to start cause I see so many things.

First off, I see the shape. Certain shapes have different uses and different tribes have different shapes. And then the different techniques, if it’s coiled or plaited or twined. And then the materials it’s used, different materials only grow in certain plant regions or ecoregions within the state. So if it’s an old basket, depending on a couple factors – the patina, the materials, the techniques, the styles, the age of the basket – will tell me. I can get pretty close to the village, sometimes the weaver, and dating it. And I can tell you if it was a man or a woman, if they’re right-handed or left-handed, their social status, if they were more high social status where they could … if they had the means to trade and travel for finer material that was harder to get or that wasn’t in their region, versus someone that didn’t have those means.

Miller: I’m curious what it’s like for you to see one of your baskets in a museum setting, on a pedestal as something to be looked at and maybe even have a glass box around, as opposed to something being used in daily life?

Craig: It’s something that has taken me a few years to come to terms with. Because I use all my stuff. And I grew up with my ancestors and my family – our stuff is meant to be used. It wasn’t meant to sit on a shelf and or be on display. I’m a very humble person, so it’s still kind of crazy to me that it’s my work that’s out there. I just wanted to learn the culture the best I could, and to share it and pass it on. I’m so honored to have my stuff up there.

It’s super surreal. My kids now – I have a 4-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son – they’ll see something online or me in a newspaper and [say] “that’s my mom!” It’s crazy. It’s surreal.

Miller: Do you ever think that the baskets want to be carrying stuff, they want to be used, even if that means that they’re going to be damaged in some way, as opposed to being put away simply as an object of aesthetic fascination or love?

Craig: Yeah. My basket cap that I wore in my wedding was made in the late 1880s, 1890s. I don’t know the weaver. I just know that it comes from one of my villages down in Southern Oregon, Takelma Rogue River, where my weaving family was from. And the connection that I have with that, I wear it for ceremonies and I’ve been wearing it for eight years. However, the last couple of months, because it’s old, and I’ve been wearing it and whatnot, there’s been a lot of damage starting. So I’m having to kind of draw that line of, I want my daughter to have this. And I need to, let’s say, retire it, so that way it can be passed down and preserved.

I will say there are certain items that I have made that I do not touch very much. And there’s items that’ve been passed down to my family that the kids know that they’re not allowed to touch and we don’t take them out to show people, because some of them are 130 years old. It’s different having to walk in two worlds, being museum trained and knowing protocols and best practices, but being Indigenous and growing up with the land, and understanding the land and the importance of using and continuing these things.

Miller: How much have you taught your 4-year-old daughter and your 6-year-old son the actual craft and art, the practice of basket weaving?

Craig: Our son William was born in December, so he was about 5 months old when he first started gathering materials with us ...

Miller: Wait, as a 5-month-old, he was with you, but was he actively gathering? I guess you mean in the way that babies grasp things?

Craig: Yeah, him in a carrier at the base of the cedar tree as we pulled the cedar. So if he was right up in the middle of it, we put cedar on him, and he either touched it or didn’t touch it. But he’s built a relationship with it. He knows how to do it, he knows the tools, he knows how to test the tree.

And our daughter who’s 4, Josie … I was, a couple weeks ago, teaching over at Crow’s Shadow in Pendleton, Nixyáawi country. Our niece was so happy sitting next to Josie and I. We looked over and Josie, my daughter, had already started stripping and thinning down plant material that I’ve never shown her how to do. And then [my niece] got her plant material stacked up and then Josie just started twining it. And I looked at my niece and I looked at my daughter again, and I gently grabbed the little basket start from her, and I tucked it away, and I’m gonna frame it. [Laughs]

I cried. I was so excited, because I didn’t teach her how to thin the material down at all. I didn’t even realize that she had watched me that day. She grabbed a needle, she took the material which is already split down at a quarter of an inch, and split it down to half of that.

Miller: Could you do that when you were a 4-year-old?

Craig: No, no, no, no, no. [Laughs] I would probably bend it up, wad it and throw it away, or make a bird’s nest with it. I was just so surprised. It makes me feel amazing. It makes me feel good … and honored, just so honored.

Miller: Stephanie Craig, thanks so much for spending some of your time with us today. I really appreciate it.

Craig: Thank you for having me.

Miller: That is Stephanie Craig, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, a seventh-generation basket weaver and artist. Her solo show, which is called “Hands of the Ancestors” is on display right now at Linfield University’s Miller Fine Arts Center in McMinnville.

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