Basket-making with a Cherokee Indian Who Knows Her Craft

        In 1972 I lived in a cabin on the Cherokee Indian Reservation near Cherokee, North Carolina, as guests of Emmaline and Russell McCoy, who lived down the mountain, in the valley.  Emmaline was full-blooded Cherokee; Russell was part Cherokee. My partner, Dan, and I were living in the cabin with another couple, Hap and Barbee. Barbee and I were both pregnant when Dan and I joined them in the cabin. On April 20 the four of us in the cabin suddenly became six. 

      There was no electricity there on the mountain, and no telephone. There was a road to town, but we didn't take it very often. Mostly we were living the sort of cræfty life I talked about in my last blog: doing things the way they were done before motors and electricity. One day, for instance, Russell took all of us – the two couples and their two babies – way back in the woods to a bee tree he remembered from years ago, enough years ago that small trees had grown in the wide path we were using for a road. Russell kept having to get out of the car to cut them out of the way. But when we stopped, somewhere deep in the woods, his memory had served him well. There was indeed a bee tree there. Russell must have known that the bees were swarming then because it wasn't honey we were after but bees themselves. (Swarming bees don't sting.) Russell scraped an armload of bees into the hive he had brought, making sure he included the queen. Bees buzzed angrily all around us, but I don't remember that anyone got stung. We took the bees home in the back of Russell's pick-up and set up beekeeping.

        Another day Emmaline took Barbee and me into the woods to find suitable white oaks for the baskets we had asked her to teach us to make. She showed us how to select good trees for making the splits. I don't remember what her criteria were or whether, after we selected a tree, we cut it down. Possibly Russell did, with a chain saw. When we got back to Emmaline's house, she showed us how to split the tree, dividing the pieces more and more finely, with a knife, until they parted easily into thin, pliant strips we could just pull apart. Emmaline used skillful, swift motions with her knife, starting at the top of the length of wood, then pulling it apart into two long, flexible slats. The pieces that would be the warp of the basket were about an inch wide, the horizontal weft pieces about a quarter inch. 

        After the strips were made, we boiled English walnut husks for a dye and dyed the pieces a dark brown. Some pieces stayed in longer than others and some absorbed the dye more than others, causing slight variations of color that, later, lent the baskets interesting rhythms of color. 

        When the wood was dyed and the dye had set, we put the long white-oak splits in water to keep them flexible and started weaving the baskets themselves. We were making rectangular baskets with a stiff rim and a stiff curved thick piece of white oak for a handle. It didn't take long to do the shaping and weaving. The finished baskets were sturdy and beautiful, and I loved having made my basket at Emmaline's tutelage, from gathering materials to tucking in the end of the last strip of oak.

      I used that basket for many years. I do still use it, for storing canning supplies, but my lack of skill in the craft showed where the oak splits broke at one side. Or maybe I was careless with the basket during one of my moves to a different location – from Cherokee to the Rogue Valley or from my first home there to my first house on this land, then, ten years ago, to the one I live in now. Always the basket went with me. It is a prized possession, not because it is a perfect basket but because I made it: from tree to materials to product.