Surface-level market forces are no match for ancestral traditions in Diane D. Dittemore’s Woven from the Center, a revelatory window into Arizona State Museum’s Native basketry collection.
Early in Diane D. Dittemore’s book Woven from the Center: Native Basketry in the Southwest, published this year by the University of Arizona Press, an unnamed young basket weaver makes a seemingly uncontroversial aesthetic decision.
“The small ‘olla’ shape with the beads on the rim had been on my mind for a while,” recalls the contemporary practitioner, who is Diné, Tohono O’odham, and Pima. “I consider O’odham baskets to be beautiful in their current state, but I liked how the beads enhanced the beauty of the baskets even more.”
Dittemore reports that such a choice, while “widely appreciated” now, would have been “decried as decadent by some basketry purists” around the turn of the last century. This anecdote hints at the capitalistic crosswinds that howl through Woven from the Center, which recounts the century-long formation of Arizona State Museum’s opulent collection of more than 4,000 baskets from the American Southwest and northern Mexico.
“In the beginning there was basketry,” is Dittemore’s fantastic opening line. While white collectors and their influence loom large in the first part of the book, they’re soon superseded by the ancestrally informed expressions of named and anonymous weavers across millennia.
In her introduction, Dittemore espouses a multidimensional approach to interpreting historical basketry, informed by nearly fifty years of ethnological practice and over forty years at ASM, where she is the associate curator of ethnology (and organized a permanent basketry exhibition that corresponds with the book). She writes that each object in the ASM collection “is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historic meanings.”
She continues, “The meanings are derived from the objects themselves, from individuals and communities of origin, from the collectors, and from those who have subsequently spent time with them—artists, curators, researchers, and members of descendant communities.”
The notion that an object accrues significance over time, rather than acquiring a set meaning from its original creator, is both necessary and potentially dangerous in relation to ASM’s sweeping collection that includes many unattributed works. The colonial or neocolonial layer of an orphaned object’s past—the story of the collector who transferred it to the museum—is almost invariably its most accessible marker. What if a curator or ethnologist, lacking in time, resources, or interest, stops there?
Woven from the Center’s first section offers a comprehensive look at a recent stretch of the ASM basketry collection’s history, presenting the biographies of the wealthy white patrons who helped build it. ASM opened in 1893, and its ethnological collection took off in 1915 amid “a time of great interest in Native American basket weaving” stoked by the Arts and Crafts movement.
Dittemore dips into this era just enough throughout the book to unspool some of its strangeness and racism. On the weirder end, there’s a dealer of mail-order O’odham baskets who also sells scorpions and wildcat kittens; and a military widow who relinquishes her collection to the museum before moving to Los Angeles, bemoaning the loss of the “pretty Indian room” in her former home.
Making and selling baskets became a survival tool, and weavers were therefore beholden to the market.
The racial charge of the latter tale, with its fierce possessiveness, links to a broader current of commodification and persecution. With impressive subtlety, Dittemore explores a particular result of the displacement, confinement, and poverty inherent to the “heinous” reservation system established in the late 19th century: “[basket] weavers had the time and motivation to cultivate their weaving skills.”
In other words, making and selling baskets became a survival tool, and weavers were therefore beholden to the market. At Tohono O’odham, women started weaving highly salable baskets in the form of people and animals and selling them to trading posts, curio stores, and traveling dealers.
Likewise, Akimel O’Odham basketmakers added woven images of people, cacti, horses, and lizards to their repertoire. They altered the shapes of the baskets to “appeal to their new clientele: wall pockets, compotes, treasure baskets, […] trays and jars.” Lettering woven into a coiled bowl (ca. 1900) from Akimel O’Odham, gifted to the museum by the first Arizona governor George W.P. Hunt, spells out “ARBUCKLES”—a coffee brand.
One donor used a Tohono O’odham vessel (ca. 1899) as a toy bin and a wastepaper basket before passing the object to the museum. Its maker, a weaver named Chona Ochoa, later described going to Tucson to work “for the white people” who housed her in a “shack with mattresses in it.”
Dittemore quotes Karen Ray (Yavapai), director of the Fort McDowell Museum in Arizona: “This time may be considered by collectors to be a classic period for basketry production among Yavapai people… but we know it as a time of horrible hardship, trauma, and exile from our homes.” One Yavapai basket (ca. 1920) in the collection bears a donor tag that reads, “Much sorrow in family, hence dark design.”
Woven from the Center bristles with colonial signifiers of value—authentication tags, craft-fair prize ribbons—but by the book’s end, the modern market has shrunk to a brittle (albeit important) stratum in a much longer and richer story. In the book’s primary passage, titled “Centering In: Basketry by Tribal Community,” Dittemore pairs baskets from the collection with quotes by and documentary photographs of the weavers themselves.
Revelatory images by longtime museum photographer Helga Teiwes, a close collaborator of Dittemore, show Tohono O’odham weavers making baskets together, preparing raw fruit juice and mixing clay in baskets, and proudly posing with their creations on their land or in their homes. A young woman named Maxine Norris, beaming in braids and a basketry crown in a photo from 1973, positively leaps from the book’s pages.
There’s a strong voice [in Native communities] of, ‘Yeah, we’re here and we’re going to chart our own future.’ It’s an art towards agency.
These evocative windows into tribal life highlight the sweeping ceremonial and practical significance of Native basketry. Teiwes captures the dynamic use of a burden basket in Linette Anderson’s Ndée puberty ceremony (pictured below). Dittemore writes, “When the medicine man pours the contents of the basket over her… everything in the basket becomes holy… and everyone scrambles for a piece of candy or a coin.” In a visceral image (ca. 1899) by George Wharton James, a Havasupai man named Singela slates his thirst with an esua, or pitched water bottle. A poignant passage of the book includes examples of taapu, Hopi wicker cradleboards, and a 1921 photograph by Edward S. Curtis of a mother tenderly holding her child.
Recent images by Jannelle Weakly, the ASM photographic collections manager, enrich Dittemore’s contemporary storytelling throughout the book. There are dazzling images and backstories of baskets by present-day weavers, often paired with an image of the practitioner holding the piece. Tales of master weavers such as Terrol Dew Johnson and Sally Antone of Tohono O’odham, who are passing on their knowledge, underscore the hope and struggles of their work. Dittemore calculates that weavers made about $0.17 an hour for their time-consuming work in 1979—and gross only about $1.00 an hour today.
I spoke with Dittemore about Woven from the Center this week, not long after ASM closed its doors for an indeterminate period to address extensive facilities maintenance issues. Dittemore was already planning online exhibitions to bridge the gap, and didn’t seem interested in discussing the museum’s plight. Nearly every time I steered the conversation towards her or the institution, she angled it back to the story of a weaver.
“Agency is the word of the day,” Dittemore told me. “There’s a strong voice [in Native communities] of, ‘Yeah, we’re here and we’re going to chart our own future,’ whether that’s individually through devotion to traditional arts, or political art that tells a story and helps people understand the traumas of the last 500 years. It’s an art towards agency.”
Editor’s note: Special thanks to Jannelle Weakly, Arizona State Museum photographic collections manager, for providing additional context on many of the images in this article, which you can read in the captions. She offered the following story about the image featuring a Seri woman and anthropologist Gwyneth Harrington, which appears at the top of the article: “Seri woman showing Mrs. Gwyneth Harrington the use of the head ring and carrying basket. Mrs. Harrington came ashore at Palo Fierro laden with notebooks and trade goods and the Seri came to the rescue with great hilarity, to show her how to carry still more upon her head.”
