 Hi, my name is Brenda Crabtree and I'm a member of the Spuzm Band. The Spuzm Band is located in the Fraser Canyon and it's part of the Lakatmuk Territory. My artistic passion is weaving and primarily weaving with cedar. Cedar is actually known as the tree of life in this territory. It's used for many, many different things. The wood is used for canoes and for building longhouses. The bark is used for clothing and baskets. The roots are also used for baskets and the bows are often used for ceremonial purposes. Cedar trees can grow up to a height of approximately 70 meters and they can actually reach a width of four meters in diameter. When we harvest cedar bark, it's generally during the summer months when the sap is running. Cedar bark can only ever be live harvested once from a tree. Once a tree has been harvested for the purposes of making a basket, it's then deemed a culturally modified tree. And what we do is we gather the bark, we remove the outer bark from the inner bark and this is what we usually leave the forest with, so we have a roll of bark that is quite damp and wet at the time that we harvest it. We then dry it and it can be left dry for many, many years until we're ready to use it and have a project that we need it for and then it has to be reconstituted and it's soaked in water until it's pliable and ready to use. And some of the tools that we use are traditionally made from bone from a deer and these are called ALS, AWL, and they're actually used for packing down the twining in the cedar basket and traditionally they would have used all of the tiny little scraps as an absorbent material so they would pound it and use it for baby diapers as sort of a paper towel. But today we work just as hard to get our inner cedar bark and we don't want to waste any part of it once we've done all of the processing so some of the more contemporary objects that we make are cedar paper. We can also make cedar bowls, cedar masks, and we have a variety of small cedar projects like earrings, frogs, hearts, things that might be geared towards working with children and elementary school projects. One of the more common techniques for beginning a cedar basket is the twill weave base and we have the twill weave base on this basket. We also have a sample of twill weave on this purse, it's a little bit different, it's a little finer woven, it actually just gives it strength and I'm going to show you the start of a twill weave basket base, we're actually going to be looking at weaving just a small utilitarian basket like this one with both red and yellow cedar bark. So I'm going to begin with five strips, I always line them up at the edge of the table because this is a small project I can just use my hand as a clamp. I'm lining up five strands fairly close together at the table edge and so it's over two, under two, over one, under two and you follow the basic pattern until you get your five by five pieces woven. So what you do is you have to get your materials as tight as possible, as tight in as possible to each other before you actually start the next step. And the other thing that I've done with this is I've measured its relatively equal distance from all four corners of the basket base for materials and this can be manipulated, you can at this point, your cedar barks damp and wet, you can pull strands from the middle, you can pull strands from the edge, it's very malleable at this point. Once we have everything ready to go, we're ready to start the two strand twining. Okay so we've completed the 12-weave basket base now and we need to start with the twining and the hat you can see is primarily made out of two strand twining. The basket is primarily all two strand twining and this is actually a very simple technique with just a few rules that if you follow can go very smoothly. So I've soaked the dried yellow cedar twining, it's just like leather, it's just an amazing material and I never start in the corners, I always start in the center because wherever you start is where you have to end and if you're ending in corners it sometimes makes it too bulky. So I'm going to pick up a middle strand here, I've loosened up my two strand twining and I'm going to drape it around a spoke, so one piece of twining on either side. You need to remember that the strand on the right is always down towards the center of the basket base and really you're only ever dealing with the strand on the left. So to begin my two strand twining I'm going to go in front of the spoke and behind the next spoke and that's it. I'm going to lay this strand down towards the center of the base again. So here I start again, I'm starting with the left hand side twining, I'm going to go in front of the next spoke and behind and I'm going to lay that down. Now at this point I want to make sure that my tension is okay so I'm gently tugging on it to make sure that I've got a good tight weave but not tugging on it so hard that it will buckle, that it will buckle this spoke over. So it's just a little bit of practice and just watching what you're doing. So when you're working with your materials you've obviously started with them damp to make them pliable and often during the weaving process you may have to give it a little spritz of water. One of the things that we also need to address is what happens if one of your strands breaks or if one of your strands runs out and what you do is simply overlap. So I take another piece of twining and I've got it ready to overlap. I'm not worried about hiding it or securing it at this point. I am just going to buddy it up so I will either put it directly in front of or directly behind another strand like that or alternately for the shorter one I can put it in front of and I simply carry on my twining with two pieces. So you can see that I've got a shorter strand happening here. I'm going to double them up and I'm going to work them just as one. So in front of and behind drop them down and I do that for one or two spokes. Take the longer one in front of and behind, here's my double dot piece and at this point when I go in front of and behind I will just drop it and leave it. When the cedar dries it won't move, it won't go anywhere and what I will do is I'll backtrack and I will just trim that piece off. It's not going to go anywhere once it dries and there and I'll pack this down and there I've added on another whole long piece of twining and I could carry on and leave a basket this size and just keep adding in cedar twining so pieces of cedar. So that's just another element to basketry. So we've completed the 12-weave basket base, we've also completed the two rows of two strand twining to secure the base. Now we're going to proceed to what we call upsetting the spokes. Before I do that I will look at both sides of the basket and I can choose which side I want to be the inside of the basket, which side I would like to be the outside of the basket. So I will put the inside of the basket side up and I'm going to start upsetting the spokes and I'm just going to be going from spoke to spoke and I'm going to be pressing them forward with my fingers. Bark has a memory and so when I go to do my weaving around the sides of the basket I want it already prepared and already have a memory imprinted into it so that it will be a little easier for me for actually weaving up the sides. So we've upset the spokes, we've bent them, they've got their memory and now we're ready to start up the side of the basket so I'm going to take the side of the spokes that are closest to me that are facing me and I'm going to lift them up and repress them. This part of weaving a basket for me is both the most exciting part and it's the most stressful part. This is by far I think the most difficult role in weaving any basket and so we've got the spokes ready to go. We really want to keep them evenly spaced, we don't want them crossing over, we don't want them overlapping and now I'm going to take an independent spoke that's going to be my weft piece, my wrap around piece and what I'm going to do is just like the twining I'm going to start it in the middle, I'm not going to start it at the corner and it's just a very basic basket weave so it's the over under or in front of and behind weave. We're going to be weaving this spoke in and out completely around the basket until it meets where we started at the same time you're going to be doing your two strand twining and because the spokes aren't aren't all upright at this point it's like it's a little bit of a struggle to make sure everything's happening correctly at the same time so don't forget with your two strand twining you really need to keep your tension even when you're doing it and at the same time keeping your spokes upright and even. We are making sure that we're weaving in and out and alternating this wrap around piece and the biggest struggle usually occurs is when you get to the corner you don't want to have your spoke so tight that it squishes them into the corner but you don't want to have it so loose that there's big gaps either so this first little bit is a little bit of a struggle but you just carry on weeding the spoke in and out at the same time keeping track of the tension of your twining making sure that your twining lays flat and there we go we'll continue on around the entire basket until we reach the part that we started from so now we've completely woven the spoke the very first spoke on the first row around to where we started and we know that we started in the middle of the basket so it's not too bulky in the corner and we've got the end of the spoke here and for this row and for every other row I usually just take a small pair of scissors and cut it to a point and I feed it through and essentially I'm going to pull it and I have sort of control of the tension then of this spoke so I'm not going to cut it until I've completely finished the row now I've got that well attached I'm going to finish my two strand twining and generally I like to do at least two rows of two strand twining around and I will just carry on I've got my first row there and I will just carry on with these strands and do yet another row and at this point when I'm sort of finished and I'm off doing my two second row of two strand twining and I've packed it all down and what I do is I usually handle two spokes at a time and I very gently work my all so I'm pulling up on the spokes pushing down on the all to get as tight a weave as I can I can then trim this off equal to the outer spoke so it won't show and carry on and complete my second row of two strand twining. So now we're ready to do the rim on the basket we've done a few rows I could carry on and keep going but for the purposes of this demonstration I am going to show you how to do the fold down Lummi edge this edge was actually taught to me by Lummi basket weaver Anna Jefferson. To begin this edge we have a single piece of twining we don't double it up this time we're just going to leave it and again we're going to start in the middle of the row we don't want to start in any of the corners of the edges and I'm just going to drop it in behind I'm going to leave about a two or three inch tail on that piece I'm going to take my wraparound spoke and I'm going to set it in behind and I want to keep my rim nice and close to the edge of the two rows of twining so to do this fold down edge I've just got the spoke and the wraparound piece and I'm going to do half of an axe so I'm crossing over from the left hand corner to the upper right hand corner I'm going to fold down over that piece and I'm going to press it quite hard with my fingers I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to measure over one two spokes but only cut the piece that I folded down and that's essentially it then I bring the next spoke to the front and that is completing one section of that so I'm going to start all over again I've got the piece of twining from the lower left hand side of the spoke I'm going to go up create half of an axe to the upper right hand corner wrap it around the spoke fold it down press it quite hard with my fingers I'm going to measure over one two cut and I'm going to bring the next spoke to the front and this is an absolutely magical edge because it not only looks fantastic from the outside and it's a very strong stable rim but it also looks very neat and tidy on the inside so we'll just do one more take on this we'll just do half of an axe wrap it around the spoke fold it down press it tightly measure one two approximately cut and next spoke to the front and there you have the start of your Lummi edge rim this is a cedar basket that has been started and you can see that it's naturally a completed basket inside it's got some of the materials and supplies inside of it but the outer wall hasn't been finished yet and so this is where sometimes the design will come in and this is one of my more recently completed baskets and you can see that it started out fairly wide on the bottom it's also got an inner basket in it so this is termed a double wall basket and then I've cut the cedar strips finer on the outside so that I could manipulate it a little bit for design elements and you can see that I've dyed some of the inner cedar bark for the bird figure and for some of the geometrical figures in there I think I've been very lucky to have a grandmother that nurtured my passion for weaving and I hope that she would be very proud of the fact that I am also very passionate about perpetuating this art form about teaching about sharing and that was certainly something that I learned from her.