Learning to Make Makah Baskets

12 the minnesota review Alice Deery Learning to Make Makah Baskets First, you must find a rock that has always wanted to be a bird: to sing, fly. "Arrowhead" by Gary Miranda 1 The baskets will not fly or kill. Even the shiny ones, dressed in bear grass, take their lessons from earth. A person has to keep adding; there is nothing to cut away. It is a matter of fingers and head acting their best parts: like cedar strips the fingers twine every other one until they're joined. The mind must have more than a cooking pot: some sign from the gods woven in, some pattern only a few can learn. Nothing sleek. No cutting edges. More than a struggle for release, a basket's shaggy life is like grass bunching together in a low place where goldfinches cling and eat seeds. Or like the cover of bark. Baskets squat on the table, empty. Like the women, they hold whatever must be held. Deery 13 By folding one thing over another, by moving in and out among obstacles you have set up, by twisting and turning, by binding and tying off, you bring a basket to the surface. It breathes. A thing on its own now, it won't need you. I've heard the same story on the broken-down stoops of the Nez Perce at dusk: in the government schools when the elders were small, soap was used to stop a language. "We'll wash your mouths out," they said. So we made up a song about not being able to sing, Helen says, singing it for us. The words stutter across my tongue like something laundered and put away, a little stiff, a little scratchy. Soon they will ease to the body's fit. In the oppressors' mouths they will be fashionable. Isabelle Ides, ageless, sits in the corner of her unlighted beach shop, shrunken by mounds of bear grass and cedar bark. Her hands don't miss a stroke. I want to talk; she doesn't mind. As long as her grandchildren bring firewood, she can stay here, right on the beach. Without weaving, she gets sleepy. Bear grass takes an effort; there are no through roads to Quinault. 14 the minnesota review After the basket with the whale chase is mine, I ask if we can walk on her beach. OK, she says. When we come back, she's out with her great-granddaughter. Her dress flaps in the wind. I smile. She nods. For my birthday—"a fine old spruce root Tlinget basket" bought at North by Northwest where someone sold it for half the price we paid because they needed groceries more than heritage. While this basket was woven, other women marched the "trail of Tears" or froze at Wounded Knee. It is finer than many, with raised zigzag patterns and overlaid stitching in grass dyed orange and brown. The woman who made it forgot why. Her hands daydreamed into sunny afternoons, each new design inevitable. Like a flower, the basket claims nothing for itself. Melissa, I don't remember when you were my student and dropped out to get married. You, who remember me, teach me. Between us, the gap, how my people killed yours: disease shooting and the oldest way, until most of us are half-breeds. Deery 15 You can show me how to weave, but no shop would sell my baskets; I can help you begin school again, but your male children grow up where people still say, "drunken bucks. You and I know our limits. At the last class we exchange phone numbers, promise to meet for coffee sometime. ...