The Brooklyn Rail

It is June of 2023. I stand in a storage facility of the British Museum in London, my outstretched palm resting inside the coiled top of a wide-brimmed Chumash hat. The scent of dried plant bodies spans more than two centuries since these beings were harvested, woven, and worn in the vicinity of Old Mission Santa Barbara. To sense this extraordinary item is to enter an intertwined history of colonization and Indigenous creativity, a vast story that is still unfolding along the contours of mega-fires and mass extinctions in California and around the world. I’m compelled to think with this woven spiral, to inquire how it might reorient the work of Native North American art history, the future of land stewardship, and my own troubled kinships in the thirty-first state.

I imagine the Father crowned by this golden miracle of botanical abundance and Chumash dexterity. Whorls of sedge shield his face from the sun, which must have scorched even then. The wide brim bears eight brown bulrush crosses that promise protection from a worse inferno, a landscape of eternal flames. The headwear is enrolled in an evolving system of bulwarks to guard the “verdant plain” of land and soul from conflagration.¹ The latest effort is a law stipulating corporeal punishment for those American Indians, mostly elderly women, who continue the devilish practice of setting pasture afire.

The woven hat is an ambivalent agent of suppression, to be sure. A novelty when collected by members of the Vancouver expedition in 1793, it is a convergence of two long-standing Chumash coiled basketry forms, the tray and the bowl. Visible fibers are wrapped around hidden bundles of roots, each revolution stitched to the previous row to form a continuous, interpenetrating spiral. The resulting form is tensile, taking shape through the opposite tug of plant bodies pressed into tight relation. Lacking a true inside and outside, this organic helix is a poor protector from environmental and spiritual assaults.²

A coiled basket does not defend so much as orient. It points toward expansive circular growth. Up and around. Out and about. “Every material that goes into the basket has to go in the way it grows,” the late Kashaya Pomo and Miwok weaver Julia Parker related. “We are very careful about making sure we have the earth end first and then weave all the way up to the sky end. I don’t try to make the plant work my way. I go with the direction of the plant.”³ Vegetal orientation is a precondition for coiled basketry. Indigenous weaving protocols heed plants as pedagogues within a “landscape of gifts peopled by nonhuman relatives.”⁴ Yet the plentitude, strength, and shape of roots and stems is also human-influenced. Growth is a partnership among Indigenous fire matrons, wild gardeners, and countless beings who compose soil, transport seeds, clear underbrush, and pare branches. Each is responsive to the trajectory of others, responsible for a part in the vast weaving of the world. A basket’s final form is never a sole impress. It is a massive collaborative endeavor, a collective pointing toward the sun.

“What does it mean to be oriented? … Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction,” writes Sara Ahmed.⁵ The basket-hat moves its wearer heavenward. The slow climb of the coils is assisted not only by eight crosses, but by a band of spiraled staircases. Above the steps float four sets of wings, pale versus stitched into rectangular brown medallions encircling the crown.

In the early twentieth century, Chumash elders María Solares, Luisa Ygnacio, Lucrecia García, and others transmitted stories of their transformed cosmos to the anthropologist J. P. Harrington. He was told that the upper of three interconnected worlds, home of a voracious Sun and a trickster, Coyote of the Sky, was held aloft by the wings of a giant eagle. One could find and take a trail there, but access was difficult and infrequent.⁶ The Father failed to transmit the allure of ascension. For the survivors of conquest, existence remained an ambiguous, uncertain affair, subject to the whims of other beings at every turn. To travel the spiral, to orient one’s body skyward, was to sink more deeply into awareness of precarious interrelations on earth.

There was no direct path to salvation for Indigenous peoples in the decades following California statehood. With state-sanctioned genocide underway, eighteen groups negotiated treaties with the United States government, ceding vast tracts of land and sovereignty in return for promised reservations. In 1852, the Senate rejected these contracts, dispossessing Native peoples of title to their homelands. Tens of thousands were rendered destitute, surrounded by the organic abundance of a region that had sustained their people for millennia. White settlers were overtaken by “canastromania,” a feverish desire to salvage the handwoven vessels of “a civilization that would soon otherwise be lost.”⁷ Parker’s relatives were called back to their gathering site, Yosemite Valley, to do laundry and demonstrate weaving for tourists. Pomo people in the coastal hills where I grew up pooled their earnings from domestic work and basket sales to buy back small tracts of lost land. Weaving offered a circuitous route home.

Settler time is an arrow of progress, a march to straighten the spiraled shape of Indigenous kinship relations. Coiled baskets resist the linear flattening of village and family to make way for mission and state. Into the presumptive universality of colonial temporality, they reintroduce whorls of time in which all things remain present. The helix is dynamic; it has “the substance, feel, and force of time unfolding.”⁸ Always circling back around, it leaves nothing behind. Each rotation presses past and present bodies into intimate contact, stitching new lifeforms tightly to ancestors. The temporal orientation of the spiral is a kind of slipstream, a swirling eddy that makes possible the experience of return without repetition to the collective place of emergence.⁹ To coil a basket is to steal back time, raise the dead, move toward center. It is a long, slow labor that capitalism never rewards.

It is July of 2017. There is an enviable house perched high on a grassy ridge with an enormous wrap-around deck and a wall of windows facing southwest. Illuminated against a dark canopy of oaks, the chimney marks the presence of hearth, controlled fire’s promise of warmth and safety from the elements. But it’s blistering summer in northern California and the flames are uncontained outside. They form a jagged, glowing line of heat on the horizon. A wall of orange smoke masks the vivid blue pop of sky.

Somewhere in the stand of trees behind the house, my father fights a battle with pump, hose, and pond. A lone helicopter offers reinforcement from the sky, bombing fire with baskets of precious water. My dad shouts “I’m in the war again!” over the phone with my mom and I that afternoon. The smoke and noise trigger his Vietnam flashbacks and a downward health spiral, pointing toward his death in 2022. I google the news from afar and find a Los Angeles Times photograph of my childhood house approached by flames. Its specificity erased, the scene stands for middle-class white property under threat, a home and nation that must be protected at all costs.

I stand to inherit land in a system of private property forged from the militarization of fire and the criminalization of its Indigenous stewards. I’m heir to my father’s fear, wounds that have stubbornly eluded the power of plant medicines still growing in Pomo homelands. I am caught in other patterns that are only just emerging into sense and sight, moving along the rings of oak elders and the coils of baskets held in the local museum that I visited growing up.

It is October of 2022. I do an online search for information about the Miwok and Paiute weaver Lucy Telles. The black-and-white photographs at the top of the page show the artist sitting in a fringed gown and beaded accoutrements, surrounded by a mound of baskets and the natural landscape of Yosemite Valley. Further down, an image of Telles standing in a calico dress on the wooden porch of her home brings the person and place much closer. Before her is a small child rooted in a field of redbud, bracken fern, and sedge. He touches black flames that burst from a red and gold mosaic to lick the edges of the variegated grassland. His delicate fingers curl into the grooves between each row, feeling the lateral shape of the fiery fronds. His grandmother leans in, looks up, smiles. He is safe inside her enormous vessel, protected by an elemental agent of regeneration.

Telles’s three-foot-wide basket contains the memory of familial fire. From 1929 to 1933, the artist traveled the distance from knot to rim, building a flickering field, stitch by stitch, along a spiraled path. Her checkerboard patterns the amber glow of redbud bark. A similar radiance might have cracked and warmed the seed of this native shrub, inviting new life to emerge. Redbuds resprout vigorously from singed foothills, soak up sunlight in the freshly cleared understory, and grow small and straight when harvested annually. “The Yosemite Indians burned the meadow and they kept it clean,” recalled Parker, who learned to harvest and weave from Telles. “There would be seeds here. There would be berries here. There would be basket materials here…. It is like going into K-Mart or Walmart. Everything was here.”¹⁰ Fire is an honored elder in a kinship mesh that nourished a prolific futurity.

California reinstated Spanish fire prohibition in 1850. This regime succeeded not in suppressing fires so much as oppressing those who set them. In the absence of Indigenous caretaking, the open oak forests and meadows of Yosemite became choked with conifers and shrubs. Conflagrations continued, only now they burned hotter and faster, threatening the ancient redwood groves in which tourists delighted. Simultaneous with the emergence of the transatlantic basket craze, a national debate over “light burning” erupted. Advocates promoted the “Indian way” of land management while detractors denigrated intentional fire-setting as irrational and immoral “Paiute forestry.” The latter won the war against fire in 1924. The California Board of Forestry entrenched an orientation that had arrived on ships from Europe, rebranding fire as an enemy of the state. Crowded from the forest floor, redbuds continued to cluster thickly around villages-turned-archaeological sites, bearing witness to the longstanding homeliness of Indigenous fire.

Telles stitched bark and stem from the battlefield back together. She made orderly new wholes from the organic chaos of the anti-fire regime. Her baskets grow skyward while sticking to the soil, staying with the trouble. Earth-bound, they regenerate relations under siege. After Telles’s death, the serrated motif on her largest basket would be touted by the Yosemite National Park Museum as a traditional Miwok “flame pattern.” Flame, frond, fang—the design is polyphonous, distributed along the coils of a form that admits no closure. Novel images and ecologies, changes both gradual and catastrophic, are woven in, remade as continuities, and readied to withstand devastations in the rotation to come. Embellishment structures the sphere, forming an analogue for the fire-mottled assemblage from which it sprang and for ecological interdependence at a global scale. Flame is not a figure but a guide for this spiral of relationships. Triangles shimmy, squares slide, and the whole vessel dances in the wind.

It is January of 2023. I take my mom to Rekindling Culture and Fire, one of a series of similar events organized by the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association. Across two days, talks and activities teach landholders about the potential for Indigenous-led cultural burning partnerships to revitalize a botanical mosaic and ensure the integrity of traditional gathering sites for basket materials. It is the start of my family’s reeducation in the expropriated land on which we built a home. The gathering generates small flickers of understanding, glimpses of our woven-ness into relationships beyond ownership, our receipt of gifts we have yet to return, our responsibility to Pomo-land futures that can only be cultivated, not controlled. We are beginning to talk about fire that belongs outside, about paths for reconnecting seed and flame to those who hold the memory of tending both.

The work of art history spirals out from the object—a cultural belonging, possibly a relative—to encompass vital relationships that nurture and outlive the art. The work of the art historian is a circling back around, a reckoning with material inheritance, scorched earth, and reciprocity with the beings and places that nourish ideas. Literal ground must be tilled for language to grow, for words to wrap around the coils of baskets, kinship, and time.

1. Archibald Menzies and Alice Eastwood, “Archibald Menzies’ Journal of the Vancouver Expedition,” California Historical Society Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Jan. 1924), 276.
2. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 341.
3. Quoted in Deborah Valoma, Scrape the Willow Until It Sings: The Words and Work of Basket Maker Julia Parker (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2013), 206.
4. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Mishkos Kenomagwen, the Lessons of Grass: Restoring Reciprocity with the Good Green Earth,” in Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability, edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 27.
5. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 15.
6. Thomas C. Blackburn, December’s Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 30.
7. Sherrie Smith Ferri, “The Development of the Commercial Market for Pomo Indian Baskets,” Expedition Magazine 40, no. 1 (1998): 15; George Wharton James, “Indian Basketry in House Decoration,” The Chautauquan 33, no. 6 (Sept. 1901), 620.
8. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 3.
9. Grace L. Dillon, “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 4.
10. Quoted in Deborah Valoma, Scrape the Willow Until It Sings, 201.