First Peoples Fund, Community Spirit Award, Nomination Statement 2021

Dale R. Croes

doi:10.7273/000006453

“What does the maker of this basket want you to know? Think about the fact that artists, like the basketmaker, might be the only conduit of precious information by which Coast Salish people remain connected to their ancestors” (Bruce Subiyay Miller, Skokomish Elder, Master Basketmaker, recipient of a 2004 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, and long-time late friend of Ed Carriere’s (Carriere and Croes 2018:244)) Ed Carriere (age 88), Suquamish Elder and Master Basketmaker and Canoe Carver, learned the old-style cedar limb/root clam basket making from his Great Grandmother, Julia Jacobs, who raised him from infancy; he started to learn at age 14. No one has contributed more to revitalizing and teaching of old-style Salish Sea basketry than has Ed Carriere in his 50+ year basketmaking career. Sales records kept by his late wife are used to predict that he has made over 600 traditional clam baskets in his lifetime (so far), teaching numerous clam basket classes. In basketmaking, Ed’s underlying personal goal has always been to learn and re-construct old style Salish Sea baskets from as many generations back as possible, endeavoring to learn from his own Elders and visiting museums as much as possible; this effort allowed him to learn basketry styles from about 5 generations back and mostly making these woven and coiled baskets of split cedar limbs and roots (today current Salish Sea basketweavers use mostly cedar bark). Then, beyond anything he ever thought possible, he met a Washington State University (WSU) waterlogged/wet sites archaeologist, Dr. Dale Croes, in 2003, who had spent his career excavating these well-preserved sites, recovering ancient Coast Salish and West Coast baskets dating from 15 to 150 generations back, 300 to 3,000 years old. By visiting Dale’s sites and helping to excavate some of these ancient clam baskets very similar to the ones he makes, Ed literally was able to learn from his 30th and earlier generation grandparents, something he never would have believed possible. Croes had compared ancient basketry from throughout the Salish Sea region, using statistical techniques, and demonstrated that the styles through 3,000 years linked sequentially into Ed’s old-tradition cedar limb/root basketry, going from deep-time through to the work Ed learned from Julia and her/his Elders. For a three-minute YouTube discussing "Why I Nominated Ed Carriere," see the Awards Ceremony at the Kennedy Center at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc_-gNV0Uz0

First Peoples Fund, Community Spirit Award, Nomination Statement 2021

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details