Voice of Jennifer Neptune: …so i just want to share some information about fancy baskets. Baskets tend to fall in two categories: utility baskets, which are pack baskets, carrying baskets, harvesting baskets, and what we call fancy baskets, which are sometimes smaller, they use finer weave of ash, [they have] fancy designs in them, so for example, the pineapple – this is called the porcupine weave and that’s a fancy basket weave. They’re functional, like, you can use them usually. You could use this for storage. But mostly they’re decorative; this is meant to be decorative and put on a shelf and maybe you put special things in it. Other fancy baskets are small or miniature. Sometimes they’re useful; a sweetgrass flat is considered a fancy basket.

Fancy baskets, along with utility baskets too, served a really important purpose in all of our communities in that they’re useful but also they helped Wabanaki families and communities survive a hard transition from hunting, gathering, fishing, being able to survive like that to, you know, when the whole world changed and settlers came and they changed the landscape, the rivers – by damming them the fish could no longer get to Indian Island, where I’m from, so salmon fishing was out in Old Town, once there was a dam there, in the amounts that could sustain a community. As farming and logging changed the landscape it changed ways that we could harvest deer and moose and even caribou back in the day, so there had to be another way to survive and our traditions of basketmaking and carving and a lot of those artistic and functional traditions allowed us to trade for food or sell them for cash.

And we were really fortunate here in Maine that in the Victorian times wealthy people wanted to get out of the cities in the summer and get to some place beautiful where there was fresh air and they came to Maine, along the coast, and in our traditional movement on the land that’s also where Penobscot and Passamaquoddy people were going in the summer. We were going there to fish, to seal, to get bird eggs, to pick sweetgrass, to harvest clams, and do all those summer things, but then all these wealthy summer people started showing up and it just worked out beautifully for us that we could make baskets that appeal to them, that they would purchase from us.

So basketmaking became a way to survive. It became a way to continue a traditional lifestyle of movement on the landscape. It allowed us to go to the ocean in the summer where we wanted to be anyway so it worked out really well. In the Late-1800s when tourism in Maine started to boom in Bar Harbor and Kennebunkport and all these, what we think of as summer towns, you know, sprung up, people would come to our little villages on the on the coast and visit our tents and buy baskets from our ancestors. And so fancy basket styles really took off and took a life of their own during that time and got more and more fancy and more elaborate and to appeal to that Victorian taste of the time.

Baskets were made for every conceivable conceivable reason that you can think of: to hang on walls, to hold watches, to hold little cups that you could travel with, sewing baskets, thimble baskets, baskets to hold women’s hair, to hold collar stays, all kinds of different amazing styles of baskets came out of that time and and they’re still styles that we make today.