Access to sweetgrass key for artists at Maine Indian Basketmakers Holiday Market
Transcript
Suzanne Greenlaw:
Sweetgrass is used for spiritual practices. Also, it gets woven into baskets. People have been picking sweetgrass for as long as I can remember, for generations and generations.
We have creation stories for sweetgrass. Picking is a spiritual practice. People braid it as a spiritual practice. Then they smudge with it.
Jennifer Neptune:
So after you pick it, you’ll take a bundle of it and comb through the ends of it. And it will get rid of all that discolored grass.
Braiding sweetgrass is a connection to my ancestors and the basketmakers before me that have done the same thing and picked in the same places that I have, and stood in their kitchens or outside and braided grass for hours.
The holiday market at the University of Maine Hudson Museum has been going on for over 20 years. And it’s been a collaboration between the Hudson Museum and the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance.
And it’s an important event for artists — not just basketmakers — but a lot of different artists to sell their work to the public. There are demonstrations all day long, storytelling, singing. There’s even a fashion show.
Even if you are not in the market for a basket, a Maine Indian basket, it’s just fun to be there and hang out and watch the demonstrators, and the music, and just to be there.