 |
Making Baskets and Mats
| | | Making mats and baskets are tasks for women, who can often work in and around the village and mind their children at the same time. In this woman's hands is a partially-completed basket made of woodsplints. The woodsplints, like those you see on the ground beside her, usually come from ash trees, and it's a lengthy process to cut down the tree, split it into sections, pound each quarter so it splits into strips, soak them in water, and thin and trim them until they are precisely the desired shape.
| | | We make baskets in all different styles and sizes, depending on their use. The finished basket just next to this woman would be good to use for gathering nuts, for example, since the handle makes for easy carrying over one arm.
Our people also weave two different types of mats, including mats made of bulrushes. These have a variety of uses: lining the interior walls of houses, covering sleeping platforms, and covering the ground to create seating or work areas. They can also be quite ornamental if the weaver incorporates colorful, dyed bulrushes and weaves them into a pattern. Here, a woman is incorporating brown and red rushes; this will be a handsome mat when she is finished.
The other type of mats we make are created by sewing together the stems of the cattail, another plant that grows in our wetlands. Cattail mats are sometimes used instead of bark to cover the outsides of wigwams, like the one you see behind the women here. These mats aren't decorative, but they help make the houses wind and weather-resistant. And they're designed to be portable, so that if the village is moved, the women can simply take down the mats, roll them up, and carry them to the next location.
|
Behind the Scenes with Director of Research Kevin McBride
| One of the reasons that we wanted to show a woman weaving a woodsplint basket in the village is to make the point that the Pequots were probably making these baskets prehistorically, before the arrival of Europeans. That's always been a big topic of discussion among the experts, whether these baskets were originally made by Native people or whether they were a Swedish or Northern European introduction.
Based on our research, we're pretty confident that the Pequots were making these baskets prior to European contact. There are some archaeological remains of splint basketry in the Northeast in the late prehistoric period. Oral history, what the Pequots and other Native people are telling us today about their ancestors, confirms this. And if you look at the other kinds of baskets that are being made by Native people, a lot of it is pretty sophisticated stuff, why not splint? All the metal tools that are used later to make splint baskets could easily have a prehistoric counterpart. So it just doesn't make sense that they wouldn't have made splint baskets, too.
|
Making Baskets and Mats: Then and Now
| Mashantucket Pequot elder Alice Brend remembers that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, making woodsplint baskets was a way for tribal members to earn a little money; by selling them, door to door. Her mother and father shared the tasks of making the baskets:
"Oh, my mother was so wonderful. . . . She used to make baskets to sell, and she sold them so cheap, you know. My father used to help her make the baskets by pounding them out. She'd tell him what wood to cut and how to pound them out so that she could chip them off and shave them and make the baskets. She used to make so many baskets . . . "
It was a tough way to make a living. After the baskets were completed, Alice's mother would set out, on foot, and walk for miles:
"Every farmhouse would take them from her, buy them from her. Before the day was out, all the baskets, she'd probably have fifty or sixty baskets that she'd work hard to make, would be all gone, [they'd take them]. [B]ut she'd sell them too cheap, fifty cents and big baskets, I guess they were about half-bushel baskets. It was only a dollar."
|
| |
|
