Round 1915, the final identified Chumash basket maker, Candelaria Valenzuela, died in Ventura County, and along with her went a ability that had been basic to the Indigenous individuals who lived for hundreds of years within the coastal areas between Malibu and San Luis Obispo.
A century and two years later, 70-year-old Santa Barbara native Susanne Hammel-Sawyer took a category out of curiosity to study one thing about her ancestors’ basket-making abilities.
Hammel-Sawyer is 1/16 Chumash, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Maria Ysidora del Refugio Solares, one of the crucial revered ancestors of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians for her work in preserving its practically misplaced Samala language.
However Hammel-Sawyer knew practically nothing about Chumash customs when she was a baby. As a younger mom, she usually took her 4 kids to the Santa Barbara Museum of Pure Historical past, the place she mentioned she liked to admire the museum’s in depth assortment of Chumash baskets, “however I had no inkling I’d ever make them.”
Nonetheless, at this time, at age 78, Hammel-Sawyer is taken into account one of many Santa Ynez Band’s premier basket makers, with samples of her work on show at three California museums.
Brief, reddish brown sticks of dried basket rush sit in a small basket in Susanne Hammel-Sawyer’s kitchen, ready to be woven into certainly one of her baskets. The reddish colour solely seems on the backside ends of the reeds, after they dry, so she saves each inch to create designs in her baskets. “These are my gold,” she says.
(Sara Prince / For The Instances)
She grows the basket rush (Juncus textilis) reeds that make up the weaving threads of her baskets in an enormous galvanized metal water trough exterior her Goleta dwelling and searches within the close by hills for different reeds: primarily Baltic rush (Juncus balticus) to kind the bones or basis of the basket and skunk bush (Rhus aromatica var. trilobata) so as to add white accents to her designs.
All her basket supplies are gathered from nature, and her instruments are easy family objects: a big plastic meals storage container for soaking her threads and the rusting lid of an previous can with different-sized nail holes to strip her reeds to a uniform dimension. Her baskets are principally the yellowish brown colour of her important thread, strips of basket rush made pliant after soaking in water.
The basket reeds usually develop a reddish tint on the backside a part of the plant once they’re drying. “These are my gold,” she mentioned, as a result of she makes use of these quick ends so as to add reddish designs. Or typically she simply weaves them into the principle basket for added aptitude.
The one different colours for the hampers come from skunk bush reeds, which she has to separate and peel to disclose the white stems beneath, and among the basket reeds that she dyes black in an enormous bucket in her yard.
“That is my witches’ brew,” she mentioned laughing as she stirred the viscous inky liquid contained in the bucket. “We’ve to make our personal from something with tannin — oak galls, acorns or black walnuts — and let it sit to dye it black.”
Hammel-Sawyer is outstanding not only for her ability as a weaver, however her willpower to grasp strategies that went off form for practically 100 years, mentioned anthropologist and ethnobotanist Jan Timbrook, curator emeritus of ethnography on the Santa Barbara Museum of Pure Historical past, which claims to have the world’s largest museum assortment of Chumash baskets.
“Susanne is likely one of the only a few up to date Chumash individuals who have actually devoted themselves to turning into expert weavers,” mentioned Timbrook, creator of “Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Data Among the many Chumash Individuals of Southern California.” “Many have mentioned they’d prefer to study, however as soon as they struggle it and understand how a lot time, persistence and observe it requires … they simply can’t stick with it.”
Susanne Hammel-Sawyer provides one other row to her thirty fifth basket, working from a straight again chair in her small front room, subsequent to a sunny window and the tiny desk the place she retains all her provides.
(Sara Prince / For The Instances)
In her eight years, Hammel-Sawyer has made simply 34 baskets of varied sizes (she’s near ending her thirty fifth), however she’s in no hurry.
“Individuals all the time ask how lengthy it takes to make a basket, and I inform them what Jan Timbrook likes to say, ‘It takes so long as it takes,’” Hammel-Sawyer mentioned. “However for me, it’s a approach of slowing down. I actually object to how briskly we’re all transferring now, and it’s solely going to get sooner.”
She and her husband, Ben Sawyer, have a blended household of 5 kids and 9 grandchildren, most of whom dwell close to their cozy dwelling in Goleta. Household actions preserve them busy, however Hammel-Sawyer thinks it’s essential for her household to know she has different pursuits too.
“If you’re older, you’ve to have the ability to discover a ardour, one thing your kids and grandchildren can see you do, not simply taking part in golf or occurring cruises, however doing one thing that issues,” she mentioned. “I want my grandmother and my father knew I used to be doing this as a result of it’s a reference to our ancestors, however it’s additionally trying forward, as a result of these baskets I’m making will final a really very long time. It’s one thing that comes from my previous that I’m giving to members of the family to take into the long run, so it’s value my time.”
Additionally, this isn’t a enterprise for Hammel-Sawyer. Her baskets are usually not on the market as a result of she solely makes them for household and associates, she mentioned. The hampers on the Santa Barbara Museum of Pure Historical past and the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Middle belong to members of the family who have been prepared to mortgage them out for show. The Chumash museum does have a few of Hammel-Sawyer’s baskets on the market in its present store, which she mentioned she reluctantly agreed to offer after a lot urging, so the shop might provide extra gadgets made by members of the Band.
For the final eight years, Susanne Hammel-Sawyer has used the identical previous can lid, punched with nail holes of varied sizes, to strip her moistened basket threads to a constant dimension.
(Sara Prince / For The Instances)
The one different basket she’s offered, she mentioned, was to the Autry Museum of the American West, as a result of she was so impressed by its reveals involving Indigenous folks. “I simply imagine so strongly within the message the Autry is giving the world about what actually occurred to Indigenous folks, I assumed I’d be proud to have one thing there,” she mentioned.
Making a basket takes so lengthy, Hammel-Sawyer mentioned, that it’s essential for her to concentrate on the recipient, “so whereas I’m making it, I can take into consideration them and pray about them. When you realize you’re making a basket for someone, it has a lot extra which means. And I’m so utilitarian, I all the time hope somebody will use them.”
As an illustration, she mentioned, she made three small baskets for the youngsters of a pal and was delighted when one used her basket to hold flower petals to toss throughout a marriage. Virtually any use is ok along with her, she mentioned, besides storing fruit, as a result of if the fruit molds, the basket will likely be ruined.
Baskets have been a ubiquitous a part of Chumash life earlier than the colonists got here. They used them for almost every part, from protecting their heads and holding their infants to consuming and even cooking, Timbrook mentioned. They put scorching rocks into their tightly woven baskets, together with meals like acorn mush, to convey the contents to boil.
“Individuals assume pottery is a better type of mental achievement, however the factor is, baskets are higher than pottery,” Timbrook mentioned. “They’ll do something pottery will do; you may cook dinner in them and retailer issues in them, and once you drop them, they don’t break.”
1. Tule reeds that grows in the yard in preparation of basket weaving. 2. Susanne Hammel-Sawyer weaves a basket. 3. A basket sits during a break in weaving with tools on a table. (Sara Prince / For The Times)
After Hammel-Sawyer’s first marriage ended, she worked as an assistant children’s librarian in Santa Barbara and met a reference librarian named Ben Sawyer. After their friendship turned romantic, they married in 1997 and moved, first to Ashland, Ore., then Portland, and then the foothills of the Sierras in Meadow Valley, Calif., where they took up organic farming for a dozen years.
Meadow Valley’s population was 500, and the big town was nearby Quincy, the county seat, with about 5,000 residents, but it still had an orchestra and she and her husband were both members. She played cello and he viola, not because they were extraordinary musicians, she said, but because “we played well enough, and if we wanted an orchestra, we would have to take part. I loved how strong people were there. We were all more self-sufficient than when we lived in the city.”
The Sawyers moved back to Santa Barbara in 2013, the year after her father died, to help care for her mother, who had developed Alzheimer’s disease. And for the next four years, between caring for her mother, who died in 2016, and the birth of her grandchildren, family became her focus.
But in 2017, the year she turned 70, Hammel-Sawyer finally had the space to begin looking at other activities. Being she’s 1/16 Chumash, she was eligible for classes taught by the Santa Ynez Band. She had seen several class offerings come through over the years, but nothing really captured her interest until she saw a basket-weaving class offered by master basket maker Abe Sanchez, as part of the tribe’s ongoing effort to revive the skill among its members.
Most Chumash baskets have some kind of pattern, although today people have to guess at the meaning of the symbols, Timbrook said. Some look like squiggles, zigzaggy lightning bolts or sun rays, but the wonder, marveled Hammel-Sawyer, is how the makers were able to do the mental math to keep the patterns even and consistent, even for baskets that were basically everyday tools.
Hammel-Sawyer is careful to follow the basics of Chumash weaving, using the same native plants for her materials and weaving techniques that include little ticks of contrasting color stitches on the rim, something visible in most Chumash baskets. She keeps a good supply of bandages for her fingers because the reeds have sharp edges when they’re split, and it’s easy to get the equivalent of paper cuts.
She keeps just two baskets at her house — her first effort, which “wasn’t good enough to give anybody,” she said, laughing — and a basket hat started by her late sister, Sally Hammel.
This basket hat was started by Susanne Hammel-Sawyer’s sister, Sally Hammel, but the stitches became ragged and uneven after Sally began treatment for cancer. She was so distressed by her work, she hid the unfinished basket, but after she died, Hammel-Sawyer found it and brought it home to complete it. It’s one of only two baskets she’s made that she keeps in her home.
(Sara Prince / For The Times)
“Sally was an artist in pottery, singing, acting and living life to the fullest,” Hammel-Sawyer said, and she was very excited to learn basketry. Her basket hat started well, but about a third of the way in, she got cancer “and her stitches became more and more ragged. She had trouble concentrating, trouble preparing materials,” Hammel-Sawyer said. “Everything became so difficult that she hid the basket away. I know she didn’t even want to look at it, let alone have anyone else see it.”
After her sister died in 2020, Hammel-Sawyer had a hard time finding the basket, “but I did, and I asked my teacher what to do, and he said, ‘Just try to make sense of her last row’ … So that’s what I did.” She added a thick black-and-white band above the ragged stitches and finished the blond rim with the traditional contrasting ticking.
The hat rests now above the window in Hammel-Sawyer’s living room, except when she wears it to tribal events.
“Sally and I were very close, and I think she’d just be happy to know it was finished and appreciated,” Hammel-Sawyer said. “Even the hard parts … deeply appreciated.”
