Coiled Basketry in British Columbia: The 1928 Monograph

Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region, by H. K. Haeberlin, James A. Teit and Helen H. Roberts under the direction of Franz Boas, appeared in the 41st Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1928). It remains the deepest published study of the coiled basketry of the Interior Salish peoples, the Secwepemc among them.

Boas framed the project around the artists: "The problem that I set myself was an investigation into the attitude of the individual artist toward his work. Much has been written on the origin and history of design without any attempt to study the artist himself." The field research was Teit's, conducted in the makers' own language among Nlaka'pamux women whose "basket-making tradition was still very much alive."

The monograph traces the geography of the art: all Interior Salish tribes of British Columbia "once made coiled basketry of cedar or spruce root," coastal groups learned it from the Thompson and Lillooet, and "the direction of diffusion of the art in British Columbia was from the interior toward the sea." It records how women gathered cedar roots in June "when the sap is running," split them with knife and awl, and sewed watertight coils decorated with beading and imbrication.

It is also a document of loss and survival. By the 1920s the Shuswap, Lake and Okanagan "make almost no coiled baskets," while Thompson and Lillooet production continued at full strength. The authors admit that "complete data from the Shuswap can not be obtained at this period."

The book carries its own griefs: Herman Haeberlin died young with his analysis incomplete, and Teit died in 1922 with his notes unfinished, partly because he had set the research aside for Indigenous rights work. Helen Roberts wove the surviving manuscripts into the final text. The full report is freely readable at the Internet Archive.