Basketmaking: Applying Two Analytical Lenses to a Pomo Making Practice

• In Event: Cultural Making: Practices, Priorities, and Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives: Inspired by Barajas-López & Bang’s (2018) work, this case study of a Pomo culture keeper’s basket making practice serves as a microcosm for the tensions uncovered during a 3-year co-design project around a wellbeing focused Indigenous makerspace. Moreover, it offers a concrete example of the worldviews embedded in Pomo making practices.

Theoretical Frameworks: This presentation analyzes an example description of a Pomo making practice using two different frameworks. The Make your Makerspace framework emerged early in the 3-year co-design makerspace project, when goals for the space focused on STEM education. This framework was informed by design thinking (Beckman & Barry, 2007), emerged through conversation and iteration with the larger university research team, and includes the following four elements: materials, technique, process, and product.

The holistic ecological framework captures the project team’s perspective toward the end of the co-design timeline, when goals for the space focused on creating an Indigenous Making Learning Ecology centered on Wellbeing. This perspective is named for Begay’s (2020) work and informed by Wilson’s (2008) depictions of relational Indigenous ontology and epistemology. In accordance with these relational perspectives, the holistic ecological perspective includes the following four elements: people, land/environment, cosmos, and ideas.

The project team’s goal throughout was to understand Pomo members’ views on making practices to inform the creation of a makerspace that would best serve them.

Data and Analysis: I present a 9-minute excerpt from a longer interview with two cultural keepers, an Elder mother and her adult daughter, in which they describe the process of making a Pomo cradle basket. I separately apply each of the above frameworks to this excerpt to evaluate the differences in elements and perspectives highlighted by each.

Results: Analyzing the interview excerpt using the Maker your Makerspace lens emphasizes the elements and processes required to make a baby cradle basket, facilitating a ‘clinical’ identification of materials (e.g., willow sticks, feathers), techniques (e.g., weaving), processes (i.e., the ‘recipe’ for producing an artifact), and products (e.g., baby cradle basket, clappers). Almost half the excerpt remained uncoded. Analyzing the basketmaker’s narrative from the holistic ecological perspective recategorizes some of these elements (e.g., “harvesting willow” describes Land/Environment rather than a material or process) and, more importantly, captures numerous elements previously left uncoded. Individuals described in the excerpt - great aunties and other family members - register under People. The blessing of materials, singing a song for the baby, and getting to know trees are emphasized and convey the community’s cosmological views. Ideas about the value of making (“it’s more the intention that goes into every single thing”) and definitions of wealth (“those things we make represent your wealth”) emerge as salient under a relational lens.

Significance: This description Pomo basket making practice exemplifies how practitioners identify and express their worldviews and values through making. It also cautions that these Indigenous perspectives can be (unintentionally) obscured by researcher decisions. As maker education expands to serve more learners, researchers and designers need to take care that the frameworks guiding such work preserve and amplify, rather than filter out, Indigenous perspectives and worldviews.

Author

• Elena Durán–López, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author