Handed Down - Nevada Arts Council

1993–1994
Washoe Baskets:
Amy Barber and Jody Barber Steele
On a sunny summer afternoon, Amy Barber sits
on the sofa in a warm corner of her little house
near Woodfords, California, and lifts a damp spiral of
split willow from a bowl of water. With an awl held
between the last two fingers of her right hand she works
an opening between the coils of a basket and inserts
the new willow under the end of another split willow
and wraps it tightly around the coils. Amy works with
rags wrapped around the fingers of her right hand so
she won’t be cut as she pulls the willows taut. A stitch
at a time, she shapes round baskets of pale willow with
dark bracken fern root designs, as her Washoe ancestors
have done for generations.
Amy Barber has lived all of her 85 years in the tiny
Washoe community at Woodfords on the Nevada-California
border, and she is used to making creative use
of the resources around her. She talks matter-of-factly
about grinding pine nuts in the hollow of a big rock
outside, cooking acorn soup by heating it in a basket
with hot rocks, and boulder hopping across the Carson
River canyon to find willows. Her mother and grandmother
were basket makers, and Amy used to help them
gather and prepare willow when she was young. She
started making baskets when she was seven or eight,
but stopped when she got older and only returned to
the craft in her senior years. She now has a houseful of
round baskets, which she mostly makes for friends and
family members.
Jody Steele
learning to split a
willow.
Amy Barber working on a round basket.
Amy’s granddaughter Jody Barber Steele knows her
grandmother is a cultural treasure, and spends as much
time as she can in the little house by the creek at Woodfords.
Jody also learned the basics of basketry as a child,
from Amy, and now in her mid-30’s, with children of
her own, she is coming back to the tradition. Amy has
showed her where to find good willows, and watches
with amusement and sympathetic advice as Jody struggles
to learn to split willows into three parts to make the
threads for sewing a coiled basket.
“People see the basket already made, they think it’s
easy, but it’s not that easy,” Amy explains. “The hard
work is where you get the stuff first, the material. If you
haven’t got the material you can’t make it.” Jody continues,
“Then knowing how to prepare it. I think it’s easy
by comparison to do the basket, to actually weave it.”
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