Handed Down - Nevada Arts Council

1996–1997
Shoshone Baskets:
Darlene Dewey and Melanie Bryan
When Darlene Dewey was born in the mid-1940s
at Yomba, in the Reese River Valley of central
Nevada, the Shoshone natives of the area still lived in
tents. Her family didn’t move into a house until she
was three years old, and even then they spent most of
their time outdoors, raising their own food in a garden,
hunting, gathering wild plants, and raising cattle.
Darlene’s daughter Melanie recalls that there wasn’t
even electricity or running water at Yomba until she was
in high school in the 1980s. It’s a remote place, and as a
consequence Darlene was raised with many traditional
skills, among them willow basketry.
She was the youngest of 13 children and something
of a tomboy, preferring to be out helping her father with
horses and cows, but her mother did teach her how to
gather, clean and weave with willows. “She’d make me
sit down and say this is how you clean it,” Darlene recalls.
“She always told us you start something, you finish
it. She said don’t put it down, just finish it, and that’s
the way your life’s going to be.” Melanie heard the same
lessons as a child: “They give you a task, and whether it
be basketry or whatever, whoever is teaching you, if it
was their specialty, they would make you complete it, so
that when you got older you wouldn’t be lazy, and plus
you would know how to do it.”
The impetus for this apprenticeship came from
Melanie, who has two small children of her own and
wanted to be able to pass her culture on to them. “The
thing that bothered me was that I couldn’t speak my
own language,” she explains. “And I wanted my kids
to be around it and know these things, know how to
do the willows and stuff. I wanted my mom to spend
time with us. She’s always on the go, you know, you can
never just make her sit down and this is the only way,
otherwise she would have been gone already. When I
was little I saw my grandma do it, but I never had the
opportunity to really try it. You need to be able to practice
with somebody going, ‘no, like this,’ or ‘you pull.’
You have to have someone to show you and to teach
you how to feel it. I wanted this for my kids, to see that
their grandma and I were taking interest in this. And
now they’re interested. You know, they’ll come over and
they’ll help me, and now they know how to do it.”
Melanie Bryan
(right) singing
songs with a group
of Head Start
children.
Small twined
basket made by
Melanie.
Darlene
Dewey splitting
willows for a
cradleboard.
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