Handed Down - Nevada Arts Council

1997–1998
Shoshone Winnowing Trays:
Leah Brady, Avrilla Johnny and Marian Sam
On a cold December afternoon the living room
of Elizabeth Brady’s house in Elko is alive with
laughter and talk and the smell of fresh willow. Old sheets
are draped over laps and furniture to catch the willow
shavings, and the conversation turns to last month’s
adventures of looking for willows in nearby Starr Valley.
Master weaver Leah Brady, who is Elizabeth’s daughter,
is visiting from Fallon for a few weeks to teach her older
sister Marian Sam and another younger relative, Arvilla
Johnny, how to make winnowing trays. On her first trip
to Elko in November, the three went out looking for
their willows, which must be gathered between late fall
and early spring when the plants are dormant. Leah says
they look on mountainsides, because willows growing
too close to water will be weak. It will take about 100
willows for the body of the tray, and even more for the
threads to weave with.
Arvilla Johnny and Marian Sam work at cleaning and
splitting willows.
Willows for the “spokes” of the tray need to have the
bark and inner membrane scraped off while they are still
fresh. The willows for threads also need to be cleaned
and split into thirds right away, making for a busy time
right after gathering. The trio is almost finished with
their first batch and is planning on going to Ruby Valley
the following day to get more. Willows are getting
harder to find as more land is fenced and more willows
are cut by the highway department or sprayed with pesticides;
because they are held in the mouth while being
split, sprayed willows can be very dangerous.
Leah Brady
with one of her
winnowing trays.
All three women
remember
their grandmothers
weaving, but
they never took
the time to learn
the art themselves
until later in life. Leah recalls, “Grandma Alice used
to be out in the front yard all the time making baskets.
We never even paid attention or nothing to what she
was doing, we just kind of ran around the yard. I can
remember her working on baskets all the time, and it
never interested us. I don’t recall anybody even trying to
encourage us to watch, it was more like we were in the
way. A lot of this went along with the treatment that
they had gotten, like at boarding school. [They were
told] you need to go to school, that stuff isn’t considered
important. And now that people are interested it’s
hard to find anybody to help and show us things. There
are a lot of areas where they don’t have anybody left
to show.” Leah made the effort to watch and talk to
older women, including her own mother, to learn willow
work on her own.
Leah is also an accomplished bead worker, but she
finds a very different sense of accomplishment in working
with natural materials. As she explains, “Beads are
beautiful just strung on a string, you don’t even have to
do anything to them to make them look pretty. But here
you’re taking a stick, and you turn that stick into something
which is completely different than doing any type
of beadwork, or even buckskin, it doesn’t have the same
feel because you’ve created something out of a stick. It’s
hard for people to understand, it’s just like clay, you’ve
taken earth and changed it into something, and you end
up with a pot that is nothing close to what you started
with. And that’s how it is with willow, it’s just a feel that
you’re creating something that wasn’t there.”
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