Handed Down - Nevada Arts Council

1997–1998
Shoshone Beaded Willow Baskets:
Bernadine DeLorme and Linda Johnson-Comas
Traffic on the freeway hums just beyond Bernie
DeLorme’s backyard at the Reno-Sparks Indian
Colony, and the Reno Hilton looms not far to the
east, but sitting in the shade on an August afternoon
surrounded by willows and beads, we could be a hundred
miles and a hundred years away. Bernie comes from an
artistic family (her mother Lilly Sanchez was a master in
the apprenticeship program and has received a Nevada
Governor’s Arts Award) and has been weaving round
baskets for over 25 years; her apprentice Linda Comas is
already a skilled bead worker and has taken to willow work
like a duck to water. The two have known each other from
the time Linda was growing up across the street from
Bernie and her husband Norman, and participated in a
youth craft and dance group the DeLormes organized.
Linda learned back then the value of tradition and the
importance of doing things with care and quality, and
has carried those lessons with her ever since.
Bernie has some of her work out on the card table
where they are working. There are simple round willow
baskets, a few inches in diameter and decorated
with dark designs made from devil’s claw, and some extremely
tiny ones, covered with beads the size of grains
of sand. The most spectacular is about ten inches in
diameter and eight inches high, decorated with cobalt
blue and orange beads depicting three rows of circling
butterflies. It recently won the best of show award at the
annual Wa-She-Shu-It-Deh Native American Festival
at Lake Tahoe, and deservedly so. Linda also has some
of her beadwork with her, like belts, hair ties and beaded
bottles, and her artistic eye is also evident.
Both women say they are never sure how a
piece will turn out when they start. Sometimes
a round basket turns out oval, or one
row of beaded butterflies metamorphoses
into three. Linda likes to start with one
color of beads and see what works; Bernie
has dreamed of beadwork designs, or used
colors she recalls from a sunset.
Just as the world around them is fodder
for the imagination, the ordinary objects of
life are also available as basket making tools
if you know how to look at them. Bernie
uses a dart as an awl for making holes between
her basket coils so she can push the
split willow threads through. She gave
Linda a jar lid punched with various size nail holes—it
is used to pull the threads through to make them all the
same size. And Bernie wears a heavy work glove on her
left hand as she splits the bark off her willows instead of
wrapping her fingers in rags as her elders used to do.
It’s traditional for a first basket to be given away as
a gift, so Linda gave her first one to her 19-year-old
daughter for Christmas. As she explains, they were having
some difficulties at the time. And Linda used the
basket as a lesson. “We were going through a really bad
time and she’s going to do what she’s going to do and
mom don’t know anything, and she was just driving me
up the wall. I gave her my first one, and I told her, you
see, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I kept going on
and going on with it and not really knowing what I was
doing, but it still came out looking halfway decent. Being
real blind at doing something like that, but to still make
it work. And I said I need you to understand that that’s
something that you could do in your life, no matter how
many times you mess up, you can always straighten yourself
up, start over, learn something from that.”
Linda Johnson-Comas (left)
and Bernie DeLorme work on
baskets; Linda’s beadwork and
Bernie’s baskets are on the table.
Bernie DeLorme coils and wraps
her split willows.
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