by Deborah Gabriel Brooks, Passamaquoddy Weaver, 2021
EQUITY, HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS, AND POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE
In creating baskets, we strive to promote cultural knowledge by utilizing the inherent power of our basket weaving and sweetgrass braiding to build new relationships that strengthen and embrace positive social change. Our baskets skillfully weave narratives about our ancestors and their amazing endurance, adaptability, and artistic resilience through the evolution of contemporary work that is based on cultural traditions. The immense struggle and cultural clash our ancestors experienced during early colonization deserves recognition and baskets help to tell their story. The life and tradition of our ancestral relatives deserves to be known and shared, for it is through them and their struggle that we carry the fire forward to weave baskets today.
The continuity of the traditional practice of basket weaving moves forward despite threats of material shortages from the Emerald beetle’s decimation of brown/black ash trees. Even though the creative expression of traditional arts in our modern world can be challenging, cultural wisdom can endure into the future if we, as artisans, provide the way despite the challenges. Any challenge that leads to opportunity is ours collectively to meet in whatever way we can.
There is power in weaving – it makes visible the tradition that created it and provides a lens into the past through visual imagery. Woven art breaks down barriers as it touches the heart and permeates the soul.
It is our hope that the weaving of our basketry can help to create a more sustainable future for our cultural heritage at the social level of understanding. We believe that as individuals begin to change, society changes through the slow rhythm of its movements. Social change is a slow process, and yet, individual efforts can produce progress toward our shared goal of a more equitable future.
We are all in relationship with one another and the created world. Using natural fibers and materials, the art of basketry moves beyond ordinary barriers of space, time, language, and limitations of understanding to establish new and healthy relationships. We focus on the power of basketry to promote a more positive image of our Wabanaki communities. Let’s collaborate as a global culture in a movement toward equity, healthy relationships, and positive social change.