Ed and Dale will present a richly illustrated talk about ancient basket making and invite visitors to interact with the ancient basket replicas they make. Dale and Ed also will launch their brand-new publication, Reawakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry (available for purchase and signing).

The event celebrates the arrival of one of Ed’s Archaeology Baskets into the museum collection. This basket embodies memories and identities from four time periods spanning 4,500 years of Coast Salishan basketry. Held in conjunction with our latest exhibit, The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving, this program will provide a very deep time perspective of these practices.

Ed Carriere was born and raised on the Port Madison Reservation at Indianola, Washington. He has woven baskets for about seventy years, learning the art from his great-grandmother, Julia Jacob, who raised him. He started at 14 years old to learn the old Salishan tradition of split cedar limb basketry. Since then, he has mastered a wide variety of baskets including sewn coiled baskets, mats, and woven clam and burden baskets and hats. Ed and Dale have teamed up to replicate the 2,000 year old Biderbost wet site archaeological pack baskets from a site near Seattle (housed at the Burke Museum). They will bring their replicas to share and discuss their “generationally-linked archaeology” approach from their new book.

Photo credits: Dale Cross