Identifying Intrusive, Non-Indigenous Basketry in Museum Collections

My esteemed colleague Ellen Pearlstein and I recently had an article, "Identifying Intrusive, Non-Indigenous Basketry in Museum Collections,"  published in Museum Management and Curatorship online. The link is at the bottom of this post. The print version is pending; Volume 36, Issue 1. First, a bit of background on how it came to be.

Ellen and I collaborate every two years, when the graduate students in the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials program work on the basketry component of their training. Professor Pearlstein works with Indigenous weavers to introduce her students to the art of basketry, and borrows baskets from tribal museums for the students to treat. The students research the baskets, analyze the conservation issues, propose conservation treatments, and perform them. Prior to performing the treatments, a few basket weavers and scholars such as myself are invited to examine the baskets, listen to the students' proposals, and lend our expertise.

On one such day in 2018, I cautioned that one of the baskets was not, in fact, Native American. This agreed with what one of Ellen's consulting Kumeyaay weavers had said, that it was not a Native Southern California basket. Made of raffia and rattan (fibers not native to North America), it was what I had seen called an "Indian School" basket in various museum catalog records. I explained some basics to her:  sometimes they were made from kits by non-natives during social gatherings akin to quilting bees; their manufacture was often linked to the American Arts and Crafts Movement; I'd never been able to find good references in the literature. Intrigued, she wanted more information. If there weren't references, then we should pursue this. And we did.                           

                                      Photo: Rattan imported from China (B. Potter).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Detail, raffia stitches on a rattan foundation. Photo: B. Potter.
Courtesy Museum of Riverside, Riverside CA; basket A430.8

From November 2019 to late February 2020, we visited museum collections and gathered our data. Then we had the COVID-19 lockdown. Future museum visits were prohibited, and museum staff members were absent from their collections or limited in their ability to provide information to us. Thus we proceeded with which I alliteratively dubbed "the Pearlstein & Potter Pandemic Paper."

open access to the article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09647775.2021.1873828