Weaving a Life

Clara Neptune Keezer has lived all of her 77 years within a two mile radius, and for 69 of those years she’s been weaving fancy baskets. The oldest of 10 children, she wove her first basket at the age of 8.

Home is a small, single-story brick home at Pleasant Point (Sipayik in Passamaquoddy, her native tongue), where every day, she eats at the small table in her kitchen, clears it off, and begins the making of baskets. She shapes them around blocks of hardwood and cedar, forms that determine the final product, and decorates them with curls, diamond twists, crisscrosses, rainbows, spirals, and woven braids of sweetgrass—designs that the Farnsworth Art Museum has called “contemporary and innovative.” She works in series now, laying out four or five baskets at a time.

The box of tools with which she will split the strips of ash lies nearby. Made with clock springs and wooden handles carved to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand, some are her grandmother’s—she has never thrown one away and still uses them all. Although she has had to patch them, she prefers them to her newer ones with X-acto blade edges that break down more rapidly.

A Passamaquoddy elder, she was raised by her grandmother, a Penobscot from Old Town, and her grandfather, a Pleasant Point native. Two sons are basketmakers; one is a wood carver. All of her boys pounded brown ash for her for years: It takes four hours for the pounding of a log to release the fibers and allow the peeling of the strips. Two or three poundings later, the log has been exhausted—only the beginning of the long process toward a basket.

Basketmaking is the oldest art form in North America, practiced for thousands of years, but, according to the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, in which Keezer has been instrumental since its beginning in 1993, it is practiced by a very few.

In 2002 Keezer was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, only one of three Mainers to win the award since it was established in 1982. Her work has been shown at the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Abbe Museum, the Wabanaki Arts Center Gallery, the Pequot Museum, and the Colby College Museum of Art, as well as included in a national traveling exhibit—although Keezer is too quietly humble to tell you all of that. Pieces just slip out in casual conversation.

Today, two large plastic tote tubs hold over 100 baskets, waiting for the annual Maine Indian Basketmakers Sale and Demonstration at the University of Maine held in December each year. After the market, Keezer will spend the winter, as she always does, making more baskets, refilling the tubs for the Native American Festival in Bar Harbor in July and waiting for another Red Sox season. A diehard fan, she never misses a game, although she’s been known to “miss the end.”

How did you learn to make baskets?

By hanging around and watching [my grandmother]. That’s a lot of learning how to do things.

Did your grandfather make them, too?

He made the bigger baskets—scale baskets, laundry baskets, potato baskets. The men made the baskets that were needed for work, but we don’t need them as much anymore.

And so the lines have blurred?

Yeah, men and women make fancy baskets now.

How important was basketmaking when you were growing up?
Very important. It’s how we lived. Almost everybody made them.

Do any of your children make baskets?

I have two sons that make. I had two granddaughters that apprenticed with me, but they didn’t stay. It takes a lot of patience. That’s something the young people don’t have much of.

So are there fewer basketmakers now?

Yes and no. Less than when I was growing up, but more than 20 years ago. If we didn’t have the alliance [the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance], there’d be none. No new ones. They’d just be dying off.

Are the materials you use readily available?

I use the traditional materials, brown ash and sweetgrass. The men used to get the ash. They’d have to pound it, then strip the strips off the log, and then split it, scrape it, gauge it. My husband used to go cut ash at Boyden Lake. None around here at all anymore. They have to go way up to Aroostook County. But most of us buy it all pounded and split now from Eldon Hanning [Micmac basketmaker].

How did you figure out what designs you would work in?

I got the curls from my grandmother, and the diamond twist from my mother. And lots of others, we all worked in. Then I tried every which way that I could making new designs, and then using both in one basket.

Have the forms you use been passed down in the family?

Some.

Are they guarded and treasured?

Well, I have them in the corner over there! [She laughs and points to a corner in the kitchen.]

Are baskets valued differently now?

Oh, yeah. In the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, I was getting about 25 cents a basket for the small ones. That size [she points to a medium-sized basket] about $1.50. Now the little ones are 25 or 30 dollars, and the bigger ones, 200 or 300. I used to make 10 or so handbags a week for $1.50 apiece.

I bet they’re worth a lot now.

I don’t know. A collector at a show at Colby College had one. I knew it was mine right away.

Do you sign your baskets?

We do now, but then we didn’t. You just know your work.

How?

I can’t really say, but you do. Each maker is so different. We know it even if others can’t see it.

How long does a basket take?

If everything’s already prepared, could be a few hours or a couple of days.

We live in a world that tends to forget a lot about its culture. How does one hold onto it?

Pretty hard, I think. Like the language. I speak Indian. It was around me all the time. We all spoke Indian, and English, too. My grandfather always said, “Speak Indian first and then learn the English language, too. You will need both to get along in this world.” But that isn’t so anymore.

Are there any hot young basketmakers we should pay attention to?
Well, there’s a young [man], Jeremy Frey. He goes everywhere to learn different weaves, and his work is very good. He tries new things.

Basketmaking isn’t practiced like it was, in a lot of the homes, so young ones can just even “watch.” Will it survive?
I hope so, but that’s hard to say. Hard
to say.