Celebrates the state's distinctive cooking, a blend of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo influences.

This strong, handsome, informative and attractive book gives penetrating views of the richness of the traditions, the current state of the art and the beauty of the products. Arresting photos from historic sources as well as images of current baskets are well chosen and forceful.

Abstract: "Native American women from the American Southwest have always used basket weaving to maintain relationships with nature, their spirituality, tribal histories, sovereignty, and their ancestors. However, since the late nineteenth century, with the emergence of a tremendous tourist industry in the American West, non-Indians have perceived Native American basketry as a commoditized practice with no connection to tribal traditions or spirituality. Non-Indians often viewed Native American women basket weavers as submissive individuals who became part of the market economy and abandoned their tribal traditions. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists and art historians believed in the narrative of the "Vanishing Indian", which led museum officials to collect baskets as the last remnants of a "once proud people". Officials maintained these ideas until the 1990's. During the last decade of the twentieth century, Native Americans scholars pushed back against these dominant narratives by acknowledging the harsh realities of settler colonialism. Even more extraordinary, researchers placed Native American women at the center of their arguments to affirm their adherence to cultural traditions and their continual commitment to tribal continuity. Despite these accomplishments, however, scholars have not applied this research to American Indian women basket weavers. Because of this absence in the historiography, numerous non-Natives continue to believe indigenous basketry of the American West is an art form that lacks traditional methods, continuity, techniques, and cultural connections to communities. To combat these preconceptions, the following dissertation will examine the lives and works of four Native American basket weavers from California and Nevada, Basketry has always been a way to honor traditional values and assert a woman's individual sovereignty, as a tribal member and artist. This is because since ancestral times American Indian basketry has played a significant role in indigenous communities in California and Eastern Nevada. More importantly, this dissertation will focus on exploring the tremendous amount of power these women exerted when establishing boundaries over who they would teach their art form. Overall, the four indigenous women in this dissertation all show that basket weaving manifests unique pieces of art and have always been an important part of their identities and communities."--Pages iv-v.

Two photographers recreate a visual record of the 18th century friars' search for a route from New Mexico to California.

"This first volume features basketmakers from three regions: Southwest, Great Basin, and California"--Introd. (p. 5).

The origins of basketry are lost in the mists of prehistory, but making baskets is certainly one of the oldest and most nearly universal crafts of mankind. In the Americas, basket artifacts found in caves in Utah have been dated at 7000 B.C., while twined baskets said to be at least 5,000 years old have been uncovered in Peru. In the American Southwest, an entire Indian culture (ca. 100–700 A.D.) is known as "Basket Maker" because of the distinctive baskets it produced. This exhaustive survey (two volumes in one) of American Indian basketry, perhaps the finest book ever published on the subject, documents basketmaking throughout the Americas — in Eastern North America, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, Oregon, California and the Interior Basin, as well as Mexico, Central and South America. Spanning a wide range of indigenous cultures (Aleutian, Tlinkit, Shoshonean, Athapascam, etc.), the detailed, carefully researched discussions in this book offer a wealth of information about woven and coiled basketry, watertight basketry, materials, basketmaking techniques and preparation, ornamentation and symbolism, as well as the uses of baskets as receptacles, in preparing and serving food, for gleaning and milling, in mortuary customs, in religion and social life, in trapping, carrying water, and in many other areas of Indian life. An interesting and informative chapter on collectors and collections and the preservation of baskets, followed by a helpful biography, rounds out the book. In addition, the author, once Curator of Ethnology at the U.S. National Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution), enhanced this encyclopedic study with over 450 excellent photographs and illustrations. For collectors, preservationists, anthropologists, students of crafts and culture, modern basketmakers, this is an indispensable reference — a massively rich source of information about baskets, the peoples who made them, how they were made, and their role in native American life and culture.