| Very little in the first part of
Susan Billy's life gave portent to the second, except for four small woven Pomo Indian
baskets. One twine, one feather, two coiled---woven by Susan's grandmother Susie, and
brought to Susan's Arlington, Virginia home by her father Ignatius---they rested,
prominent and revered, on a bookshelf. As a child, Susan understood their special quality,
but still they puzzled her: "I couldn't tell by looking at them how they came to be.
They were so perfect. I couldn't see a knot on them anywhere." Susan questioned her father: How did grandmother begin? How did she
change colors? How did she figure out the design? What does the pattern mean? Susan's
father---full-blooded Pomo from the Hopland rancheria (first from there to graduate from
UC Berkeley), with a career in Washington D.C. (Veterans Administration, Department of
Interior, and Bureau of Indian Affairs)---had no answer and said: "Perhaps when you
grow up you can find your Great Aunt Elsie Allen in Ukiah. She worked with your
grandmother. Maybe you can learn from her."
After high school, Susan left home, attended college for
two years, and traveled across the States. Yet, she says, "I knew Mendocino was my
journey's destination."
In 1973, in Berkeley, at age 22, Susan's path intersected
at the crossroads of serendipity and necessity---a chance meeting with an uncle and a lost
job. From her uncle, she learned that no one had lived in her Grandmother Susie's house
since her death five years before. Jobless, Susan moved to Hopland the next day. Two
months later she hitchhiked to Ukiah to meet her Great Aunt Elsie Allen, the best-known of
Pomo basket weavers. "You don't know me, but I'm a relative, and I would like to
learn about the baskets." Elsie, then 74, asked why, because until then, young people
had shown no interest. Susan replied: "I don't know, but I've been drawn to them all
my life."
Susan Billy---a presence, gentle but no-nonsense; face,
smiling easily; eyes, large and brown behind gray lenses glasses, discerning---worked with
Elsie until Elsie's death at age 91. "We worked all day, five days a week, [although]
there wasn't a set schedule. You don't make baskets unless you gather your own materials
and that's not according to the calendar, but according to the weather, the cycles, the
spirit."
In "the long time ago," the Pomos harvested
fourteen materials for baskets. Today they employ six to nine: sedge grass root, bull rush
root, new (gray) willow shoots, redbud, oak, spruce, willow root, hazel, and red willow.
These materials the Pomo weave their baskets from are harvested from the wild, casually
but not indiscriminately. As Susan explains: "You can't just drive along and say, oh,
there's a stand of willow, I think I'll cut some for baskets. [Even wild] they have to be
tended, like you would a vegetable garden . . . pruned to certain places to encourage new
growth . . . the sucker shoots, because they're long. It takes three years to prepare a
stand of willows no one else has harvested before it's right for baskets.
Elsie said, 'We have relationships with these plants. Talk
to them. See how they're growing. It is like visiting our relatives.'"
Sometimes, though, relatives live far from the weaver's
neighborhood. "There's no redbud here that is good for weaving. We have to go to Mt.
Konocti. There's no bull rush here. So, we go to Clear Lake." Sometimes relatives'
neighborhoods may be where they always were, but they have become a different place.
"For a couple of years we missed harvesting bull rush at Clear Lake. When we
returned, there was a boat ramp. It was filthy and disgusting. It was no longer safe. No
longer holy," Susan explains.
Susan Billy Teaching at Point Reyes
|
Susan Billy
Materials for Pomo baskets---of which at least twelve
distinct shapes exist---take days to weeks to gather and weeks to months to prepare. All
materials are sized because, as Susan continues, "you can't mix your sizes on the
same basket." Some are cleaned and scraped. Some are not; they are left to mature
without the intervention of the weaver's hand. Susan, though, sands some of hers.
"I've found sanding makes them like silk." Some are formed into bundles of
particular shapes and tied with rags so each bundle is alike in shape. Some basket
materials are left to nature's ways. All are dried---a year is the traditional length of
time.
Finally, the weaving begins. The designs---of which,
according to Samuel Barrett in his book Pomo Basketry, there are at least 281---are
not prescriptive; none are necessary or forbidden, although Elsie Allen said,
"Generally, we don't weave people into the designs." And animals are more
geometric patterns than representational. The time it takes to weave a basket varies as
that task fits into the weaver's life. For instance, a baby basket, may take three days to
make, if you do nothing else. Other types of baskets take weeks or months, or a lifetime.
Elsie Allen died in 1990, but not before anointing Susan in
the tradition. Elsie's words: "You know you're going to take my place. You're going
to teach and travel" initially met with skepticism, yet proved prophetic as the trail
of honors, books and legacy follows Susan in an ever-widening wake. In 1990 she began
research for what became the 1994 exhibition, Remember Your Relations: The Elsie Allen
Baskets, Family and Friends. Held in Ukiah's Grace Hudson Museum and in the Oakland
Museum of California, Susan was a guest curator. She also co-authored a documentary book
by the same name. Twenty-three weavers were represented in that collection, seven of them
living when research began and only two when the show opened. One of them was Susan.
In addition, since 1990, Susan has been the featured weaver
or guest curator at New York's Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum, National Museum
of the American Indian/The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., The De Young Museum
in San Francisco, the Mendocino County Museum in Willits, and last year in an exhibition
at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. where she presented Pomo
basket weaving techniques. She also provided the HBO movie Grand Avenue, produced
by Robert Redford and written by Greg Sarris, with original Pomo artifacts and basketry
coaching. Susan's sole proprietor business, Bead Fever, in downtown Ukiah, is in its tenth
year.
She says: "When people ask me if this is a craft, I
say no, it's a spiritual path. It's certainly not about money. People think you can make
money on Pomo baskets. I think non-Indian art dealers make money on Pomo baskets. It's not
true for the weavers themselves."
This is Susan's 26th year learning about and making Pomo
baskets. What started as an ember of cultural curiosity burns even brighter today. "I
had no commitments when I started and my parents were very supportive. I don't think
anybody thought I would ever do this, or that I knew. But I felt this spirit call."
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Contributor Sandy Thompson has written for Artweek,
Coast Magazine and many other publications, particularly about the arts. |
