Sneak Peek: Kelly Church Podcast

Jo Reed: You once said that basket making isn’t just what you do but it’s who the Northeast people are. I’d like you to say more about that.

Kelly Church: Yeah. The native nations of the Northeast. So it would be the Nishnaabe. That’s all of us in the Great Lakes area. The Iroquois and the Haudenosaunee, which is the New York areas, and the Wabanaki, up in the Maine area, and it is something that’s just integral to our people, but I do believe it’s that blood memory that makes it so precious to us. You know, why do we love this tree so much? It’s the stories that we hear from our ancestors, it’s the stories we hear from our families. I fell in love with basket weaving from hearing the stories that my grandfather told about him and his mother harvesting trees, weaving baskets… I come from an unbroken line of weavers, so we’re not really sure where they started, but we do have a picture from 1919 of our family weaving. So with that picture I’m fifth generation. My daughter’s sixth generation. So it’s just something that has been sustained in our family.