General Meeting with Beth’Ann Gipson, Indigenous Basket Maker

 Thursday, October 20, 2022, 6:30 pm PST, online via Zoom 

To attend, you must RSVP. Members only, please. Send an email with the subject “October Zoom" to ColumbiaBasinBasketryGuild@gmail.com. Please put your full name and email address in the body of the message. We will email you a meeting invitation a few days before the event. 

Basket woven by Beth’Ann with roots she gathered and processed. Ornamented with a bear claw.

For the past ten years, Beth’Ann Gipson has been studying and learning the traditional basketry skills of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians in the hopes of bringing a dying craft back to life. She and several others began studying with members and master weavers of the Yurok and Karuk tribes of Northern California. Their goal has been to learn the skills to harvest, process, and weave baskets of their heritage. Many of the traditional basket designs have not been woven in nearly a century.

With the help of a $5,000 grant from the Traditional Arts Recovery Program Beth’Ann is continuing her work to advance the knowledge of the Cow Creek Band’s traditional basketry designs. Her main goal is to bring back a tobacco basket. The grant has assisted in helping fund teaching resources as well as travel and lodging for the weaving group to collect the natural weaving materials.

Beth’Ann’s current project is a Wolf Eye basket. This is a traditional design that has not been attempted in the past 100 years. Only one exists in the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians collection.