To attend, you must RSVP. Members only, please. Send an email with the subject “August 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.

Margaret Mathewson recently completed a 6-year grant studying Western Indigenous basketry in European and Russian museums with tribal members from California. Her presentation will feature highlights from some of her adventures including some very wonderful older baskets and their histories and sleuthing to find proper documentation. Each basket has a complex 'life history' that can sometimes be traced with a little research.

Margaret is a scholar, teacher, and basket maker, weaving traditional styles since 1980. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she did graduate work at UC Berkeley focusing on contemporary issues in the maintenance of ancestral ways among Native peoples in California. She also did post-doctoral work at the Smithsonian studying old basketry collections and working with tribes to revive traditions.  

Margaret is currently retired from teaching at Oregon State University and works on and off in museum attribution, and technical and material attribution for various organizations, as well as teaching basketry classes. A resident of Oregon, she runs the Ancient Arts Center, a retreat and school with classes in basketry, food ways, spinning, dying and felting, hide tanning, carving, pottery, stone and bone tools, and other skills from around the world.

Her own basketry work is a mix of ancient and modern, and reflects her studies of the traditions of Europe and Japan as well as North America. All her work uses natural materials.