Our Lives in Our Hands: Micmac Indian Basketmakers

Terrence Paris is Public Services Librarian at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

The tribal elders of the Aroostook (Maine) Band, one of the 29 bands of
the Micmac nation, have celebrated the basketmaking tradition of their
people by assembling a museum collection of baskets and tools, with
appropriate documentation. They are also responsible for the production
of a documentary film (1985) and this book, both titled Our Lives in Our
Hands.

The book is a collaborative effort: the introductory essay (“Micmacs
and Splint Basketry: Tradition, Adaptation, and Survival”) is written
by Bunny McBride, an Aroostook Band researcher and advisor, and Harald
Prins, the Aroostook Micmac Council anthropologist. Donald Sanipass, a
former band council president and master basketmaker, photographed the
craftspeople whose biographies, based on interviews by McBride, form the
second part of the book.

The introductory essay outlines the ethnography and history of the
Micmac people from precontact to the present. Weaving with cattail,
sweetgrass, spruce roots, or Indian hemp was a traditional occupation;
splint basketmaking using ash, cedar, maple, or spruce wood can be
traced only to the late eighteenth century. The baskets were sold or
bartered to whites and supplemented a meagre income derived from labor
appropriate to the season and locale—lumberjacking, clamming,
blueberry picking, trapping, potato picking—and to gender—fancy
weaving, beadwork, and quillwork were female tasks, while the men wove
fishing creels and pack baskets. The seasonal, nomadic life of the
people called the Wabanaki echoed their ancient wanderings by foot,
canoe, or sled in search of the animals and plants needed to sustain
life—big game, seals, salmon, eels, berries.

The Micmac crafted both utility and fancy baskets; many were decorated
with dyed splints, braided sweetgrass trimming, and curlicues to satisfy
the Victorian tourist’s taste for the exotic. In this century the
Maine “podado diggin’ ” boom of the 1920s to the 1960s, before
the advent of mechanical harvesting, created a demand for potato baskets
woven by the same Indians who worked as field pickers and in the
“potato houses.” Now the baskets are valued for their artistry, and
the craft has become somewhat more lucrative. David Sanipass of Presque
Isle, who was born in 1958 and has become a master blacksmith as well,
represents the younger generation, with its renewed pride in basketry as
an ethnic and a family tradition. The future is uncertain: the valuable
stands of brown ash have been decimated by acid rain, fertilizer runoff,
and overharvesting.

This book will appeal to everyone interested in the culture of Native
peoples and in traditional crafts. By including an ethnohistory of the
Micmac and allied peoples, McBride and Prins have offered more to the
reader than the book’s subtitle might suggest.