Arlene Skinner's Alutiiq Basketry (published 2005)

Arlene Skinner's Basketry

Anchorage Museum of History and Art exhibit catalog

By Drew Herman

Known for tight weave and fine detail, the traditional basketry of the Aleuts/Unangan peoples of the Aleutian Islands transformed a method for making practical objects into a medium for cultural and artistic expression that anyone can appreciate. By mastering the technique of Aleut basketry, Kodiak artist Arlene Skinner has found a home for her expressive talents. Of Cheyenne and Sioux heritage,

Skinner has lived on Kodiak Island in the heart of Alutiiq (neighbors of the Aleuts/Unangan) territory since 1960. There she learned the imported Aleut technique, making it her own, carrying on a tradition from a region she has never visited herself.

Born on the Northem Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, Skinner attended grade school in Montana and Seattle. She married a Kodiak fisherman and moved to the island in the Gulf of Alaska, where she has raised five children and has pursued several textile crafts.

"It makes me feel good to use my hands," says Skinner.

While her work usually has a strong aesthetic side, practical application formed a common thread. Crafts like quilting and knitting, in addition to their practical use in a growing family, proved to have a powerful spiritual value for Skinner. She came to depend on the quiet time at the end of the day when

she did such work: "I didn't feel complete unless I created something." Learning the Aleut tradition added a different dimension to her craft work. "I didn't think of them as art until the basketry," she said.

Basket weavers make their products literally from the ground up, combining physical effort and ecological awareness with an artist's attention to detail. The process begins with gathering and curing beach rye while it's green, between late June and late July. Later in the season the grass gets coarser, and Skinner prefers pliability. "You pick right after the heads come out," she said. Exactly where the grass grows matters, too, since the blades get too coarse at heads of bays where they have to stand up to stronger winds.

The gathered grass must stay wet, and from a pillowcase full of picked grass, Skinner makes a bundle only as big as her wrist, keeping it wrapped ten to fifteen days.

"The color fades out and you get a pretty golden shade," she said. Sometimes only one or two blades eighteen to twenty-four inches long from the center of the bundle turn out just right. "Your basket is only as good as the curing," Skinner explained.

Arlene Skinner found her way to Aleut basketry through a class at Kodiak's Baranof Museum. Her teacher, Eunice Neseth, had learned from Anfesia Shapsnikoff, who was born on Atka and lived in Unalaska. Shapsnikoff sometimes visited her son who worked in a Kodiak bakery.

During a visit in 1956 she became ill and spent some quiet recovery time practicing the traditional art. When Neseth and other Kodiakans saw the beautiful, tiny baskets, they asked the visitor to teach them. In regular visits over many years, Shapsnikoff passed her Aleut art along to dozens of new weavers in Kodiak. After Shapsnikoff's death in 1973, Neseth continued teaching, and later Arlene Skinner led

classes at the museum and the local college.

According to Ray Hudson, the art's continuity gives it a special place in the history of Alaska Native culture, providing an "unbroken link" between today's Unangan (Aleut) people and their ancient ancestors. Hudson, a teacher in Unalaska from 1964 to 1973, was also a basketry student of Shapsnikoff. She asked him to help write about her art and preserve the tradition, and they collaborated on an article that appeared shortly after she died, and which has become a classic text on Aleut basketry (Shapsnikoff, Anfesia T.,  Aleut Basketry, Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska; v. 16, no. 1 (August 1974), Fairbanks, University of Alaska Press, 1974). The writings and classes were only part of Shapsnikoff's efforts. She traveled quite a bit giving talks about Aleut culture. Shapsnikoff, who was literate in several Aleutian dialects, felt the unique basketry held a central place in that culture. "It was something that identified a person as Aleut, as Unangan," Hudson said.

Basket styles from one island to another can be partly distinguished by the raw material, the Aleutian

grasses, with those of Attu and Atka considered finer than that of Unalaska (or Kodiak). According to Eunice Neseth, the original weavers from Atka made special trips to Attu to get the best. "They just wouldn't think of using any other grass," she said in a 1983 radio interview. "Usually Anfesia concentrated on the Attu technique," Hudson said. Today, highly skilled and artistic practitioners of traditional Aleut basket weaving- some of them relatives of Shapsnikoff keep the art alive in the Aleutian Islands. Thanks to Shapsnikoff and other teachers, including those she trained, people from other areas and traditions like Arlene Skinner and Ray Hudson have been able to take part. Skinner

estimates she has taught about three hundred students over twenty years in Kodiak.

Skinner said she learned in part so she could transmit some of their Alaska Native heritage to her own daughters, and she made them take her class. "Two out of the four really enjoy it," Skinner said. Her situation is nothing new. According to Neseth, Shapsnikoff was too restless and tomboyish to learn basket weaving from her own mother, whose work she remembered as so fine she compared it to silk. Later she settled down enough to learn the art in school in Unalaska, where her aunt was the teacher. Skinner has further refined her work through studying the diagrams and descriptions in the article by Shapsnikoff and Hudson.

Her participation in the Earth, Fire and Fiber juried art exhibitions at the Anchorage Museum challenges Skinner to stretch to new ideas. She has introduced blue trade beads and red heart beads woven into her original patterns, and even incorporated pieces of amber and turquoise sent by her aunt in Arizona. As she continues to develop the art of basketry, Skinner chooses not to promote her work through galleries, finding that it digs too far into her creative time.

And the demands of traditional basketry leave little room for drumming up business. "It's hard on your eyes and it's hard on your shoulders," Skinner said. Nor can inspiration be rushed. The weaver always looks at her work with satisfaction and feels a strong bond to the finished baskets.