Gabriel Crow

Partial Transcript: My name is Gabriel Crow. I’m a Cherokee basket maker out of Marion (? ). I’m 26 years old. I learned how to do it from Lucille ( ? ) there taught me back when I worked at the village as a high school student. I was 15. I learned under then under a mentorship program that they offered at the village at the time. I come from a family of wood carvers and stone carvers. I didn’t grow up in a traditional basket-making household like most basket-makers. I grew up in a wood-carving household, but I didn’t care to learn how to do wood carving. That, as I say, it’s in your blood to do it. It wasn’t in mine. I didn’t like to do it. I done my first basket in cultural ( ?) school and that’s the first thing I remember the most. The thing I picked up from that, though, was just the weaving. You don’t hand kids a knife and a blade and just expect them to just scrape splints and stuff at that age so I just wove. It wasn’t until I got into high school that I learned the material-making process – and that’s a whole – based on the phone – 85% of that work is, you know, the prep. And 15% of it is the actual weaving. That’s why I learned that while I was in high school. So I’ve done that for most – half of my life, basically, at this point. I work at Harrah’s Cherokee Center now as a table games dealer. I deal there, but I do this as a supplement to my income. Back in the day, they didn’t do that. It was a little bit different than it is now. But I learned under them. I do white oak, maple, and river cane, and I work a little bit in hickory. I’ve learned from mainly ( ? ) It wasn’t until I got into my later years, which is now my 20s, that I tried to pick up the older methods that have been and have been forgotten. As I went along my basket-making journey, I learned white oak first from Lucille ( ? ). They taught me how to scrape the splints – break everything down. And I kind of did it backward. I worked from learning how to do the splints to the basket and then I wanted to learn how to do the prep because one thing that I learned from Butch and Louise ( ) is that their mom had told them – well, Butch – Louise’s ( ? ) mom had told her there’s a difference between a maker and a weaver. A weaver is somebody that, if you give them the materials, they can take that basket – er – they can make a basket. They don’t know how to go and do any of this that me and Mary and Betty know how to do. A maker is somebody who can come out to the materials, get the correct materials, and learn how to work it up from then on. And also know how to get the dyes and the right correct amount of trees. As opposed to a maker, as I said, a weaver only knows what the base materials are and not how to make it from there. They don’t know nothing about the seasons. When to go out and gather the stuff. They don’t know what type of trees are correct to use. They don’t know what ( ? ) cane to get. And the biggest thing difference between a weaver and a maker that makes the baskets turn out differently is a maker knows how that material is supposed to bend. A maker knows how that material is collected and harvested and what kind of things it goes through and knows exactly how it's supposed to be prepped. As opposed to a weaver who just knows how to do scraping and trimming and a little bit of weaving. That’s really about it. So I learned all that on my own after learning the initial stuff from Lucille and Ramon ( ? ).

Partial Transcript: Yeah, pretty much. I done my first two or three years as a weaver and then slowly progressed to becoming a maker. I actually was first a white oak basket maker. And then, I thought I’d never pick up river cane cause I thought it was too hard at the time. Of course, all the high school students say a kid doesn’t really pick that up as easily but eventually, I became a maker as I progressed more into my weaving.

Partial Transcript: Well, it’s like how Betty and Mary said about not that many of them left. If you take all of us together, there’s 18,000 raw members today. Only 12 of us know how to do everything from start to finish, and most of the ones that are in that 12 are over the age of 30. Me and one other person under the age of 40 that know how to do this from start to finish. That’s two people that’s under the age of 40 that know how to go out and do all of this. That’s very low. That’s not even 1% of 18,000 members that know how to do this. So it’s a rarity at this point. I really think that came from the times changing. Back then, you had to do this to survive. This was your income. This was how you survived, and, as tourism got bigger, it kind of deluded it down to where, you know, you didn’t have to do this for survival. You didn’t have to do this to supplement your income anymore. And the younger generation is kind of half and half. They’re picking it up and some of them aren’t. But they’re not picking it up everything like they should be like people like Mary and Betty went through growing up. I ( ? ) like me. I didn’t grow up in that type of household where I grew up where you had to do it. My parents had a job at the casino or they had a job worked at somewhere else, so they didn’t have to have that to supplement their income. I had to go out on my own and find that. So that’s a difference. That’s a big difference today. You have to want to go out and find it. You have to go out and want to find this information You can’t – you can’t get it in the household anymore like you used to. Some families still do, but, in my case, like in my case a wood carver. I picked up wood carving, but it's of no use to me other than handles and ( ? ) sticks, but I’m a basket maker, so I had to go find that information for myself. I couldn’t get that anywhere else.

Partial Transcript: I mean, there’s a good bit of that that I still do, but I’ve taught classes where I’ve taught people older than me how to basket make and weave. It’s more or less of just picking it up and wanting to do it knowing that it’s a part of you. And that’s something that was instilled in me early by my parents. I believe a lot of that comes from your parents. Your parents are the ones that are supposed to tell you that all this is yours. So why not use it. It’s yours. It’s nobody else’s. There’s a lot of people out there in the world that wants to be native but aren’t. And then there’s a lot of people that are native here that don’t even bother picking it up. But it’s ours. It’s part of you. Why not take advantage of it? It’s yours.

Partial Transcript: It’s a calling.

Partial Transcript: I think it’s a calling because I’ve tried all the crafts. I took a handful of them but I didn’t fall in love with them like I did basket making. A lot of people complain about the work that goes into it. It never felt like work to me. It never once felt like work to me. I enjoyed it actually a lot to sit there and bust cane and bust stuff and prep it up and work it up. And that’s another thing about the day and age that we live in now is the instant gratification Like everybody wants things now. You can buy – you can go out and buy this stuff like ( ? ) basket making. What makes it such a hard craft is the prerequisites that it has. You can’t go out to a craft store and buy this stuff. You can go out and buy reed and stuff, but a basket maker is going to call you out on it because it’s fake. It’s pre-made. This stuff, you can tell from the instant that you start working with it, it’s real. And a lot of times, too, is people just want things now. They want it quick. They want it in a hurry. And that’s, I think, a really rare thing to find now is people that’s willing to put in hard work at the beginning to receive the reward at the end, which nobody my age, I would say, has that anymore. And that comes with the digital age and things like that that people forget that we came from a time like Mary’s time where you didn’t have per capita. You didn’t have all these tribal benefits that we have now and we have a cozy lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy it, and I’m thankful for it, but they had to go through all the hardships that we didn’t have to. That’s why they don’t understand what this stuff is now.

Partial Transcript: So, back to that, I worked at the museum for a while, and I worked in the cultural district for a long time – ten years. So what I learned is a lot of our villages, before European contact, that we had actually was near river cane patches because a lot of our crafts require it. Carving tools for pottery was out of sticks of cane that was carved down. Blow gun, ceremonial objects. And not only that. Animals. Animals came
(conversation with unknown woman)
But, yeah, like I was saying, river cane patches. We had all our patches (airplane noise) But all of our villages were all down in the valleys, so when you went down in these valley areas – especially Murphy, Peachtree area. Where these villages were found, there were patches of river cane near there. All of our river cane patches were associated with villages cause we never lived on the hillside like people thought we did. We lived down in the valley cause that’s where all the animals come to drink water. That’s where the clay is when we need pottery. That’s where the river cane was for our baskets that we needed. What was a couple other questions that you had?

Partial Transcript: As of right now, I think we’re a little bit late to the game. I mean, they’re doing it now, which is great. There’s never, I guess, a late time to start, but if they had started this revitalization ten, twenty years ago, you would have caught people like Eva Wolf. You would have caught people like Edmond Youngbird. These older ones that knew more than what we know now. If we had got this information twenty or thirty years ago, we’d probably be better off now with our basket making than all our other crafts when these other legacy people were still alive. Like she was saying, ( ? ) in the last 2002 and 2004, they were, they literally were the last two, besides Carol Roach, but she only done white oak, but, yeah, they were the only three that knew how to do river cane. And even right now, the old river cane rim, that’s only unique to us. In the whole United States native culture, that river cane style of rim that we do with the hickory lace and the hickory rim. We’re the only ones that do that. Out of every single tribe, we’re the only ones that do that. And the fact that that’s pretty much almost died out. There’s only a hand-- maybe three of us, that know still how to do it. And I do it on my baskets, but nobody else does that other than our tribe. And I think that’s something that we should keep ( ? ) that we should keep doing it because that’s one of the things that was uniquely us that we done. And that was almost to a point that that was almost gone. And I see Carol Roach. Sadly, she’s suffering through dementia, so she probably don’t even know how to do it anymore. And that’s one of the sad cases where we don’t catch these people before they’re already in the state that the information is gone. A lot of people in the past five years that’s passed on, there’s probably been a lot of cultural information that’s been gone just because nobody cared to pick it up which, I mean, they probably did, they just didn’t know where to get it. And it’s gone now. There’s probably still people that have it, it’s just that the whole thing is seeking it. You have to go seek it. If there’s nobody seeking it, then it’s just going to die with them.

Partial Transcript: There’s the one that I mentioned earlier to Mary. It was the painter one. I think it was – they called the red man ( ? ) and that story they brought up how hunting was involved. How we got some of our hunting. The one thing – key thing – I took about it is when they killed that snake, they talked about its blood where it was so toxic and it was an evil creature, that when its blood ran off the hillside from killing it, it ran into this lake and it turned that lake solid black. And then they said that’s where the ladies would take their strips and run them through the water to turn the strips black. And that’s how we have our black dye today. And if you think about it, a lot of the stories – the myths and legends that we have – have deeper meanings than what the base thing is. Just the base things right there, but the people have to take it and run with it and that’s why I’m associating where we get our butternut dye for black. Somewhere in that story has to correlate with that because that’s where we get our black dyes from that. And that story mentions how we’ve run the strips through that water to turn our strips black. And Cherokees are known – in the timeframe, Cherokees were part of the big fur trade that was running through at the time. What people don’t know – a little thing behind that – number two second-most traded thing was river cane baskets. With the British, specifically. It was the second most traded thing – object that the British valued the most beside the fur trade. And the pottery and then some of the stuff ( ? ), but there’s so many historical documents that record river cane baskets being the most sought after thing. Even today, they’re the most sought after thing. If you throw a couple white oak baskets and you throw a couple river cane baskets, people’s going to want those river cane baskets more than the white oak cause they’re more valuable. Just because we’ve worked with river cane for tens of thousands of years, and like you say, ( ? ) of plastic. That is true in a sense cause river cane is the only thing that has two grains that run through it. Everything in nature only has one grain, especially trees only have one grain. River cane has two. That’s why it’s circular the way it is. When you break it down, you can see the fine grains that run straight up and down. That has top grains that’s on the top that’s actually like it’s growth rings at the top so when you bend it, that’s why you can bend it in all the different directions, because it’s so flexible like that. That’s why it’s such a flexible material to work with.
Patterns and stuff, too. That became a big thing and about the late 1800’s, all throughout the 1900’s til now, patterns have been a big thing. The names are still there, but the meanings are lost and that was due to boarding schools. But a lot of the patterns that we have have just recently been documented in a pattern book that came out in 2000, but before that patterns were passed down through mother-daughter, family to family. Some families have certain patterns that connect to their families specifically. One of the recent patterns that I can say that connects to a family is Jim Long’s pattern of a spider pattern. You can tell that comes from the Long family because he created it. And even today, any pattern that we create is traditionally Cherokee because we are Cherokee. So say if I was to create a pattern today, and it gets passed down my family, then that’s a traditional pattern at that point. Like Mary, if she was to create a pattern today, and it got passed down to her daughter Sarah and so on and so forth. At that point, it becomes a traditional pattern from the moment that it’s put onto a basket and down. And I consider that Cherokee because it came from her. It came from me. It came from Jim Long. As opposed to a white person making a pattern. That’s nothing. That’s nothing. It’s who you are that puts that tradition behind it at that point. And what people don’t realize that, I won’t say easy, but hard, is you don’t have to sit there and figure out something brand new. It’s already been figured out for you. You just have to do it. That’s it. You just have to do it. That’s it. And that’s the hardest thing about it is the prep work. People quit doing the prep work. They see the work and they’re scared of it, but they don’t realize that you can’t go out – like I said – it all ties around. You can’t go out and buy this stuff. Where else are you going to get it? You’re going to have to speak to your Elders to get it or somebody that knows how to do it. And that ties into the whole thing with community, too, is that that’s where it started. Like the double weave and the single weave. All this started probably one or a couple people that’s been passed down generation to generation. The double weave is the oldest method today that we have that’s been found. Especially places like ( ? ) Cave and most of the cave systems around here they find river cane fragments around here. A lot of them that they find is woven in a diagonal fashion which the double weave is woven in a diagonal fashion.
There’s a couple of things that were lost like diagonal mats. That’s something I want to bring back. Me and Mary’s actually had a conversation about that about a month ago. But back then they were mats that were woven diagonally. That hasn’t been done since then probably for -- during contact. But from that time to now, they’ve been lost so that’s something I want to try to bring back – the diagonal style mats.

Partial Transcript: This cane’s older than I am. It’s older than Mary. It’s older than the oldest person in the Cherokee and it’s been passed down from generation to generation to generation. And it’s grown up alongside us. As we’ve changed, it’s changed. And, in a sense, we’re dying out with it. With the culture as the cane’s leaving. It’s only going to stick around as long as we stick around. If we go out, the cane’s going to go out with it, cause there ain’t going to be nobody there to preserve it – to keep it going. It’s basically who you are and you have to take pride in that. And I think that’s one thing that’s missing from a lot of people my age today is that they don’t realize two or three generations before that, this is what their grandparents used to survive off of. They had no way of making money but this. For a good example of that, ( ? ) Bradley, she would trade a basket and get a cart so she could take her other baskets and trade them. If she didn’t do that, her kids were going to starve and die and a lot of families around here had that same situation. If they didn’t do the arts – cause we didn’t have tourism at the time. That was the only thing that we had to survive off of. Cause people had these large families so kids could tend to gardens and they could do all this art work – and well now it’s art work – so they could do to survive so their survival was tied to this art and stuff so it has a deep history alongside us. It’s as much you as you are it, if that makes sense. And with that being said, though, about the language. You don’t got language without no crafts. You don’t got no crafts without no language. Because we – this stuff’s been here before we even had language. So the language is tied to the stuff as it is. Like river cane, it has a Cherokee name. But it was here way before there was a Cherokee name even put to it. So if we lose one thing, you lose another. Everything’s inter – it’s almost like a basket itself – it’s interwoven with itself – with language, culture, traditions, foods, medicines. Everything’s interwoven with itself with us. So if you lose one aspect of that, you lose everything else essentially.