Captive Baskets: Contemporary Indigenous History of California Basket Collecting and Repatriation Policy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The vast majority of baskets in Californian collections were woven in the past 150 years and yet they are often displayed as separate from their contemporary histories; posed as ahistorical relics of a static imagined past. Rather, basket collections as social beings contain a contemporary past that is fraught with the realities of settler colonialism, Indigenous persistence and the creation of the Californian academy. By studying the practice of California basket collecting I hope to better understand the interplay of settler colonialism and basket collecting and examine repatriation and NAGPRA policy within basket collections. My aim is to understand what aspects of the contemporary Indigenous history, a term coined and explored by Beth Rose Middleton Manning, of basket collecting can the archive illuminate. I propose that when basket collections are seen as social beings they portray larger intricacies about ecological change, land stewardship, and cultural revitalization. I will present my preliminary findings from my interdisciplinary methodologies of archival research and heritage ethnographies from Univerity of California Davis, the California Academy of Sciences and the Bancroft Library.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53763