Southwestern Indian baskets : their history and their makers /

Five years after Clara Lee Tanner's monumental Indian Baskets of the Southwest (1983), Whiteford (Beloit College) has added another milestone to the growing appreciation of the oldest and most widespread art and craft tradition surviving today among Indian tribes in the Southwest. For this book, he focuses on Southwest baskets housed in the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research in Sante Fe, fulfilling his goal "to make the holdings of the School known and available for public appreciation and scholarly research." He includes a complete catalog of this outstanding collection of some 600 baskets from the San Juan Paiutes, Navajos, Apaches, Yuman-Pai, Pima and Papago (O'odam), Hopi, and other Pueblo groups. The book contains excellent illustrations (130 black-and-white and 14 color plates). Going beyond a descriptive presentation of materials, techniques, form, design, function, and historic and social context for the baskets of individual tribes, Whiteford adds highlights of conversations with contemporary basket makers, both elders and the younger generation, at the various Southwest reservations and Pueblo villages he visited during his study, sharing with the reader "a basket maker's-eye view of how the baskets were made and how aesthetic and technical conventions evolved through time." Although once made principally for utilitarian purposes, today most basketry is made for ceremonial use and as fine art, highly skillful aesthetic creations produced for sale to traders, collectors, and tourists as a vital source of income. This comprehensive treatment adds immeasurably to the importance of this publication for a wide and varied readership. H. H. Schuster Iowa State University