‘Invisible Presence’ WSU Art Exhibit Showcases Indians’ Struggle To Keep Their Ancient Skills Alive

As her wrinkled fingers work hemp fiber into belts and bags, Sarah Quaempts hears echoes of her grandmother’s voice.

Growing up on the Yakama Indian Reservation, Quaempts followed her grandmother as she gathered the plant and wove it into tight containers.

“She’d make a big one and I’d make a small one,” said Quaempts, smiling.

Now her fingers are arthritic as Quaempts, 75, struggles to weave gifts for her own granddaughters. She pointed to hemp bags and baskets she has woven.

“When I die,” she said, “nobody will make this. Nobody learns this.”

Quaempts and about 15 other women, many of them elderly, demonstrated weaving and beadwork Monday at Washington State University as part of an exhibit of Plateau Indian arts. The 250-item exhibition was a decade in the making. Two elderly artists died before the exhibit could be finished.

“We live on the homeland of the Nez Perce and the Plateau Indians, and nobody talks about that. They’re an invisible presence,” said Barbara Coddington, former WSU Museum of Art curator who came up with the idea for the exhibit.

If the tribes were invisible, tribal women were even more so, she reasoned. So the exhibit showcases the work of women, such as corn-husk-and-cedar weaving, hide clothing, beading and porcupine quill work.

The exhibit, Coddington said, “is a chance for us to see that not everything comes from the machine.” It also is a chance to see art forms that tribes are struggling to keep alive. The skills practiced by Quaempts and her colleagues date to prehistoric times.

“This is only one of the things they need to know and remember,” said basket maker Valerie Calac, also a Yakama. “It reminds them who they are and where they come from.”

When Calac was 15, her grandmother taught her how to strip soft brown bark from cedar roots and how to split the root wood so it could be woven, too. Her grandmother would weave corn husks and sew elk skin to make bags, which she would trade for roots or dried meat.

“She said that whatever’s in your heart will come out in your design,” said Calac.

The exhibit, at the WSU Museum of Art through Dec. 15, includes beaded elk skin gloves, woven hats, ceremonial dresses, saddles, even a small tepee made of woven mats. One pair of gloves is beaded to spell out “Wm. Cree, 1917.” A bridal headdress shimmers with thimbles, Chinese coins and long, thin dentalia shells.

Museum officials say they expect 6,000 to 8,000 visitors. If so, the exhibit will be the largest at the museum in more than a decade. The artifacts are on loan from many museums.

With the help of Ann McCormack, a Nez Perce graduate of WSU and a house painter, exhibition officials compiled a 174-page book of interviews with Indian artists and scholars. Titled “A Song to the Creator,” the book details the techniques, folklore and lives of the artists.

Several artists said Monday they’re trying to pass their skills to their children and grandchildren.

“It’s like everything else. Our language is almost gone; now we’re trying to bring it back. A lot of people don’t teach their children,” said Geraldine Jim of the Warm Springs tribe in Oregon. She wore moccasins she’d made herself, tanning the skin with cow brains and smoke.

She learned beadwork from her grandmother, who worked during daylight because the family’s kerosene lamps weren’t bright enough.

“It’s very important to show people how Indians lived a long time ago,” said Elsie Selam, holding up bone-and-wood needles used for making hemp twine for salmon gill nets. “You could make everything,” she said, “from just what you had.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WSU exhibit The display of Plateau Indian arts features more than 250 items and will run through Dec. 15 at the Washington State University Museum of Art. Admission is free.