A Hand Craft to Accompany our Study of Native America

I often pair handcrafts with our history lessons. This keeps little hands busy while we are listening to our lessons and helps us to retain our lessons more easily. One of the many handcrafts that I chose for our Native American block last year was pine needle baskets. Today I’m going to share with you our process for making a small, humble pine needle basket.

An important aspect of this block for me was learning from material of Natives in their own voice. That means looking for indigenous teachers, authors, and sources for our block. I was happy to find a Nanticoke Lenni-Lenap women that has a series of YouTube videos making and talking about pine needle baskets of her people. I used this series to make our basket. One additional tip that I used from another video was the use of a paper straw to keep our needles together. 

In this post, you’ll find

Appropriation versus Appreciation

I feel for this block, because we are studying many peoples of North America, I must pause to talk about appropriation. If you are unaware, cultural appropriation is the taking (not being given) of an aspect of another’s culture for personal or monetary gain. 

Contrastingly, cultural appreciation is the act of admiring and supporting indigenous communities and people. Making and selling dream catchers is appropriation. Dressing like indigenous peoples is appropriation. Purchasing earrings or other crafts from indigenous people is appreciation. Respectfully attending powwows, enjoying the food, and purchasing from the vendors is appreciation. 

In several types of homeschooling styles – Waldorf, Charlotte Mason, Unit Studies, Eclectic, and Unschooling – we often have projects or crafts relevant to the theme of our study. As in this case, we are making pine needle baskets. There is a fine line here between appropriation and appreciation. It’s imperative that we have a conversation about appropriation with our children. Seek out Native Voices. Never sell these items. Keep within the spirit of appreciation.

I come to this humbly as a person still learning, and as such, I would like to acknowledge my privilege. This is not my direct ancestory, and what I have learned has been from others. The artisans that grow up in their culture have spent years learning and refining the craft. We do not have these skills. Their work often has deeper meaning with intention and prayer built into their craft. We are merely learning. We do no know or necessarily understand the nuances of this work.

Video Instructions by Tyrese Gould Jacinto

The video that I found to ‘teach’ us about pine basket weaving is from Artist Tyrese Gould Jacinto. She is from Nanticoke Lenni-Lenap tribe in New Jersey. You can find more of her work at https://www.nativeadvancement.com.

Supplies

We are lucky to live in an Upland Long Leaf Pine ecosystem where pine needles are readily available. The timing of this craft was serendipitous in that when we started the pine were dropping a fresh bed of needles. We walked out to harvest the needles. I have found that some people will supply pine needles on Etsy. 

We had learned from this point the concept of reciprocity from the many books that we were reading, my favorite of which was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. With this learning, as we collected just enough needles to create our baskets, we gave thanks to the tree for the needles.

Soaking the Needles

Like many other basket weaving techniques, the media needs to be soaked to be pliable. We soaked our pine needles in almost boiling water. We left them in the water for 15 to 20 minutes. Because this was a project that we did over several days, when we were finished working on our baskets for the day, we would wrap all our basket items with the exception of our sewing needles in a plastic bag and store them in the refrigerator. This allowed our materials to remain pliable throughout the project. 

Making of the Basket

There is definitely a little skill needed to make the basket. You can see that in the beautiful indigenously made pine needle baskets in comparison to our own. There were a couple of aspects of the making that were tricky. One was keeping the needles together as we worked. Another was the addition of the pine needles which needed to be added to the center of the bundle of needles. Both of these were helped by the use of a straw. 

Our straw was a paper one left over from another project, but I think a plastic one would have worked just as well. The width of the straw determines the thickness of the pine needle basket. With this in mind, we opted for a smaller straw. 

The center was by far the most challenging. After the center was well established, the rest of the basket was easier. This may come in useful to know if you want to scaffold your child by making the center or if you want to lend encouragement during the project. 

Video of our Process