Basketmaker Continues Abenaki Family HeritagePhotos By Mary Fratini
“Traditionally, Abenaki men spent the winters trapping and hunting while their wives and children made and stockpiled a collection of baskets,” Brink explained. “In the spring, the men returned to the reservation with their furs, and then left again for a summer of selling the baskets.” Each family had a specific destination to which they returned every year; the sites included Atlantic City, the White Mountains, Saratoga Springs near Lake George, and Highgate Springs in Vermont. Brink’s great-grandfather sold his wares at Thompson’s Point in Shelburne. “The men stayed at their sites all summer, selling baskets of every shape, size, color and design that you can imagine,” Brink said. After spending many summers in the same place, the Abenaki men often received offers of employment. Brink’s grandfather became the caretaker for one of the new camps sprouting up for vacationers around Vermont, this one in Charlotte, and relocated from Odanak permanently. His children, including Brink’s grandmother, joined him in the late teens and early twenties. Brink’s grandmother and great-aunts were all basketmakers and continued to sell their products door-to-door after leaving Quebec, but the tradition began to die out with Brink’s mother’s generation. Her mother and aunts learned neither the language — Western Abenaki — nor basketmaking, largely because their parents wanted them to be fully acculturated into Anglo society. Despite the break, Brink remained aware of the long history and tradition of Abenaki culture that permeated her life. “We always heard my grandmother and her siblings speaking Abenaki, although we never thought to ask what they were talking about!” she said with a laugh. “I would often ask my grandmother how to say something in Abenaki, or watch her while she made a basket, and then go off to do something else and not think about it again.” Brink’s interest in her heritage returned while pursuing a bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Norwich University’s Vermont College campus in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. She was studying business administration and took a class with Rhoda Carroll on contemporary Native American literature. For her final project, Brink turned to her mother’s collection of family artifacts and information that had been in the background, but which she had never really looked at before. The items included some of her grandmother’s baskets, as well as books about Abenaki culture and interviews of her family from the 1950s conducted by Dr. Gordon Day, a curator at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. After that project, Brink changed her concentration to Native American Studies and focused on learning everything possible about the language, literature, history and culture of her people. “Part of what I studied was basketry and I realized that this tradition wouldn’t continue if I didn’t do something about it,” Brink said. Brink, who was been making baskets for over twenty years now, recalled her first attempts with great humor and chagrin. She took a one-day class with a non-native basketmaker and then left the half-finished project sitting on her shelf for months. A self-described perfectionist, Brink couldn’t bring herself to work on the basket because she was unsure of the next steps and didn’t want to make a mistake. “But then my mother came over one day, saw the unfinished basket, and explained that traditionally you learn by making bookmarks first because it is the same design as the bottom of a basket,” Brink said, displaying one of her early bookmarks, a three-inch circle of woven sweetgrass attached to splints of black ash. “She said that girls would have to weave hundreds of bookmarks until they could sell some of them; only then did someone teach them how to make baskets.” Brink spent the next four years weaving bookmarks, basing her designs on examples she bought at two powwows and experimenting with weaving single strands of sweetgrass so she could choose the exact color and shade. When she was finally satisfied with the bookmarks, Brink moved onto making baskets. “But I was teaching myself, so I did everything wrong, but didn’t have anyone to ask about it,” Brink recalled. After four years of self-teaching, Brink became the first recipient of a new apprenticeship program sponsored by the Vermont Folklife Center and began two years of study under Sophie Nolett, an Abenaki basketmaker in Odanak. Brink traveled to Quebec for one weekend every month and Nolett came to Barre for one week every summer. “Sophie’s an amazing woman, so full of life and also a very knowledgeable taskmaster,” Brink said. “I had to produce, I had homework every month and she used to tell me that I would never make a living at this because I was too slow!” Nolett became a teacher, mentor and friend to Brink over the course of the apprenticeship. “We didn’t just make baskets. Sophie would tell stories the entire time; that’s part of the tradition and it was a one-of-a kind cultural experience,” Brink said. Now, with three apprentices of her own and two others scheduled to start soon, Brink is a master in her own right. All of her students are of Abenaki heritage; Brink will not share the knowledge outside of the culture. “It was part of my deal with Sophie,” she explained. “I agreed to teach only other Abenakis in order to preserve the cultural tradition and heritage.” Brink’s baskets range in size from a custom-ordered napkin holder down to a dollhouse decoration the size of a fingernail. Although she makes smaller baskets largely out of preference, it is also becoming increasing difficult to find the appropriate materials. The baskets are made from woven sweetgrass and ash splints. “Abenaki women have traditionally been very spoiled because the men would pound the growth ring off the ash trees, split it, and then shave the rough side off,” Brink said. “But it’s a hard job and today I know of only one man in Vermont that is pounding and splitting ash.” Once the ash is prepared, it needs to be cut with gauges of varying sizes. A gauge is made of a block of pine that fits in your hand and has a row of evenly spaced blades at the top edge. To slice the splint, you dampen it with a sponge (or traditionally, with your mouth, leading to many splinters, Brink said); hold it against the gauge with your thumb and pull it across the blades with your other hand. The gauge blades are made from clock springs, which are now almost impossible to find, according to Brink. She has a few traditional gauges from Sophie — antiques, really, since some of them are more than one hundred years old — and some that are homemade. “Someone at Odanak generously gave me some clock springs, and my husband Doug designed some new gauges with a locking clasp to hold the splint against the blades,” Brink said. “But my apprentices have had real problems getting their own, and without gauges you can’t cut your own ash and have to depend on other people.” The third element to basketmaking is sweetgrass, which can only be gathered once a year in July. “You have to pick enough for the whole year and it is getting very difficult to find because of development,” Brink said. Interstate 89 destroyed a large bed in Highgate and Brink recently lost her local supply when a beaver dam flooded the field, leading to more berries, weeds and goldenrod in place of the sweetgrass. Even without the flood, Brink would have lost that source, however, because an absentee landowner recently posted the entire area against trespassing. In the past three years Brink has traveled all the way to the coast of Maine to gather sweetgrass. Recently, the USDA office in Burlington has helped procure sweetgrass plugs for planting, and Brink planted her own bed in a child’s broken wading pool. “It’s actually just about perfect for the sweetgrass because it maintains enough moisture, but still allows for drainage,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to grow your own sweetgrass; the plugs usually grow about 12 or 18 inches tall as compared to almost five feet in Maine.” With all the materials in place, Brink can begin on the basket, which is woven from the bottom to the top very tightly around a wooden mold. Then she removes the basket from the mold, and makes a cover around the finished basket. Brink lists four elements to a well-made basket: a tight weave; a clean finish on the outside and inside of both the cover and the bottom, with no pieces sticking out; a tight-fitting cover that fits snugly enough to allow the entire basket to be picked up by the cover without its coming off; and the top should cover the wide splint finished with sweetgrass that is at the rim of every traditional Abenaki basket. “I could never produce en masse like my grandmother did; it’s too monotonous and I’m too busy to make very many baskets these days, most of which go into museums or exhibitions,” Brink said. In addition to her own baskets and apprentices, Brink also serves as the coordinator for the W’Abenaki Dance Troupe and speaks to local groups almost weekly about Abenaki history and culture. The Vermont Historical Society has a teaching kit it lends out to schools that includes her family genealogy, a bookmark, finished basket, and samples of sweetgrass and splint. Brink said she never intended to make basketmaking her career; she wanted to ensure the continuation of a family tradition. “So often people don’t start looking at their heritage until their 40s, and that’s so unfortunate because by then the older generation has passed away,” Brink said. “I really encourage people to start collecting their family stories, especially children. There are things that I wish I could ask my grandmother now and I can’t. But I know that she knows what I am doing and she is pleased.” Mary Fratini is a freelance writer living in Montpelier. She thought Jeanne Brink’s first basket ever was a masterpiece, although now she knows why she was wrong. |
Jeanne Brink makes mostly smaller baskets. “I like to have something I can get my hands around,” she says while rifling through her cupboard of supplies. She is a master Abenaki (pronounced Ah-BAN-ah-kee) basketmaker, continuing a family tradition that stretches back over two hundred years. Her great-grandfather, originally from the Odanak Reservation in Quebec, moved to Vermont in the early decades of the twentieth century.