Basket-making: from traditional craft to gallery exhibit | Made from this Land

I'm Gabriel Frey, basket maker, gezitacik, obnakik. I am a, I say 13th generation, I grew up in a family of basket makers, we've always made baskets. I didn't really start making baskets until I was around 18, and that was when my grandfather was diagnosed with emphysema. I kind of got a sense of the precious nature of the work that has always been in the family, but suddenly there's this time frame on how much I can learn, right, when you get, you know, your grandfather has turned three years to live, you know, okay, that's a whole life of knowledge that you need to now cram into it. Our creation story is based in black ash, right, we have the mythical figure of Gluskup who shot an arrow into an ash tree, and within the heart of the tree was Wabanaki people. It's actually part of our, the fabric of who we are, and that's why it's so sacred to us, and that's why we always try to protect the resources that mean so much to us. My ancestors found out that, you know, ash was a very strong, strong, strong material, you know, that can make bows, it can make tools, it can make a lot of things for their everyday survival out of ash, and one of those things were baskets. I broke a couple of axe handles before I actually figured out how to do it. It's incredibly labor-intensive, and it's a very difficult process, but within that, it embeds those lessons deeper. They're not just objects, right, like each basket has a job that it, that carries through its own life, it has its own life. There's one story I think of, and that's Charles Solomon. When he couldn't pound the ash anymore, he still didn't want to give up. He got people in the community to donate Venetian blinds to him. What he would do is he would take the Venetian blinds apart, and he would still weave baskets out of Venetian blinds. You know, that was so inspiring to me because, you know, if it wasn't for the fact that you love making baskets so much that you would, if you can't use a traditional material, you would actually go to a non-traditional material to create something. He made art out of necessity, because he just didn't want to stop doing what he loved, right? And I always wanted to make just a big silver basket, so I started to make this one here. And this one here really reminded me of Volusta, the river. You know, the double curve on the bottom really is the water, right? But the actual shape of this basket is kind of like a water drop, so I really wanted this basket to reflect Zamogwin, which is water. It's all based in traditional knowledge, but we have so many artists now that are really seeing the value in that traditional knowledge and then learning it and then taking it beyond what it was ever used for. So it's literally like taking parts of our traditional homeland, our culture, and sharing that with people. And when it's used, that's the sharing, that's the part of our culture that remains alive, right? I mean, that's kind of the purpose of not only art, but also culture.