Basket Weaving in the Tohono O'odham Tribe

Basket Weaving in the Tohono O'odham Tribe

The Tohono O’odham tribe has been weaving baskets for at least 2000 years. Although the reason for weaving has changed through the years the Tohono O’odham are still using the same weaving styles as their ancestors. Basket weaving for the Tohono O’odham has gone from an everyday essential to a prestigious art form. Basket weaving for the Tohono O’odham represents an active way of preserving their culture, valuing traditions, and creating bonding ties within the tribe; consequently weaving has transcended into an economic resource.

Basket weaving has played a large part in the culture of the Tohono O’odham tribe. Baskets were used mainly for practical purposes in the past. They were very important in the every day life of the tribe. It was the women's job in the tribe to weave the baskets. The baskets were used to haul grain and food. Many baskets were woven so tight that they were used to hold water and liquor. Baskets were also very important in ceremonies, such as the Rainmaking Ceremony.

In ceremonial practices, scared objects were often placed into baskets. The ceremonial baskets were made especially for different ceremonies and were never used for every day purposes. Sacred objects were sometimes single fetishes and sometimes collections of objects brought together though the years and kept in a ceremonial basket (Underhill 24). The proper way to keep fetishes was in an oblong basket of twilled yucca (Underhill 24). This oblong basket was called a waca, not to be confused with the ordinary coiled basket, which was called a hoa. It was very important to the tribe not to keep scared objects in regular baskets. People who owned a fetish kept their basket packed with eagle down, deertails and periodically “fed” the scared object with cane cigarettes and even food (Underhill 24-25). They could not move the baskets with out a ritual, which was part of the ceremony for food or purification. If anyone who was not authorized to move the basket touched it, the tribe believed a flood would come. The ceremonial baskets are very important to the Tohono O’odham tribe for a lot of their religious ceremonies.