From my mother I inherited a beautiful cedar root basket tray, and because I liked it so much my partner started giving me cedar root baskets for my birthdays. But it was when I was doing research in the museum in Yale that I became really interested in cedar root baskets made by Nlaka’pamux women in that region. There I found a gift form listing artifacts related to All Hallows in the West School. My excitement was piqued by the list of baskets that named the makers. These objects, donated by Aida Freeman, came from the collection of her mother Kathleen Edith (Pearson) Southwell who had been a student at All Hallows in the West. Kathleen had collected the baskets from makers living in the southern interior of BC, near her home in North Bend.3 This article looks at the history of basket making at All Hallows in the West and explores why it was included in the school’s curriculum.
All Hallows in the West was a mission school for Indigenous girls founded in Yale, in 1884 by three nuns who came from the Community of All Hallows, in Ditchingham, Norfolk, England. To fund the school for Indigenous girls, the nuns added a “Canadian school” for white girls (Kathleen Pearson was one of the students) and eventually received funding as a residential school from the Canadian government.4 Until All Hallows school closed in 1920, the nuns taught a dual curriculum—as historian Jean Barman wrote, a “separate and unequal” curriculum—with the Indigenous girls trained for household and domestic service, and the white girls educated for “their anticipated roles as social leaders.”5
For a time, the school curriculum for the Indigenous students included cedar root basket making,6 an art that the Sisters from England so admired that they they submitted “a collection of Indian baskets, the work of Spuzzum and Yale Indian women,” to the Agricultural and Horticultural Exhibition at Agassiz. The baskets won second prize.7 The Sisters described the baskets as “watertight, endurable, and ornamental,” and they published an article on the topic in the winter 1901 issue of their quarterly journal. “All Hallows Mission,” they wrote, “has for many years interested itself in this particular branch of Industry, among the Indian women, and the Sisters have done a great deal to encourage it, not only by purchasing all the well made baskets brought to them for sale…but by suggesting new patterns, shapes and sizes.”8
All Hallows was designed along the same lines as the At All Hallows, the Sisters included basket making in the curriculum because they recognized this skill could provide a source of income for the basket-makers.
