Made by the accomplished Haida artist Diane Douglas Willard, this cedar bark berry basket shows how fully she made tradition her own. Her training took her through the Indian Studies Program at the University of Washington, where she studied under Bill Holm and Marvin Oliver, and later to Ketchikan, where she learned with Delores Churchill. From those foundations, Willard developed a practice that is disciplined, assured, and distinctly her own. In this basket, she brings Raven’s tail design into cedar bark weaving with unusual fluency, allowing inherited structure and contemporary sensibility to sharpen one another.

The basket is woven in twining, with red cedar warps wrapped around yellow cedar wefts, and animated by a carefully staged sequence of surface variation. Three rows of slip stitch enrich the lower half, while two rows of three-strand twining frame the black-and-white Raven’s tail pattern with crisp definition. Near the rim, two loose strands of waxed linen terminate in black and white plastic beads, a small but lively note that keeps the whole work from settling into pure formalism. It is precise, rhythmic, and full of visual snap. That this very basket was awarded third place at the 86th Annual Santa Fe Indian Market in 2008 only confirms what the work makes plain on its own.