When I told my husband about the letter, he said, “It’s true. You should sign up to take a weaving class from your mother.” I enrolled in her Ketchikan Community College class. “What you doing here? You go home,” my mother gruffly said to me when I arrived for class. Ron Inouye, the coordinator of the class, walked over to my mother, put his arm over her shoulder and gently said, “Selina, Delores has paid and we need her registration to have enough students to offer the class. We need her to stay.” At last my mother gave in. If it had not been for Ron intervening on my behalf I may never have learned to weave.

Serving as my mother’s apprentice, assistant, and later continuing her legacy as a teacher, has gifted me many times over. Learning from my mother was difficult at times. She was a perfectionist and expected the best from her children. She burned my first baskets, saying, “People will know you learned from me. Your baskets need to be good.” As my weaving improved, I was glad she burned those first baskets. I would not want those to represent my work.

It takes years of weaving before a basket can be created like those woven by the masters and housed in museums. It is like ballet. When my daughter took ballet, she was not allowed to get into toe shoes until she had spent years mastering the techniques and building her strength. It is the same with basketry. There are years of learning to prepare material, which is the most important part of quality weaving. When I was asked by the University of Alaska to teach a class, my mother said, “You are not ready.” For the next two years, it seemed that all I did was prepare material.

Even before learning to weave, I was overcome with the desire to learn all I could about my peoples’ art forms and ancient ways of being. While I was still a bookkeeper for the Ketchikan General Hospital, I took a leave of absence to visit the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. Upon entering the museum, I was enthralled with the totem poles, designs and weaving.

I had little interest in our art forms before learning about governmental laws that were intended to take our culture from us. In fact, when I was a child, I was afraid of the poles that were still standing. I had thought that the elders that I had seen crying when they passed remnants of these poles were afraid as well. I did not know, at that time, that they were crying for all the people who had died from the diseases that had hit our people after contact, and most recently for them, the devastating flu of 1918.

I am grateful to have come to my senses before it was too late. I learned to weave from my mother in the traditional way, which begins with the forest visit to pull up spruce roots or to accept the cedar trees’ gifts of long strips of cedar bark.

Excerpted from pages 12-14 of From a Square to a Circle by Delores Churchill, 2024, published by Harbour Publishing. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.