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Weaver takes on a tradition Take a tour of Debbie Young-Canaday's Tlingit and Haida-style baskets and you'll see patterns that have existed for hundreds of years: half head of salmonberry, Hudson Bay blanket, snail trail. On a well-worn folding card table in the spare bedroom of her North Douglas home, Canaday has a few needles and the tip of a deer antler she uses for an awl. When she collects spruce roots and cedar bark, she says a prayer of thanks to the trees. Canaday's route to an art form steeped in tradition was anything but traditional. Leaving a farm in Lansing, Mich., at 19, she embarked with a boyfriend on a road trip that took her to all 50 states over 15 years. During most of that time, home was a converted bread van. Alaska was just about the last stop on the trip, and Canaday made ends meet waitressing in Anchorage and playing pool professionally. At one point, she was good enough to make it to the women's national tournament in Las Vegas, taking ninth place and winning $756. In 1986 a two-week visit to the village of Hydaburg on Prince of Wales Island turned into a two-year stay as Canaday fished, hunted and gathered, and took a basketry class with Ketchikan master weaver Delores Churchill. The first night didn't go well, Canaday, now 40, recalled. "It did not come easy." While everyone else in the class had finished the bottoms of their small baskets and were well on their way up the sides, Canaday barely had struggled through her first few rows. She admits now she was frustrated and went home the first night "sniveling," but soon stayed up until 2 a.m. to weave. "It was my first artistic outlet. It was like an obsession. It grabbed me and captivated me." Churchill remembers Canaday's first class. "At first she wasn't very enthusiastic about basketry, but she had a talent for it naturally from the beginning," Churchill said from Craig, where she is teaching a weaving class. After several classes and visits to museums in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C., to study Native basketry, Canaday sold her first piece, albeit reluctantly. "It was very hard for me to let go of it," she said. "I remember being aghast that I had this piece of paper for $300 and my basket was walking away." In 1991 a Skagway woman bought a cedar bark potlatch hat Canaday wove, and told her a nephew planned to paint it. "All I could think of was a teen-ager with a felt-tip marker," Canaday said. The following year, she met Ketchikan carver Nathan Jackson at an art show and got to talking about painting on basketry. He mentioned he was in the process of painting a hat for his aunt. Canaday got goosebumps as she asked Jackson who his aunt was, and discovered the hat he was painting was, indeed, hers. It now has a killer whale on it, and Jackson and Canaday have struck up a relationship both expect may see more collaborations in the future. "She does beautiful work and she's very disciplined," Jackson said from the Saxman carving shed where he's working. "She's a fascinating person." Canaday's weaving room is tidy and ready for her to return from a spring outing to collect spruce roots. A new basket is just in its beginning stages - she weaves one at a time - at the table below a wall full of ribbons from her days in Michigan raising and showing purebred Arabian horses. Canaday said she often thinks about quitting her seasonal job as a Parks and Recreation Department groundskeeper to devote more time to weaving. "That would be the ultimate goal ... to be acknowledged so you could do your art full time." Canaday said she still hates to let her work go, but it's happening more as she sells baskets, hats, ornaments and earrings at art shows, the Alaska State Museum store and shops in Juneau and Skagway. A traditional Haida design cedar basket recently returned to Canaday after almost 10 years on loan to the Heritage Library Museum in Anchorage. The open basket, with horizontal patterned bands breaking up the straight stitches, took 400 hours to complete. She worked on it during a winter as a caretaker at a Prince of Wales Island floating fishing lodge. "So what if there was a storm for three days?" Canaday said of her isolation. "You plug in the generator and turn on the lights and weave." Canaday's latest recognition is inclusion in Alaska's Earth, Fire and Fibre art show, her third appearance. Her entry was a 6-by-5-inch spruce-root berry basket. It's a continual debate for Canaday whether she considers herself an artist or a craftsperson. "Whenever I fantasize that I'm an 'achieved' weaver I go to a museum and am immediately humbled." Churchill points out that the baskets in museums were created by weavers who probably started learning the art at the age of 6 or 7. "None of us can replicate those baskets in the museums." Canaday finds weaving relaxing, for the most part. "My frustration comes when my hands don't keep up with my brain," she said, but she enjoys the challenge. "Sometimes I feel that spirits or individuals of the past have worked through me, because I don't think I could have gotten here without help." Jeanine Pohl Smith is a local freelance writer. |