Another basket. This is the most rigid/strong sided basket I’ve ever held. Solid as a rock…almost. If this one isn’t NA I don’t know what is. It’s nearly perfect and beautiful. Southwestern I imagine but I don’t know who. Pima? Navajo? 15” diameter.
Nice basket. It looks like Tohono O'odham (Papago). The start at the center is very characteristic of their baskets, and it looks like grass (likely beargrass) bundles stitched with yucca and devil's claw, which would be typical.
Ah great. Were I going to add a third guess to my initial post that would have been it. Trying to spell T O’o scares me though! I think I heard that Papago was just the Navajo word for enemy and that why it’s not used anymore (in polite circles). So I try to be politically correct but get scared off by the proper name, so just avoid it. Or I google a horribly wrong spelling and copy and paste the correct one. Thank you!
"The Akimel O’odham, a neighboring tribe, referred to them as Ba꞉bawĭkoʼa, meaning "eating tepary beans".[4] The Spanish colonizers learned that name from the Pima and transliterated it as Pápago, in their pronunciation. Anglo settlers in the area adopted that term.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_Oʼodham
After a lifetime of reading the old names, I am now trying to consistently use the names the people use for themselves. But it is difficult. You can understand why the Europeans, Americans and Spanish butchered the names into something they could pronounce. I am not sure I will ever get the hang of Kwakwaka'wakw. At least the Diné made it easy.
Over the past few years I have repeated the pronunciation every time I came across it, and I can finally say it. Not like a Kwakwaka'wakw, but much better than the average non-Kwakwaka'wakw. True.
