This story, which appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of British Columbia History Magazine, was chosen as the recipient of the Anne and Phillip Yandle Best Article Award.

By Jennifer Iredale, [1] in honour and memory of the late Irene Bjerky [2]

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.

Mrs. Rose Skuki and her Lytton basket shop, 1941. Photo: Kamloops Museum KMA 7643

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 “water-tight, 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 “mother” school in Norfolk, England, established to teach poor English girls skills such as needlework and housekeeping that would allow them to earn a living—and keep them from becoming prostitutes on the streets of London. [9] 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.

The article in the All Hallows in the West Journal noted that “small [baskets] for waste paper, flowers, letters, work etc., range in price from 25 cents to $2 or $3,” [approximately $6 to $75 in 2022] and that “large ones suitable for linen baskets, provisions, wood, etc. are sold for prices varying from $7.50 to $15” [approximately $190 to $380 in 2022]. [10] It then added, “A single large basket very often represents a whole winter’s steady work. When we realize this, the prices asked for them will not appear so very exorbitant.” [11]

Indigenous students in the West School. Photo: Community of All Hallows

Rose Charlie at All Hallows, circa 1886. Photo: Boehm Collection, Community of All Hallows

The article described how the roots were gathered—“dug up with difficulty out of the ground”—and then soaked before being “scraped and split” to make pliable for working. The coiling technique was described: “[E]ach ‘stitch’ so to speak, is laboriously made by drawing the fibre through a hole which has been pierced by a sharp pointed bone instrument, in the preceding row.” The white designs were worked in “a white reedy grass, which only grows near the mouth of the river, and is very costly for the Indians to obtain,” while red patterns were worked “with strips of the inner bark of the wild cherry.” Dark designs were made using naturally dyed wild cherry bark. [12]

Many of these tools and techniques are still in use by basket makers today. I became very curious about the makers of these fine baskets. Which of the All Hallows girls learned this complicated skill? Had any of the women named on the museum’s gift form attended the school? What was their story?

A chance encounter at the Yale First Nation Band office led me to a meeting with researcher and genealogist Irene Bjerky, a descendent of Clara Clare (Kesutetkwu) [13] who had been one of the students at All Hallows School. To get Irene’s attention when I met her one summer afternoon almost twenty years ago, I helped her can dozens of fresh-caught salmon. After the canning was done and the guts and fish scales cleaned up, Irene took me upstairs, where she spread out the longest, largest family tree I have ever seen. She showed me where the names listed on the Yale museum gift form fit in the genealogicaly. The family tree was a “map” of Nlaka’pamux families in the Canyon dating back to pre-contact days.

Irene knew a lot about basketry—her great-grandmother, Clara (Kesutetkwu) had passed down a beautiful collection to her granddaughter, Irene’s mother, Clare, and they both deeply treasured that collection. Irene published her research in First Nations Baskets at the Langley Museum. [14] She also wrote up biographies of three basket makers whose names were on the Yale museum gift form: Rose Charlie, [15] Emma Florence “Kolchasta,” [16] and Annie Campbell. [17] Only Rose Charlie attended All Hallows. Irene’s research identified other basket makers who were also students there.

Susan Paul “Kalalshe” and Chief Paul Xixneʡ of Spuzzum sent their daughters—Mali (Mali McInnes), [18] Annie (Marion Dodd), [19] Rosalie (Rosalie Gutterriez Paul Charlie), [20] Maria, and Sarah—to All Hallows School. The girls had learned basket making from their mother [21] and might also have studied basketry at the school. Their mother, Kalalshe, [22] provided extensive and detailed information on cedar root basketry to anthropologist James Teit who wrote of her: “Mrs. Paul…[is] particularly well informed about her craft and likewise a very excellent technician. Much of the information about the practices of the basket maker was obtained from her.” [23]

A fine basket in the All Hallows archives in England has designs very similar to those found on Susan Paul baskets now at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa. [24]

Top three: baskets created by Anastasia Chapman. Bottom three: baskets created by Annie Charlie. Images courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives (top down: 12785, 13083, 13085; bottom down: 12788, 12789, 12791 A, B.)

The school’s master basket maker and basketry teacher, called Katlea, [25] was described in a 1901 article in the All Hallows Journal as making half a dozen fine baskets each year, “beautifully made, firm, even and of silvery whiteness.” [26] The nuns were so impressed with Katlea’s baskets that when the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York stopped in Yale in 1901, they gave “an Indian basket made of cedar fibre,” to the visiting royalty. [27] Katlea, understandably, had high standards: She once complained to the nuns that her students were too impatient, to which a Sister replied,

“Some allowance must be made, dear Dame Keatlea [sic], for young, inexperienced hands whose finger tips, not yet hardened by the work, get sore and tired, and then fibres are not drawn firmly, and looseness and unevenness are the result.” [28]

In the Langley Centennial Museum is a basket attributed to either All Hallows student Rose Oppenheim (1879–1976) 29 or to her mother, Nukwa, an Nlaka’pamux woman. She was also known as Hannah. At the age of fourteen, she married immigrant Louis Oppenheim and moved from her traditional home in Spuzzum to the colonial town of Yale.

Three of Nukwa’s daughters, including Rose, attended All Hallows, but it’s not known if they studied basketry there or learned it from their mother. [30] We do know the basket at Langley is a very fine coiled cedar root “burden” basket with a bold design imbricated in black and red cherry bark, “well made slowly in the Spuzzum way.” [31] It would have been made for use rather than for tourists to buy. [32]

Clara Clare (known as Clara Dominic at the school) was known as Kesutetkwu in the Nɬeʔkepmxcín language of her people. She is remembered as a fine needleworker and basket maker. When she was eight, her Spuzzum family sent her to All Hallows. She remained there until she was 21, when she left to marry William Frank Clare. [33]

Annie Charlie and Anastasia Chapman in front of Hudson’s Bay Store in Yale, 1883. Photo: City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-OUT P836

Clara’s granddaughter, Clare Chrane recalled: “My grandmother was a basketmaker and I remember her sitting with a pail of water with cut roots and her deer bone awl making holes [in the coiled cedar root bundles], then pushing cut roots through the row above. I had many questions but did not ask who taught her. Just imagined it was her mom.” At least one of Clara’s baskets is still in the family. [34]

Rose Skuki was an All Hallows student who later became very well-known as a basket maker. She owned the Lytton Basket Shop. Born about 1878, Rose’s father was settler George Ward, and her mother, Mary of Nohomeen, was Nlaka’pamux. [35] Rose later recalled that, “The priest comes and picks the kids and send them to school. I was 10 when I went to All Hallows School. I liked it. They treat us all right. It’s good.”

Rose was a student in the early years at All Hallows, between about 1888 and 1891. She was sent home after being injured (we don’t know the exact injury she suffered). Rose recalled classmates Clara Clare and “Ruby from Spuzzum and Mali, too, and Annie and Zlita and Eta from Thompson [River] side.” [36]

Rose married Arthur Skuki, who was related to the Nlaka’pamux community in North Bend. In 1911 she and other basket makers travelled to Australia to teach and demonstrate coiled basketry. [37] Again, it is not known if she learned her basketry skills at school or at home, though given the short time she attended All Hallows, the latter seems most likely.

Yet another All Hallows student who became a fine basket maker was Annie Chapman, daughter of notable basket maker Anastasia Chapman. Annie’s granddaughter Marion Dixon told me that Annie was sent to All Hallows in 1902 from her home in Spuzzum and that she had a “wonderful time” in the four years she attended All Hallows. “[A]ll those people, all those girls, the Sisters were so good to us.” [38]

Though Annie may have studied basketry at the school, it is more likely that it was her mother, Anastasia, who taught her. Annie passed on traditional Nlaka’pamux skills, including coiled cedar root basket making to Marion.

“My grandmother had a place in her log house for making baskets. I was six years old when she started teaching me to make baskets.” Marion recalled her grandmother would begin coiling the roots to create the bottom of the basket, then hand her a deer bone awl and the “start” and “we would do it til I got it right.”

Marion said that Annie would uncoil bad work and have her granddaughter begin again if it wasn’t right. [39]

In 1909 the All Hallows Journal published an article called “Making Baskets,” written in the first person but
unattributed. It seems to have been written by one of the Indigenous students.

When we want to make a basket, we find a cedar tree, then we dig for the roots. We don’t dig the roots from the very bottom of the tree, because they are very tough, but we go quite far from the tree and then start to dig, and the roots will be nice and soft. Then we go down to the brook and put them in water, then we scrape the skin off, and split them in half. We make some wide pieces and some skinny ones. When we get the stuff to make the patterns on our baskets, we get it off the wild chokecherry [40] tree. We cut it around and around the branch, and we pull it off, and scrape it with a knife and then it is red and shiny, and if we want it black, we put them in tea leaves, or sometimes we get an old rusty tin and put it in and it gets black. Then we go into the field and get some dry grass, and they are green at the first, and you hang it up to get dry, and when it gets dry it gets white. Then we get a bone out of the deer’s leg, and we sharpen it with an axe for a while, then we take a sharp knife and sharpen it sharp at the end. [41]

Further references to basketry in the journal include a record in the accounts for 1905 for “Sale of Baskets: $10” [approximately $250 in 2022] and an expenditure of $37.20 for the “Basket Industry” [approximately $1,000 in 2022]. [42]

The same year, a student called Agnes won first prize for basket making and another, called “Canada” (a Theresa Canada was registered at the school) won second prize. In addition, there is mention of an “inspection by visitors of the children’s work in basketry.” [43] One of the Sisters wrote that, “Industries of various sorts, flourished gaily even during the severest weather, and though our first baskets were not so even as we hope our later ones may be…yet we hope to do good work some day.” [44]

The establishment of schools like Crofton House in Vancouver led to declining enrollment of settler’s daughters, and that part of All Hallows closed in 1915. The mission school closed in September 1917, and 33 pupils were sent to St. George’s Residential School in Lytton. In 1920, the Sisters returned to England. [45] The school, as well as the Aida Freeman collection of cedar root baskets, is commemorated through artifacts exhibited at the Yale Historic Site. [46]

The Sisters greatly admired Nlaka’pamux basketry and included basket making in the curriculum at All Hallows in the West. Nevertheless, many Indigenous students who later became proficient basket makers [47] learned their skills and designs from their mothers and families. It is chiefly because the coiled cedar root basket making tradition of the Nlaka’pamux people is so notable, even recognized by the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (2018), [48] that it is worth documenting the history of the tradition at All Hallows in the West. •

Jennifer Iredale is a passionate historian with a Mayne Island connection dating to 1958. A graduate of UBC (History) and Columbia University (Heritage Preservation) she was curator for BC’s Provincial Heritage Properties beginning her career at Barkerville Provincial and National Historic Site in the 1970s. She has previously published in the BC Historical News and BC Studies and is editor/author of Enduring Threads: Ecclesiastical Textiles of St. John the Divine Church, Yale, British Columbia (Fraser Heritage Society, 2004). She curated numerous websites on BC history (http://bcheritage.ca/). In 2015 she received a Distinguished Service Award from the BC Museums Association. Thanks and acknowledgement for the information in this article goes to Marie Elliott and her wonderful histories of Mayne Island and to Joanna Weeks, booking agent and self-proclaimed “Hall Hag” and past president of the Mayne Island Agricultural Society.

Endnotes

1. My deepest thanks to the good friends in the Fraser Canyon who so kindly shared their knowledge of cedar root basketry and Nlaka’pamux genealogy and culture: The late Irene Bjerky, Clare Chrane, Marion Dixon, Cathy Hope and her sister Chris Stephenson, Nita Bobb and Laurianne Rockel, the late Mandy E. Brown, the late Jackie Johnson, and to my friends and colleagues who shared information, conversations, and encouragement— Clare Chrane, John Haugen, Bonnie Campbell, Dr. Andrea Laforet, Dr. Jean Barman, and Dr. Wendy Wickwire. Particular thanks to John Haugen and Dr. Andrea Laforet for their comments and input on this manuscript. Also to Peggy Herring and Sue Safyan for excellent editing. Any errors or omissions are mine alone.
2. Irene Gail Bjerky, C’eyxkn, passed away at Royal Columbian Hospital, New Westminster, on December 6, 2021. Irene was of Nlaka’pamux heritage. Irene’s mother was Clare Chrane, daughter of May Algie, who was the daughter of All Hallows student Clara Clare. Clara Clare was the daughter of Amelia York, a notable basket maker. Although Irene earned her living as a boilermaker, active in Boilermakers Union local 359, it is her research and contributions to the preservation and revitalization of Nlaka’pamux basketry and BC history that are her legacy. A descendant of Nlaka’pamux Spuzzum basket makers and a genealogist for Yale and Spuzzum Indigenous families, Irene lived most of her life in and around Yale. She was the organizer, producer, and host extraordinaire of Fraser Canyon Roots, cedar root basketry workshops held in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2010, and 2011. She is the author of the Langley Centennial Museum’s website on basketry and “Colourful Characters of Historic Yale (Community Stories)”; author of “Clara Clare: Keeper of the Fabric” in Enduring Threads: Ecclesiastical Textiles of St. John the Divine Church, Yale, BC, Canada, ed. Jennifer Iredale (Yale, BC: Fraser Heritage Society, 2004); co-author with Susan Smith-Josephy of Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2020); and she features in a Films Media Group documentary The Legend of Cataline (2003). This article was originally conceived to be co-authored with Irene.
3. Irene Bjerky, “Kathleen Edith Pearson (1887–1975): Basket Collector,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March 20, 2020 (website since removed).
4. “While the white girls’ schooling would then be financed by pupil fees, that of their Indian counterparts would be supported both by ongoing donations from parishioners in British Columbia and England and by an annual operating subsidy from the federal department of Indian Affairs.” From Jean Barman, “Lost Opportunity: All Hallows School for Indian and White Girls 1884–1920,” BC Historical News 22, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 6–9. doi: 10.14288/1.0190600.
5. Jean Barman, “Separate and Unequal: Indian and White Girls at All Hallows School, 1884–1920,” in Indian Education in Canada, v. 1, ed. Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1986), 110–127; Barman, “Lost Opportunity,” 7.
6. “All Hallows was not the only residential school to teach basketry although it may have been the first. In the 1930s Indian Affairs refused to give Raley a grant of $600 for teaching basketry at
   Coqualeetza Institute, but at a conference at about the same time he said, ‘At Coqualeetza our drawings of Indian work and art, our basketry [and] weaving have made a start toward this recovery.’ The collection of the Roman Catholic Sisters of St. Ann, now at the RBCM, includes two baskets made in 1933 at St. Mary’s Indian School at Mission by Rose Irene Francis, then nine years old, and Tena August, who was twelve. In the late 1930s, Mandy Brown, born in 1924, taught a small class in basketry at St. George’s in Lytton, where she was also a student at the time.” Andrea Laforet, email message to author, January 16, 2022.
7. “Indian Baskets,” All Hallows in the West Journal (Christmas-Tide, 1901): 85–86.
8. “Indian Baskets.”
9. “Firstly homed at Shipmeadow penitentiary, near Beccles in 1854, and moving to the Ditchingham site in 1859; prostitutes and girls in need of care formed the early primary work of All Hallows Sisters.
   Drawn out of the slums of Norwich and other parishes in Norfolk and Suffolk, generations of girls stayed in our House of Mercy for a period of rescue, training and rehabilitation. All the girls were trained in domestic chores, and the stronger more intelligent ones worked in the Laundry.” Sister Violet, “Our History: House of Mercy,” The Community of All Hallows, accessed December 15, 2021, https://www.all-hallows.org/copy-of-our-history.
10. “Our History.”
11. “Our History.”
12. “Our History.”
13. Irene Bjerky, “Clara Clare: Keeper of the Fabric,” 27–32.
14. Bjerky, “Introduction,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March 20, 2021 (website since removed).
15. Irene Bjerky, “Basket Maker Bios: Rosalia Gutterriez Paul Charlie,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March 20, 2021 (website since removed).
16. Bjerky, “Basket Maker Bios: Emma Florence ‘Kolchasta’,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March 20, 2021 (website since removed).
17. Bjerky, “Basket Maker Bios: Annie Campbell,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March 20, 2021 (website since removed).
18. Jennifer Iredale and Mali Quelqueltalko, “The Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Nlaka’pamux Woman,” BC Studies, no. 203 (Autumn 2019).
19. Andrea Laforet and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories (1808-1939) (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1998), 168–69.
20. Bjerky, “Basket Maker Bios: Rosalia Gutterriez Paul Charlie.”
21. “Susan was a fine basket maker, and passed her expertise on to her daughters.” Irene Bjerky, “Susan Paul, 1847–1931, ‘Kalalshe’: First Peoples of Yale and Spuzzum: Colourful Characters in Historic Yale,”
    Community Stories, Historic Yale Museum, accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.communitystories.ca/v1/pm_v2.php?id=story_line&lg=English&fl=0&ex=00000517&sl=3978&pos=1.
22. James Teit wrote that, in her later years, Susan Paul was nearly blind and that she was also a strong church supporter. In Herman K. Haeberlin, James A. Teit, and Helen H. Roberts, under the direction
    of Franz Boas, Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region (Washington, DC: US Bureau of American Ethnology, 1928), 462; Laforet and York, Spuzzum, 194.
23. Susan Kalalshe is informant #25 in Haeberlin, Teit, Roberts, and Boas, Coiled Basketry, 447–48.
24. Cedar root coiled baskets made by Kalalshe Susan Paul are in the collections of the Yale Museum and the Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa. John Haugen of Lytton provided the information that the Susan Paul basket in the CMH collection is similar in design to the basket in the All Hallows collection in Norfolk, England.
25. Referred to as Catlea (Quathlye) in Laforet and York, Spuzzum, 99.
26. “Indian Baskets,” All Hallows in the West Journal (Christmas-Tide, 1901): 84
27. “A Royal Visit,” All Hallows in the West Journal (Christmas-Tide, 1901): 67.
28. “All Hallows Indian School,” All Hallows in the West Journal 9, no. 13 (Eastertide, 1909): 19.
29. Rose Oppenheim’s granddaughter, Bonnie Campbell, is researching Rose’s story and will be publishing it in the near future.
30. “We do know that Helen, Rose and Dora (Dorothea) were registered at there in 1891, and Rose was there for eight years, Dora for ten.” Irene Bjerky, “Basket Makers Bios: Rose Oppenheim,” First Nations Baskets at the Langley Centennial Museum, accessed March, 3, 2020 (website since removed).
31. Burden baskets were made to carry everything from berries to firewood. The wearer used a woven strap, called a tumpline, tied to each side of the basket and passed over the top of the head, to carry
    the basket on their back.
32. Bjerky, “Basket Makers Bios: Rose Oppenheim.”
33. Bjerky, “Clara Clare,” 27–32.
34. Clare Chrane, email message to author, January 18, 2022.
35. John Haugen, email message to author,January 14, 2022.
36. Rose Skuki, interview, Item T0679:0001, in Imbert Orchard, Oral History Interviews, Field Sounds, and Music, Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum Archives, 196.
37. “Rose told Harry & Audrey Hawthorn’s Japanese students that she travelled on the Zeelandia (sic) with other BC indigenous people where she says they were to pretend they could not speak English.
    These interviews are located at UBC.” John Haugen, email message to author, January 14, 2022.
38. Marion Dixon, interview with author, September 3, 2018, Hope, BC.
39. Dixon, interview.
40. “It is not really wild choke cherry; some informants slip and say ‘choke’ cherry but it is a wild cherry.” John Haugen, email message to author, January 13, 2022.
41. “Making Baskets,” All Hallows in the West Journal 9, no. 13 (Eastertide, 1909): 25–26.
42. “Indian School Special Account,” All Hallows in the West Journal 1, no. 3 (Epiphany, 1905): 383.
43. “Prize List,” All Hallows in the West Journal (Christmas, 1909): 24–25.
44. “Indian Baskets,” 85–86.
45. “Fonds: All Hallows School (Yale, BC),” Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, BC, accessed January 6, 2022, https://www.memorybc.ca/all-hallows-school-yale-b-c-fonds; Lara Kozak, “The Rise and Fall of All Hallows School in Yale” (undergraduate paper, University of Victoria, 1996), https://yale.cariboogoldrush.com/tour/allh1.htm; Melanie Delva, “Indian Residential Schools,” Diocese of New Westminster, Anglican Church of Canada, accessed January 6, 2022, https://www.vancouver.anglican.ca/diocesan-ministries/indigenous-justice/pages/indian-residential-schools-full-article; Sister Violet, “Our History.”
46. Baskets made by many of the women documented in this article are in the collections of several museums including the Museum of History (Ottawa), Royal BC Museum (Victoria), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Langely Centennial Museum.
47. Other girls who attended All Hallows and were noted basket makers include: Matilda Bolan (nee Smith); Lavinia Brown (whose mother made baskets); Susannah Dunstan (née Mitchell); and the Walkem sisters, Dorothy Ursaki and Lillian Williams, whose mother made baskets and was a Teit informant. Further research could be done to determine if MaryAnn Graham (née James), Matilda Dunstan (née Peters), or Pauline Youla went to All Hallows, as their families produced a lot of baskets. More investigation is needed into the connection between All Hallows and basket maker Annie Jamieson, a contemporary of Rose Skuki and Annie Lee, who worked with Stanley Higgs to promote basketry with The Bay stores in Vancouver. John Haugen, email message to author, January 16, 2022.
48. Parks Canada, “Government of Canada recognizes Nlaka’pamux basket-making as an event of national historic significance,” News Release, September 4, 2018, https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2018/08/government-of-canada-recognizes-nlakapamux-basket-making-as-event-of-national-historic-significance.html.