Indigenous
New England
"We're Still Here"
Online Exhibit:
"We're Still Here"
Online Exhibit
Contemporary Indigenous New England Artists
Newt Washburn
Newt Washburn is an Abenaki Sweetser family basketmaker from Bethlehem, NH.
Considered the father of contemporary Abenaki basketmaking, Newt Washburn makes baskets using the Sweetser family, signature star-shaped spoke (underside of basket on display) with brown ash splint, exclusively.
"My great grandfather came from Germany, and he was a basketmaker, and he married an Abenaki girl from Canada. So it's been baskets ever since. My mother, the woman who raised me, in her family, there were six boys, six girls, and the father and mother, and they all made baskets. They, my uncles and aunts . . . oh my God . . . there are probably 150 Sweetsers making baskets.
"I made my first basket at eight . . . a berry basket. My folks taught me, and I had to stay with it . . . because that was our livelihood. And I was the only child so . . . everyone in the family had to work, do their share, back then. And when the day's work was done on the farm, we made baskets in the evening. There was no radio, no television, no electricity. We made baskets by lamplight."
(Interview from exhibition catalog, Deeply Rooted: New Hampshire Traditions in Wood, University of New Hampshire Art Gallery, 1997)
