I was born in Chicago. My family moved back up to the Bad River Reservation where my father is from when I was four months old. After a few years, we moved into the border town of Ashland, which is just to the west of the reservation.
April Stone | Bad River Reservation, Wisconsin
I went to the public schools in Ashland. I also grew up poor and in an alcoholic dysfunctional home and saw my fair share of abuse. My father is Native, but I grew up in a mixed household without any Native culture, language, or ceremony. My father went to the mission school where none of that was allowed, so it was hard for me to find my own cultural identity while living in a town filled with racism. Just trying to get a sense of how I felt about all of that as a young person was very difficult. My upbringing definitely had its share of challenges in trying to tap into who I was, where I was going, and what I thought life was really about.
After high school, I spent some time in Minnesota and found myself in an alcoholic relationship with my boyfriend, repeating old patterns. After ending that, I returned to Ashland, found two jobs, and started going to Northland College for natural resource management. In school, I learned more about the history of my own people, which was sad because I grew up right here, but nobody had ever told me this stuff.
I had good mentors in college, both native and non-native. I learned about my native language, Ojibwemowin, and was able to identify with myself at that point for the first time. After getting married, my husband and I decided that it felt right to build and live in a small cabin on the reservation with no electricity, no running water. We used kerosene lamps and candles we made ourselves for light. Neither of us grew up that way, but we were thinking about our footprint on the earth. We were asking ourselves what it was that we really needed in life. Three of my four kids were born in that house.
I also worked for the tribe and for the Forest Service during that time and became more and more familiar with various ecosystems. Then, my husband and I decided to take some classes at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota. I learned how to felt wool slippers for my feet, and he learned how to pound black ash logs for making baskets. He was very happy with the first basket he made, which he used for his lunch basket. It had a leather strap and harness around the underside of the rim. I filled that basket with a coffee thermos, water jug, sandwiches, and snacks for him every day and then emptied it every night. To it, he would add tools, books and extra layers of clothing. After a year of filling and emptying this basket, the lashing around the rim finally broke.
I was blown away by how long that basket lasted. It had carried 10 or 12 pounds of stuff every day. He worked outside, so it saw rain, snow, wind, dirt, dog fur, and all kinds of other things, which developed its patina—the layer of age and wear that comes with frequent use and exposure to the elements. It changed color, it shifted, and it relaxed. I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. You need to show me how to make one of those baskets.’
He showed me how to make a basket in the spring of 1999, and then I spent the year just weaving baskets, taking care of my babies, hauling water, shoveling snow, and making sure that there was food on the table when he got home from work. There was nobody around me doing this kind of weaving, so I taught myself from books I found in the local library. My husband also showed me how to harvest black ash by hand through a process of pounding a freshly cut log until the rings of the tree delaminate into splints, which are then split and processed into strips for weaving. After a few years, my kids would pound the logs with me.
Basketry teaches me to be flexible, that everything is an organic process. It teaches me to be free flowing and strong. Whenever I make a basket, I think about community and how the different parts of the basket, the base, the uprights, the weavers, the rims, the lashings, all have a role. They all have their gifts, their responsibilities, their burdens.
When I teach, I use the language of basketry. I talk about the impacts your weaving actions have and how a slight change on one side of the basket will affect the other side. I talk about being “tight” vs. being “relaxed” as a weaver. People then take those words and apply them to themselves. They start talking about something that happened to them a long time ago, or how they interpret the making of a basket and the language that’s used to teach in their own life. Aside from the traditional teachings of respect, love, courage, wisdom, and bravery, it teaches patience, humility, and about yourself. It teaches all these things.
In the summer of 2000, a community member asked if I would teach basketry. I told him, ‘No. I have only been making these black ash baskets for a year. There is just so much more to know about them.’
But he said, ‘Well, we know that you’ve been working on these baskets for a while, so why don’t you just share with us what you know.’ So I did. I taught my first class at our kitchen table in our little unfinished cabin in the fall of 2000.
That was around the same time that my husband and I started incorporating a lot of traditional Native ceremonies in our lives, one of which was the jiisakaan – the shake tent ceremony. Through that ceremony, the spirits told me that as long as I always follow what’s in my heart that I would always be taken care of. I took that literally to mean, ‘As long as I make black ash baskets, I’ll always be able to pay my bills.’
My husband said, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s not what the spirits were saying.’
But I said, ‘That’s exactly what they were saying.’ And it was true. I’ve been doing this work for 23 years now, and it never gets old. I love it every day and have been able to pay my bills from my weaving and teaching. I’m in my studio all the time and I’m always learning. I certainly don’t know everything about the cellular makeup of the rings, or all of the science behind the tree really grows or how many gallons of water a black ash tree goes through in a growing season, but I know that the tree is a living being, that it is alive and that something wonderful is happening.
All I’m doing is following what’s in my heart, but if you look at my work, you’ll see that everything that I do connects me to basket work and to my community. I have worked regionally, all over the United States, and even in England. The work just morphs and takes me into all these different places for different reasons.
Those reasons are always changing, too. More recently it’s been about basket repair or weaving with manmade elements like recycled plastic. But in the past, I have worked with kids struggling with ADHD, women in recovery, at tribal colleges and other universities, on farms, at farmer’s markets, with immigrant families in California learning how to make baskets for cooking, and even for an art therapy program with boys who had been court ordered into a youth home in Ashland. It’s remarkable because these kids get a chance to sit and just focus, to be and talk and share with each other, which often sparks something in their healing. I never know when, where, or how, that healing is going to happen, but I’ve worked with thousands of people and it’s always amazing. It never gets old.
That’s the thing I have learned about basket-making, it has a way of healing people and helping them tap into their intuition. For example, I know that when I was a kid, I did a lot of watching. I watched people, I listened, and I reflected. I spent a lot of time thinking about being in my own neighborhood with other families who were non-native, and other families who were native, and how I felt as a result of that. That’s how I learned.
From there, I learned how to ask myself, ‘Is this okay with me? Is this not okay with me? How does this make me feel right now?’ These days, I use that ability to listen to the materials. I need to smell it, I need to touch it, I need to listen to it. I need to be out in the woods and I need to look at the trunks of the trees. I need to ask myself, ‘What is this material trying to teach me? Does that look and feel like a healthy tree? Do I feel like anything might be going on inside of this tree right now?’
When I do this work, I know that I feel really good. There are layers in making that physical basket. Doing the handwork itself is empowering, but then there’s the layer of sharing stories and healing, and then another layer of tapping into those traditional teachings. But no matter how my interest varies over the years, I’m still just following my heart. It’s like the spirit told me: I follow my heart, and I feel like I’m always taken care of. That feeling of being taken care of has been very healing for me.
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I have seen how climate change has affected our environment first-hand. There was a time when I was able to dry my wild rice on a tarp out in my driveway. I always knew that the sun was going to be out for days and that everything would be dry. It wasn't going to be humid, it wasn't going to rain, and it wasn't going to sleet in the middle of July. Over the course of three, four days, I'd watch the bees and ants come and carry the worms away. I knew I could go to town and come home in a few hours and it still wouldn't have rained.
Most people use dehydrators to dry their food, but I don’t have one of those, I rely on the sun. I dry stuff outside with the sun and the wind, but that’s getting harder. About five or six years ago, I noticed that sometimes I would put the rice out in the yard, and all of a sudden it would start to rain. I would hurry to cover it up, but then it would stop raining. Then it would be too humid to dry properly, so my rice would get moldy on me. It never used to happen like that before. That was interesting.
Extreme weather change is definitely affecting our trees as well. The black ash tree, which I use for baskets, has a very specific role in the ecosystem. It can grow in some of the deepest parts of the marshes and swamps where the roots can take up a lot of the water, which helps it regulate the water table. In the last several years, however, the number of black ashes around has dropped, and part of that is because of the Emerald Ash Borer.
The Emerald Ash Borer is an invasive species. The trees that they originally fed on had a natural immunity to the borer so they lived a bit more in balance there, but our trees here don’t, so it’s an unlimited food source for them. They first came here on shipping pallets from Asia. Perhaps they just hitchhiked their way here unknowingly or perhaps they needed another food source.
There are millions and millions of ash trees here in the U.S., so what does their disappearance mean for water table regulation? When the ash tree is finally gone, what species is going to come up in its place? Buckhorn? Reed canary grass? Will those species have the same effect on the water table as the black ash did? I don’t think so. What about River Birch or Silver Maple? At this point, we don’t know but it’s something that I think about a lot. I’m still trying to figure out how these puzzle pieces all relate to one another, I just know that all things are connected and species are no different. One affects the other, just like elements in a basket.
A friend once told me that the word for insect in our language is manidoons, which literally means ‘little spirit.’ Their role is to act as messengers or helpers. If this insect, the Emerald Ash Borer, is supposed to act as a messenger and helper, what’s the message? How is it supposed to help us?
They are telling us that we are out of balance. As a result of our imbalance, this beautiful species of tree is going to experience a great die back. The very places where these trees grow and the surrounding areas are going to experience abrupt change.
It just seems like people aren’t really paying that close of attention and only when stands of ash trees have become dead standing, that maybe people will take notice. I mean, they look at the forest, but many people don’t know what the ash trees look like. Some people even confuse a birch tree with an aspen tree. We, as a people, have become further removed from that knowledge over time. And agencies have tried many different ways to eradicate and control the Emerald Ash Borer, but we don’t know what impacts those strategies are going to have later on. We don’t know if they’ll create balance or further imbalance.
Trees and plants communicate. They have the whole underground network. Maybe those trees are communicating with one another and sending the messages along like, ‘Hey, something’s coming, be stronger.’ Maybe they’re slowly altering the genetic makeup of their seeds to be stronger, more immune, but we don’t know that.
This is part of the reason that I feel so strongly that I’m supposed to be doing this work as a basket maker. I am meant to send the same message as the Emerald Ash Borer: that we, as people, are out of balance. We take too much, as consumers, and don’t give enough back. It is my job to provide programming to a variety of different people and places, with the goal of empowering people to work with their hands once again. To buy only what they can carry. To weave a basket of their own. I am trying to remind people of that balance by reminding them that at one point in everybody’s history, in every culture, in every part of the world, on every continent, we wove baskets.
April’s story was produced by Alexandria Delcourt. It is part of a collaboration with the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters and their Wisconsin Climate Stories Series.
As the climate changes, we are seeing the impact on our landscape. It is harder to find traditional plants and medicines growing in the forests on tribal lands. Many tribes are actively engaged in the development of carbon projects to produce renewable energy. Learn more about the National Indian Carbon Coalition here.
The Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts & Letters is bringing together leaders who have a deep connection with forested land. Through the speaker’s stories, you’ll discover how climate change has impacted their work and personal lives. You will hear firsthand accounts of the challenges they have faced and the solutions they found. You can learn how we can all take action in their Climate Fast Forward Action Plan.
