OAKVILLE, Wash. -- Renowned basket weaver Hazel Pete has died at her home on the Chehalis Reservation near this southwest Washington town.
Pete, who died Thursday, was 88.
Celebrated both as an artist and teacher of traditional basket-weaving,
Pete was dedicated to her craft and other expressions of Indian heritage.
"The basket is a document," she said in a 1998 interview. "It's a primary source of history in our culture."
She received a Governor's Arts and Heritage Award from the Washington Arts Commission in 2001. Her image is included in the Clocktower Project at Centralia Community College, where her daughter Trudy Marcellay of Oakville, serves on the board of trustees.
Karen Reed, a Puyallup-Chinook basket-weaver, recalled Pete's "indomitable" spirit Friday.
"She always said, 'I make two baskets every day,' " Reed said. "She always wove, she always kept working, she was always up for learning new things."
"Wherever she went, it was to teach and share," Reed said of her friend and mentor.
A fifth-generation Chehalis basket weaver, Pete passed on the tradition to two generations of her family. As recently as last year, she was leading weaving classes with her daughters, said grandson Chris Richardson.
"People recognized her work as art, but for her, it was just as much a living as it was art," he said.
"She was a very practical person who saw the value of education for Indians," he said. "Nothing was ever handed to her."
Pete was born March 21, 1914, in a one-room house near the confluence of the Chehalis and Black rivers. Her father was a farmer and logger who also worked for the Chehalis Tribal Police and the Cushman Indian School in Tacoma. Her mother was a member of the vanished Kwalhioqua tribe.
As a 4-year-old, Pete attended a government day school on the Chehalis reservation. She later enrolled in a boarding school on the Tulalip reservation and went on to graduate from Chemawa Indian High School in Salem, Ore., in 1932.
Her artistic talents were recognized when she was in high school, and she was urged to study Indian arts and crafts at a special school in Santa Fe, N.M., now known as the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she spent two years.
She taught arts and crafts at government Indian schools in Oregon, California and Nevada before returning to Washington to focus on basket weaving, using both traditional and innovative designs.
Pete helped preserve tribal culture by teaching students to gather and process natural materials, weave cedar-bark clothing and clam baskets, and make cattail mats. She also worked to ensure survival of her culture and was a strong advocate of advanced education.
Pete herself held degrees from The Evergreen State College in Olympia and the University of Washington. She was a member of the Evergreen faculty, serving as Daniel J. Evans scholar at the school in 1995-96.
In addition to daughter Marcellay, Pete is survived by her children Janet Camp of Enid, Okla.; Curtis and Donna DuPuis of Oakville; Dave DuPuis of Rochester; Yvonne Peterson of Skokomish; Henrietta Boyd of Rochester; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Memorial services were to be held Monday at Swede Hall in Rochester, with burial in the Chehalis Tribal Cemetery.
