When You Return: The Wukchumni Basket Weavers — The Valley and the Lake, Part 3

Native Americans, Wukchumni, Basket Weaving, Language Preservation, farm workers, history

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Full-length documentary completed 2022.

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On the land in the foothills above California’s Central Valley, we join Wukchumni basket weavers, Jennifer Malone and her mother, Marie Wilcox, as they gather basket materials and weave baskets with friends and family. Along the way there are lessons to be learned about personal accomplishment, care for the earth, and cultural resilience.

This video is part of THE VALLEY AND THE LAKE – a four-part film odyssey focused on water issues, conflicts, and hopes in California’s Central Valley, the breadbasket of the world and also the most human-altered landscape on the planet.

I was raised in the town of Paradise, California, the town that burned down in 2018. Only one person from my high school graduating class with whom I was in touch still lived in Paradise. My friend and her horses were spared. Our family home was reduced to a few bricks from a planter in the front yard.

In the fourth grade, I was taught California history in the public school I attended. One of the lessons concerned Ishi, often described as the last of the Native Americans to have contact with what we might call the modern world—the world that began with the Europeans inhabating North America. Ishi's contact took place in 1911 about twenty miles from Paradise.

The story of Ishi stayed in my mind as I went into the combined middle school and high school of Paradise Junior-Senior High School. All through my childhood I had seen more and more astonishingly beautiful baskets of all shapes and sizes, some in museums, some in people's homes.

I kept asking myself, who were the people who made these baskets and where did they go. that I was not more aware about the actual history of the West is a sign of my insular and rural world as a child and young adult. In fact, the California Native Americans were not reduced to the one person, Ishi, as I might have thought. Today, California has the largest number of indigenous people in the United States.

As I began The Valley and the Lake, I thought again about the baskets and finally had the chance to learn more. I discovered in my research that basket weaving in California is alive, that the materials used in the baskets needed to come from nature, and that the possibilities of gathering wild plants was becoming less and less possible by the day. The basket materials could not be raised in hot houses and gardens. Cultivated plants will not hold the presence or the spirit, if those are the right words, of wild plants.

I knew by then that less than 4% of the Central Valley's original environment remained.

As a filmmaker and story-teller and with some background in journalism, I began to think that if there are places where basket materials could be gathered, that would indicate a healthy environment—and a healthy environment in turn would foster the native plants required for basket weaving. For my films about water, a healthy basket weaving environment requires good, clean water which would link basket weaving with my water theme.

I contacted the California Indian Basketweavers' Association and they put me in contact with Jennifer Malone of the Wukchumni and her mother Marie Wilcox, the last native speaker of the Wukchumni language. You will meet Jennifer and Marie and many other basket weavers, young and old, in the film.

I first encountered Jennifer at an annual state-wide powwow held every year on the Davis campus of the University of California. Somehow Jennifer and I found each other in the crowd. I might have stood out a bit because I'm non-Native. Jennifer simply said, "Hello, I think we're supposed to work together." And indeed, after that first introduction, that's how we started working together. Jennifer and I together made When You Return.