Baskets Full of Indian Heritage : Fixations: Descendant Justin Farmer of Fullerton collects relics of California’s mission peoples for their craftsmanship and history as well as their communicative skills.

When Justin Farmer graduated from grammar school, his Diegueno Indian aunt Mary Osuna gave him a handwoven basket full of candy. Though it was the candy that caught his eye then, his interests have since shifted sufficiently that he recently paid $3,000 at auction for another of his aunt’s baskets.

Those and hundreds of other baskets and relics of California’s Mission Indians, from Los Angeles and points south, reside in a large room of Farmer’s Fullerton offices, where he otherwise conducts an active business as a transportation engineer. Each basket, pot, pipe, soapstone arrow straightener, throwing stick, necklace or other handwrought item is neatly arranged, museum style, in the room, annotated with clear plastic placards. He says it is the largest private collection of Mission Indian baskets.

The 67-year-old appreciates them as art, he says, though he enjoys the anthropological detective work they call for as well. A flashily-designed basket with lots of black iron dye in it is likely from the Cahuilla people of Riverside County; if there’s a maroon design, it was likely made by desert people, because the dye is from the root of the Joshua tree.

Some pose greater mysteries, such as the basket made in the mission style, but with a coloring and pattern reminiscent of the Pima Indians of Arizona. Another basket is made of local materials, but in the thick coils of Hopi basketry. Farmer guesses these are the products of intermarriage. In another basket, the design consists of the words “Victoria Bruohe” and a rattlesnake pattern: Farmer thinks it was made for an occult doctor who dealt with rattlesnakes.

Some of the baskets are tremendously rare. His three Juaneno baskets--made by Indians of the Mission San Juan Capistrano area--account for a fourth of the ones known to exist, he says, and his Gabrieleno baskets from the L.A. basin are equally scarce, emblematic of the near-destruction of native culture by the mission system and the Americans that followed.

His biggest grouping, along one long wall, is of baskets and artifacts from the Diegueno people of San Diego County. “That shows a bit of bias,” Farmer says. It is the Dieguenos from which he is descended. Several clay pots--also Diegueno, as they were the only Mission Indians to make pottery--dominate the center of the room.

One might look at it as a conference room, for Farmer claims the baskets talk to him.

“A basket is much the same as a person,” Farmer opined, “It has a personality. It has appearance. It goes through life much the same as a human does: It starts out as an embryo, then it is imbued with a personality which can remain or change, and they do change. Every one has a little different personality.

“Some baskets will communicate well to you; others won’t. There are times when you come in and feel real good about a specific basket, and they even seem to radiate. Other times you come in and they give you this (Farmer makes a universally understood hand gesture). They communicate with you, though sometimes unless you work at it it’s difficult to hear or feel it.”

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Farmer is one-quarter Diegueno. His maternal grandmother was an Indian, his grandfather a Frenchman. Farmer believes his father was a Carolina Cherokee: He was from the Indian Territory of Oklahoma and had relatives who spoke of traveling the Trail of Tears, but Farmer says his father would never talk about his lineage.

Farmer says he was the same way when he was growing up in Julian in northeast San Diego County.

“At that time it wasn’t fashionable to be Indian. In fact, if you were smart you didn’t say a thing about it. I was raised as a white guy. Had I said I was an Indian, I wouldn’t have been a citizen and couldn’t drink beer, and a lot of other things.”

His grandmother had once been an indentured servant, essentially a slave. “That was encouraged by the early California constitution. The law said, if you wanted to acquire an Indian, you took them before a justice of the peace or city clerk and declared them to be indigent--and a youth of course is an indigent-- and the Indian became chattel.

“Along with providing free labor, it was very effective in stamping out the culture. That was the purpose of it, to instill shame in the person as far as their heritage was concerned. And that’s the way my grandmother became. She wouldn’t let an Indian in the house except through the back door. My mother was the same way. She wouldn’t look at an Indian as a social equal, even though she was half Indian. And my dad just never said anything about being Indian,” Farmer said.

For much of the time that he was in school, Farmer said he attempted to “work around being Indian” but eventually proved to be the “black sheep” of the family when it came to acknowledging his roots. He would talk with older Indians and came to appreciate the baskets and other traditional crafts.

“And as you mature--I guess you mature; you get older , for sure--you take stock of where you’ve been who you are and where you’re going, and I guess that’s the ‘born-again Indian’ business. You start taking pride in who you are,” he said.

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Farmer began actively collecting baskets when he was in his 40s. He’d decided the most significant type of collecting he could do would be to buy baskets from the artisans still making them. He then found that there were almost no traditional weavers left. One of the surviving ones was his cousin Christina Osuna, then in her 80s, daughter of the aunt who had given him his candy-filled basket. Farmer figured there was only one thing to do: learn.

“I make baskets myself now, and not very well,” he said, lifting one of his works into which he estimates he had put 250 hours of effort, including collecting and preparing the materials. A skilled weaver could have made it in a quarter of that time, he estimates.

It isn’t Farmer’s goal to become a great weaver. Instead, he teaches others, “and in order to teach I find it helps to have at least a modicum of knowledge of what you’re doing.” He has taught his craft at UC Irvine, Golden West and Cypress colleges, as well as several out-of-county sites, including the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, where he is on the board of directors.

Most of the people taking his classes have been teachers. Farmer was surprised that several of his students who have gone on to actively take up the traditionally female craft have been men. Though he’s distressed that few of his students have been Indians, Farmer says that the classes are giving the art a chance to keep from dying out.

One of the baskets Farmer made is a shallow one used for rinsing pounded acorns. Acorns were a staple food to the hunter/gatherer California Indians, and to eat them it was necessary to first leech out the bitter tannic acid.

“I like eating it,” Farmer said. “It has a unique taste and the consistency of poi. Then I got married, and my wife didn’t want me to eat acorns. Like cabbage, they smell up the kitchen when you cook them.”

His devout Catholic mother would never allow that “heathen” food in her house either, Farmer said. As for his own beliefs, he continued, “I had the benefit of an early Christian education as well as later understanding the Indian religion. If I had to choose, it would be the Indian religion. I think it’s a much more basic religion. There are literally thousands of offshoots, but the basic concepts that virtually all Indians hold I think are a little more realistic and not nearly as vindictive and hateful as most Christian beliefs.

“The Iberian religious missionaries were probably the most intolerant people in the world, all over the world. Look at the Spanish Inquisition. They could not tolerate any cultures that were not theirs. The California Indians were a fairly docile people, and the Spaniards interpreted that to be weakness, which it was to an extent: When somebody you’d never seen before came up and blew your head off with a rifle, it made a believer out of you.

“But the most devastating period to the Indians here was when the Americans came in. In Northern California they had armies hired just to shoot (Indians). And that’s when the buying and selling of people and the raping of the culture took place. It only stopped when there was nobody left.

“You have to wonder how a Christian nation could have committed everything that they did and still claim to be Christians. If you read any of the history of California, it just makes your hair stand on end.”

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Farmer says there are a few things the missionaries could have learned from the Indians had they been willing to listen.

“The Indian people here didn’t get involved in wars, for example, and they had a very fine moral character. Stealing practically hadn’t been invented. It was a capital crime. They had to learn how to steal pretty much from the Europeans.

“And if you really want to hit home with an Indian, you talk about the earth. It is something precious to him, where to the Spaniards the earth didn’t really exist, except that was where you put your feet when you walked. The Indians here respected the earth and the things on it. They’d certainly never subjugate another person.” (Farmer noted this wasn’t true of all American tribes, some of which did keep slaves.)

It is not without a certain amount of pride that Farmer maintains that the Dieguenos were the “feistiest” of the Mission Indians, inasmuch as they burned down their mission on several occasions. Though he says it’s impossible to not feel some bitterness over the treatment of the Indians, he’s not overly offended that more whites aren’t aware of that history. From his own experience, he said, “You don’t gain anything by making someone dislike their own culture. And there’s no good in hate. It’s the worst disease there is.”

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Most of the baskets in Farmer’s collection date from the turn of the century to the late 1920s, when the barely surviving Indian culture was sent further reeling by the Depression. Many baskets were made for sale to tourist shops and other commerce, such as some boat-shaped baskets made for date growers to pack their fruits in. Because nearly all of those were shipped out of state, they are very rare today.

Then there were the baskets made as gifts. Mission Indians were “incorrigible gift-givers,” Farmer said, and weavers would put special time and care into the baskets they gave away. These generally would be used to house trinkets or keepsakes. Also made with more care were the baskets intended for everyday use. Farmer usually identifies those by the workmanship and amount of wear they show. Most of the designs on the Mission Indian baskets are strictly ornamental, Farmer says, with little symbolic weight. Animal shapes or other effigies were rarely used.

He says the baskets carry a spiritual nature that’s far deeper than their appearance.

“I’ve talked to older weavers about this: They would be in a certain frame of mind, and generally it’s a very receptive frame of mind, while they’re doing the weaving, and they imbue the basket with that frame of mind.

“And if they didn’t have a reasonably good intention while doing the weaving, then the maker would put a hex mark into the weaving to correct for that, as a conduit to get rid of any bad spirits that might have been put into the basket while it was being woven.

“You know how sometimes you communicate with someone who is facing the other way and hasn’t even seen you come in the room? It can be like that with the baskets. Man has the ability to do a lot of things besides see and feel and hear. In our society today, it’s not popular to do that, to have those qualities or to use them, and after many centuries, we’ve bred out most of that.

“But people still have that ability. You can communicate as long as you recognize that the object you’re dealing with has the ability to do it, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the baskets have that ability. If I can’t communicate with them sometimes, it’s not their fault.”