An Expert’s Guide to Basket Weaving

A Cahuilla and Palm Springs perspective

The best basket is a basket made of square miles.

Although this article might be the first time these words have been strung together on paper, the idea certainly isn’t novel. It’s fairly easy to see Palm Springs on Google Maps from the distinct checkered pattern consisting of transparent and gray square mile squares that permeate within the city's borders. The pattern is equally identifiable when traversing on its plane. Streets line the border of the squares and I was able to observe how the built environment changed from square to square. As someone who actively studies city planning and built environments, this land configuration was incongruous. To this point, my teachings taught me that a city needs to be designed to encourage socialization and interconnectivity between people, but this checkered model felt like a complete rejection of that notion. For one mile there was a vast expanse of suburban development, but the next would be an undeveloped square weakly protected by a feasibly penetrable metal fence. While the content behind the fence may not warrant defense, the history of its necessity is deserving of a more appropriate fortress, and the Agua Caliente museum certainly does this history justice.

Right when we entered the Agua Caliente Museum, I was dazzled by its elegance. A large glass dome sits atop the lobby and allows warm light to flow onto our faces as we explore the gift shop. The museum introduces the history of the Agua Caliente, a band of the Cahuilla tribe based in Southern California. As I walked through the museum, a sense of awe was plastered on my face. Amongst the impressive art, unique ways of living, and dark past ruptured by colonization, the Cahuilla’s profound basket weaving ability sticks out. Whenever I walk through the California desert, I become infinitely more grateful to be removed from it. The heat and the desolation is unbearable, which makes this artistic feat of the Agua Caliente so much more impressive. The baskets are simple, made from the very few materials the arid desert gave the tribe. Deer grass, sumac, juncus, and equal parts creativity were the foundation for the beautiful baskets on display. Darkly dyed sumac intertwines with the natural brown color of the basket to create intricate designs, almost using the basket as a tool for storytelling. Each basket was a culmination of months of preparation and execution, perhaps a small tradeoff for a multi-generational legacy.

The museum is located on one of the many gray squares throughout the entirety of Palm Springs. These gray squares represent land owned by the Agua Caliente tribe, the remaining being those owned by the city of Palm Springs. We traversed further on the square mile lot the museum sat on and encountered the necessary evil of Native American tribes in the United States; a tribal casino. Despite the placement of a casino adjacent to a cultural center may be jarring, it is certainly not surprising. The casino plays an extremely pivotal role in the economy of the tribe and it is a major source of revenue. The contrast between the contents of the museum and the casino are striking, but their purposes are not misaligned. While one stands for the preservation of the history of the tribe, the other stands for the preservation of the tribe in the present. After tiptoeing through security, we got insight into the beauty of midday gambling, and even more insight into the itinerary of the average Palm Springs tourist. 

Once we had our fair share of watching degeneracy, we crossed Indian Canyon Dr. and encountered our first slice of the city of Palm Springs, downtown Palm Springs. Palm Springs as a city is fairly monotonous, mostly being composed of suburbs, hotels, and upper echelon activity centers, but downtown Palm Springs is the only walkable site in the city, and also acts as the epitome of Western influence in Palm Springs. Downtown Palm Springs is more of a strip of road dotted with retail and food spots. Our experience is fairly akin to that of walking through any other Southern California suburban ‘downtown,’ with the caveat being an extraordinarily disappointing date shake. Despite this, we still enjoyed the best it had to offer. In fact, walking through downtown reaffirmed a theory that had tucked itself away in the back of my mind, and that was that Palm Springs really wasn’t anything special, when looking at it from afar. It really is just a simple Southern California suburb, but the culture behind the city is what gives it such punching power. Throughout my time in Palm Springs, I observed how an architecture countercultural center, tourist destination, retirement hub, and Native American tribe attempted to balance the weight of its many voices 

The stark contrast between the contents of Downtown Palm Springs and the Agua Caliente cultural center to it 3 o’clock was intense. My initial intent was to point a finger at the city of Palm Springs and accuse them of displacing and disturbing the Agua Caliente tribe, but the relationship between the two has become too symbiotic to be separated. Both cultures have become intertwined with one another, acting as two fibers that weave together. 

Basket weaving: the process of weaving or sewing pliable materials into three-dimensional artifacts

The interconnection between the city of Palm Springs and the Cahuilla is eerily akin. The two were forcibly made to coexist in one urban fabric, but through the trials and tribulations of decades of mistakes came a living and breathing artifact holding life and culture. The basket is full of its fair shares of leaks and imperfections, but such the beauty of handmade material. The culture of Palm Springs is a unique conglomeration of two different backgrounds woven together in a melting basket. The 45,000 residents of the population have invisible dye on their feet as they paint an irreproducible design on the fabric of the city. 

Words: Aldrich Gwynne

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