Native California Basket Weaving Demonstration with Dixie Rogers

The California State Indian Museum is delighted to be hosting a Native California basket weaving demonstration given by Dixie Rogers, accomplished Karuk weaver and cultural practitioner.

Dixie Rogers is a respected Karuk basket weaver and regalia maker from the upriver Klamath Basin. Dixie comes from a family of notable weavers from whom she learned her art. She is the great great granddaughter of Emma Pearch and Susie Merrill, the great granddaughter of Julia Starritt and Bessie Tripp, and granddaughter of Ramona Starritt, the great niece of Florence Harrie, daughter of Claudette Starritt Rogers, and cousin to Vivian Hailstone, Wilverna Reece, and Kathy Wallace. She studied both weaving and apprenticed in Karuk language with her grandmother, Ramona Starritt. Dixie began her weaving training as a child, studying the detailed, distinct designs in her family’s basket collection, much of which can be seen by the public at the Clark Museum in Eureka today.

Dixie works with traditional native plants for her weaving, including willow and hazel sticks, willow, spruce and pine roots, maiden hair fern, Woodwardia fern, alder bark, wolf moss, and porcupine quills, which she gathers, cleans, processes and sizes for each basket. For her twined baskets, Dixie returns to the exact ancestral sites where her grandmother and generations of her family gathered basket materials on the Klamath and Salmon Rivers in Northern California.

Dixie has exhibited work, taught basketry techniques, and consulted on collections at the De Young Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Crocker Museum, the California State Parks Basketry Collection, the Maidu Museum, the Tuolumne Indian Market, Yolo Ave Gallery, the World Breast Cancer Conference, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, DQ University, Mills College, and at home for the Karuk Tribe. She has served on the board of the California Indian Basketweavers Association and on the Native American Steering Committee for the Tending and Gathering garden at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve. She has received three Alliance for California Traditional Arts awards, for a baby basket in 2014, an acorn cooking basket in 2016 and a master artist for a baby basket in 2018.