Elsie Allen

Feathered basket, 1976, Santa Rosa Junior College Multicultural Museum

Once upon a time, techniques like weaving, metalwork, ceramics, or glassblowing—especially the ones practiced mainly by women—were denied the name of art. Those bad old days are gone, and we now acknowledge that California indigenous craftspeople used one of the most humble, most practical crafts of them all—basketry—to make stunning works of art. California tribes are considered the best American basketmakers, and the Pomo, who live in what are now Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties, are the state’s best. And one of the best Pomo weavers was Elsie Allen. 

Elsie Comanche (an Anglicized version of the Pomo name Gomachu) was born near Santa Rosa in 1899, and grew up near Cloverdale, at a time when signs saying “no dogs or Indians” were common in town. She was sent 80 miles north to an Indian boarding school and didn’t learn English until she returned home to attend a new Indian day school nearby. She worked in domestic service in San Francisco, where she married fellow Pomo Arthur Allen in 1919. They had four children.

Allen came from a family of accomplished weavers, inheritor of a tradition developed over centuries in this area rich with the willow, sedge, and redbud used in Pomo basketry. She had watched her mother and grandmother gather and prepare materials and make baskets.  But it was traditional for a woman’s baskets to be buried with her, so as fewer were made due to assimilation to Western culture, examples became scarce. Allen kept her mother’s baskets, defying tradition but respecting her mother’s desire to keep Pomo basketry alive. Allen taught basketry to indigenous and non-indigenous alike at the Mendocino Art Center during the 1950s and 60s.

In addition to her own examples, Allen amassed a group of 130 Pomo baskets, the only collection maintained by an indigenous weaver. Baskets can be four feet across or as small as a grain of rice, the pattern only visible with a magnifying glass. Often decorated with woodpecker or quail feathers or shells, some took years to make. Some are watertight enough to cook in. 

Today, basketry materials are scarce. Native grasslands, which once covered at least 20 million acres, have almost entirely vanished, replaced as early as 1830 by invasive European grasses that arrived with white settlers. Many traditional Pomo gathering sites are either buried under the waters of man-made Lake Sonoma, on private land, or spoiled by pesticides.

But due to Elsie Allen’s tireless efforts, Pomo baskets are still being made today. Her inspirational collection is on view at the Santa Rosa Junior College Multicultural Museum.