LA CONNER — The basketry, woven robes and beaded and buttoned textiles of the Haida, Wasco, Tlingit, Aleut and other Native peoples of the West Coast had been passed down from woman to woman for centuries.

The modes and mediums varied, but one thing remained the same: Tribal women’s hands were always busy. Their days were filled with collecting and curing red and yellow cedar, or harvesting spruce root or weaving mountain goat wool for hats — their arts were arduously learned.

But suddenly, the tribal women were forced to stop teaching. Now only faint memories of hands in motion remain.

“In the 1850s, when treaties were signed, we were forced to go south to the Warm Springs Reservation,” Pat Courtney Gold, a Wasco weaver from Warm Springs, told the 400 attendees of the Skagit County Historical Museum’s annual gathering of Native artists late last month. Many of the women in the room came to share how they’ve worked to revive the traditional Native women’s arts.

“When we were along the Columbia [River], we were actually a quite wealthy tribe,” Gold said of the Wasco tribe, which depended on salmon for sustenance and commerce. “When we were moved to the reservations there were no salmon and we had to relearn how to live in a semi-arid area.”

As the next generations came, ties to tradition became even more remote, Gold said. The second generation was forced into boarding schools, and the philosophy of boarding schools was to alienate the tribal members from their culture, Gold said.

“They thought we were savages,” she said.

By the time Gold’s generation came up, no one knew how to weave Wasco baskets, she said.

Like many others of her generation, Gold learned to weave through research and by visiting museums to pore over samples of a nearly lost art. She sought out the help of Mary Schlick, a non-Native who nonetheless studied and taught the Wasco technique.

“The only way to keep it from getting lost is to share it,” Omaha artist Sharon Akers told a packed room during a panel discussion with Gold and other women.

But history and propriety have made that difficult at times, according to 79-year-old Delores Churchill of Ketchikan, Alaska.

Churchill’s mother taught Haida basket weaving at a community college in Alaska, but Churchill went for decades without learning the art.

Basketry was not a skill to be flaunted, Churchill said. When company came to the house, her mother put her projects aside and covered them with a white cloth.

“When somebody comes into your house, you have to pay complete attention,” Churchill said, “Politeness almost really killed basketry.”

When her mother reached her eighties, Churchill’s husband began to worry.

“My husband was afraid that the art of Haida weaving would die,” Churchill said.

So Churchill finally learned to weave — not very well at first, she said — and became one of three Haida weavers remaining in the area.

Now Churchill and some of her students teach weaving.

Lisa Telford, her niece and former student, also is carrying on the tradition, but adds a contemporary touch. In addition to Haida baskets made with the same age-old technique, Telford, who lives in Everett, weaves shoes and cedar bark garments, and even a corset with feather trim titled “A Night on The Village.”

“The technique is traditional. The technique has not changed since ever,” she said, while starting to weave what would become a small basket.

Preserving the traditional art of weaving is still a challenge.

Each of Telford’s corsets require 21 12-hour days just to weave. It is not an art that can be done quickly, she said; even the miniature basket she was working on will take five hours.

“With the economy, it is going to be even more difficult to survive,” said Telford, who like other women at the gathering, pursues fellowships and sells to museums and collectors, also financially stretched.

Skills once almost lost were summoned with ease by artists doing demonstrations for the several generations packed into the museum last month.

Chloe French, a retired teacher from Bellingham, rolled fibers on her leg and showed onlookers how they would be woven into a Chilkat robe.

French saw her first Chilkat robe in a museum as a child. She told her mother she would learn the Tlingit art and weave a robe some day.

“I am 63 and I am making my Chilkat robe,” she said, and not only is she weaving, she is teaching.

“I believe that when I learn Chilkat, I have to teach it.”

n Elliott Wilson can be reached at 360-416-2147 or at .