At Oraibi one may see the women making wicker tray-baskets. Three or four slender sumach twigs are wickered together side by side at the middle and another similar bundle laid across the first at right angles. Then dyed branches of a desert plant known as "rabbit brush" are woven in and out between the twigs, and as the basket progresses she adds other radial rods until the basket is large enough. She finishes the edge by bending over the sumach ribs, forming a core, around which she wraps strips of yucca.
One must admire the accuracy with which the designs are kept in mind and woven into the structure of the basket with splints of various colors or strips of tough yucca. The translation of a design into the radiating sewing of the coiled basket or the horizontal filling of the wicker basket shows the necessity of the different treatments, contrasting with the freedom which it is the potter's privilege to display on the smooth surface of her ware. So far as known the Hopi women never fail in applying their designs, however intricate. Frequently these designs represent mythical birds, butterflies, clouds, etc.
Among the Hopi certain of the villages are noted for their local manufactures. Thus Walpi and Hano are practically the only towns where pottery is made, the Middle Mesa towns are headquarters for coiled baskets, and Oraibi furnishes wicker baskets. Perhaps the meaning of this is that these arts belong to clans, who have preserved them and know the secrets, and with the dying out of the workers or migration of the clans the arts have disappeared or have been transformed. Another cause which will suggest itself is the local abundance and quality of the materials required to be found in the surrounding plains and mountains.
Basketry has at least as many uses as pottery among the Hopi, and a number of kinds besides the familiar plaques with symbolical decoration have been eagerly sought by collectors. The crops from the fields are borne to the houses on the mesas in carrying baskets, resembling a pannier, which are worked of wicker over a frame of two bent sticks crossed at right angles. In the house the coiled and wicker trays heaped high with corn meal, the basket for parched corn and the sifting basket near the corn grinding stones, will be found. In the bread-baking room is the coarse, though effective, _piki_ tray, and occasionally one may still see a neatly made floor mat. The thin checker mat of ancient days has long since gone out of use, but formerly, the dead were wrapped in such mats before they were placed in the earth.