Mary Holiday Black
Mary Holiday Black of the Navajo Bitter Water Clan is the daughter of a rug weaver and a medicine man. She learned to weave when she was very young. She grew up making the distinctive red, black and white ceremonial baskets that were used by local medicine men. In the 1970s she began experimenting with different basket weaving designs that told Navajo legends and beliefs. In 1993, Mary received the Utah Governor’s Folk Art Award, an award given annually to the person most responsible for developing and maintaining a folk craft in the state. In 1995, she was recognized as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, and her “story baskets” are found in collections across the U.S. In 2008, she demonstrated basket weaving with her daughter at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.
One of the reasons we want to keep basketmaking going among our people is because they are important when a person gets healed, to bring rain, for weddings, the Fire Dance, the Seven-Day Ceremony. There are many basket stories. If we stop making baskets, we lose the stories.”