Lisa Morehead-Hillman

Lisa is a Karuk/Yurok traditional basketweaver, with a focus on making ceremonial caps. Along with her husband Leaf, a Karuk ceremonial leader and cultural practitioner, she harvests, processes, prepares, and stores all her own materials. With the exception of porcupine quills, these materials come from plants stewarded in her aboriginal territories and include hazel, spruce, pine, redwood, willow, grape, cottonwood, alder, beargrass, and maidenhair and woodwardia ferns. As a trained educator, Lisa has been able to impart the importance of fire and traditional land/resource management to basketweaving materials.

She also takes the responsibility of being gifted with basketweaving skills very seriously and teaches weekly classes in her community under the guidance of her own teacher, Wilverna Reece. Recognizing that the demand for her ceremonial basket caps is higher than she can meet, Lisa has plans to establish a layered apprenticeship program working closely with weavers based in the tribal communities within Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk ancestral territories.