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At the time of the feminist movement in the 1970s, I became interested in constructing carrying cloths and cradle forms. I had read Indian Basketry by James Wharton, first published in 1902, and I was taken with the beauty of Navaho legends, which described the first baby baskets or cradle boards ever made. "Their gods of war," Wharton reports, "were born of two women, one fathered by the sun, the other by a waterfall and when they were born they were placed in baby baskets.... One child they covered with black clouds and the other with female rain."'
Cradle boards were...