Interactive notebooks for creating Coast Salish basket motifs
This website is the result of a collaboration between the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University and the Tla’amin Nation. The collaboration was initiated by Veselin Jungic (SFU Department of Mathematics), Cedric Chauve (SFU Department of Mathematics) and Betty Wilson (Tla’amin Nation). The project benefited from contributions of several people, including Howell Tan, Jenifer Pham, Laura Gutierrez Funderburk (SFU Department of Mathematics) and Ms. Gail Blaine, and Mr. Tyler (Tla’amin nation). This project was funded by the Pacific Institute for Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Cybera, as part of the Callysto project, which aims to bring technology into Canadian classrooms.
We will be together in our teachings.
Land acknowledgements
This work was conducted in unceded territory of the Musqueam , Skxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem nations.
Demo Access
To access a demo of these notebooks, please visit the following buttons 
to launch the notebooks on the Callysto Hub.
Atomic motif’s: exploring a pattern’s smallest unit and geometrical operations
Creating and combining patterns
3D visualization of baskets using patterns
You will need a Gmail or Outlook account to access the application.
Overview
Weaving is a craft with a long history in many places around the world, including the Pacific Northwest. Woven baskets, in particular, have long been important practical and cultural objects for BC Coast Salish people. An important feature of woven baskets is the occurrence of beautiful geometric motifs/patterns, such as the ones on the basket below, exhibited at the Museum of Anthropology.
The guiding idea of our work is that the motifs we observe on many Coast Salish baskets are highly regular and can be described very simply in terms of basic geometric shapes (broken lines, triangles, rectangles, …) and mathematical operations such as reflections and stacking. Following this observation, we designed two Jupyter notebooks inspired by baskets the Tla’amin Nation presented to us during a visit. .
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The first notebook (Atomic Motifs) implements the geometric principles of reflection and stacking as described above. It allows the user to design complex motifs by successively applying a sequence of geometric operations, starting from a simple initial shape. Tthe resulting motifs can be saved in a file that can be used by other notebooks.
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The second notebook (Combining and Editing Motifs to create 3D Basket Models) takes saved motifs and allows the user to edit them and to combine them into more complex motifs. It also includes the possibility of defining a motif from scratch, for example to be used as an initial shape by the first notebook. Then the user can combine various motifs into a circular or rectangular basket that can be displayed in three dimensions.
Our notebooks are primarily intended to be used by students during classrooms activities, with the goal of illustrating how to use simple geometric concepts and operations to design realistic patterns. We also hope our notebooks can also be useful to artist weavers, who could use them to visualize new pattern ideas. These notebooks form only a first draft of a more general tool we expect to develop over the next few months. The main feature of our approach is to visualize basket motifs under the prism of geometric shapes and symmetries. This results in the possibility of designing complex motifs from simple ones,to which simple mathematical operators are applied. Our longer-term goal is to create more realistic motifs.
News Articles & Stories
Here are stories and news articles covering our application.
Burnaby Now “Burnaby math students help preserve traditional art of basketry”
Medium “Weaving A New Future For Indigenous Education” by Jimmy Fryers
The Source “Basket motifs illustrate mathematical concepts” by Betty Shea
The Peak: “SFU students utilize Indigenous basketry patterns to teach mathematical concepts” By Henry Tran
SFU News: “New app uses Indigenous basketry patterns to teach math concepts” By Diane Luckow
The Salish Sea Sentinel: “Digital weaving: Online tool teaches math using Tla’amin basket designs” By Cara McKenna
The Conversation: “Indigenous basket-weaving makes an excellent digital math lesson” By Dr. Veselin Jungic
SFU Department of Mathematics News: “New Collaboration with the Tla’amin Nation” By Dr. Veselin Jungic