Indigenous basket at Toronto auction bears a swastika-like symbol

A Nlaka'pamux basket made around 1900, Lot 31 in Waddington's Discover Inuit and First Nations Art auction, is woven with a motif that looks like a swastika. Photo by Waddington's

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The symbol on an Indigenous basket up for auction in Toronto looks like a swastika, but it predates the Nazis.

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The Nlaka’pamux basket, made around 1900, is Lot 31 in Waddington’s Discover Inuit and First Nations Art sale, which closes June 25. It carries an estimate of $500 to $700 and a starting bid of $400. No one had bid as of Tuesday. The catalogue describes it as a basket with imbricated geometric designs and says nothing about the symbol’s history.

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The people selling pieces like this should be clear about what they are, said Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy at B’nai B’rith Canada. “There’s the responsibility of those who are selling items like this to make clear that this is a basket that contains the sacred symbols of a First Nations people. And that when you inform individuals like that, it helps to change the narrative.”

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Waddington’s did not respond to several requests for comment.

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For thousands of years the swastika was an auspicious symbol, sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism and used as a good-luck sign across Europe, Asia and the Americas. By the early 1900s it was a common good-luck motif in the West, printed on everything from advertising to jewellery.

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Swastika-like designs arose independently in cultures around the world, including among Indigenous peoples in the Americas, long before the Nazis adopted the emblem.

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Nlaka’pamux basket-making is a designated national historic event in Canada. The baskets were made by women, woven from split cedar root with cherry bark in a technique called imbrication, in which the bark is folded under each stitch so the design sits raised on the surface. The materials listed for Lot 31 match that tradition. After 1850, the era this basket comes from, many were woven for trade as colonial disruption reshaped Indigenous economies.

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Sharon Fortney, senior curator of Indigenous collections, engagement and repatriation at the Museum of Vancouver, said the symbol’s roots run far deeper than the Nazi era. “The design on the basket was unfortunately appropriated as a symbol of Nazi Germany, but is a design that sometimes appears on Indigenous made objects from the Plateau region of B.C. and was also used at times by various tribes in the United States,” Fortney said in an email.

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Among the Nlaka’pamux, the design was recorded as “caterpillar” in research from around 1900. “I have on occasion heard the design described as meaning balance and harmony, the four directions, and the four winds,” she said. She has seen it on moccasins and other personal items, and a basketry-covered jar at her museum carries a faded version of the same motif.

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Robertson said the two symbols should not be confused. “The Nazi symbol is actually the Hakenkreuz or the hook cross and it’s a symbol of Christian Germanic origin that is distinct from the swastika or from the First Nations symbol, that was adopted by the Nazi Party as it rose to power in the lead-up to the Second World War.”