INTERVIEW / BETH HOMA KRAUS
Interview by Greta Jaeger
Interviewee is Beth Homa Kraus
Photography by Becca Orf
It’s early August 2017 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s hot. Sticky hot. I lock up my bike and get a shady table under the hop vines that surround Northbound Smokehouse Brewpub. While I wait for Beth, I gaze around at the panting dogs and the prehistoric coleus.
Greta: Ok, introduce yourself!
Beth: I'm Beth Homa Kraus also known as Birch Bark Beth
G: Grand Marais versus Minneapolis?
B: That's tough. It can be a complicated answer. For years I feel like I've had dual citizenship in both because for every year I have my pilgrimage to Grand Marais for [birch bark] harvest and I have my glamour tent: my A-frame wall tent that I made permanently on my buddy's property and I stay there whenever I'm up there. I sewed the thing. I feel like I'm home when I'm in that tent. I go up there for at least one full month every summer to harvest birch bark. I like [Minneapolis] because I love the diversity. I love being a stranger in public. I love getting influenced by different things people are wearing or different things I see or I get exposure to, ethnic food, and I love public transportation. I love all that stuff, but I also love the nature in Grand Marais and Lake Superior.* Someone once told me, "You're going to miss the lake the most," and it's true, that was what I missed the most because it’s always in the background, this big, massive, blue, glacier-ancient water - it affects all of the air, and it feels cooler down by the water. Then you can hike and see beautiful things in nature and I can be a stranger in the woods.
G: Can you count the times you've jumped in Lake Superior?
B: Ooo, yeah, I'm afraid of Lake Superior! I think twice!
B: Yes, twice. I hope to jump in it this year.
B: It’s cold. I hear it’s warmer on the south side.
G: I've dipped my toes in on the south side!
B: I've put my toes in it this year.
G: I feel like it could cure foot fungus or something.
B: Freeze away your warts!
G: Ok, let's talk about birch. When did you learn about birch bark and how long have you been weaving bark?
B: It all started in 2012 when I was a [North House Folk School] intern. I went there with the idea that I was going to build boats, but while I was an intern I took one birch bark basketry class and I was hooked. I got “weaver fever” and couldn’t stop. I got a job after the internship in a St. Paul homeless shelter and I was dabbling in making baskets. I found myself always wanting to be spending more time weaving so I decided I was just going to quit my job and weave full time and see what happens. I kept looking at the master crafters and thinking “how did they get so good?!” Well, when you do it a lot you get good at it. My piano teacher used to say that same thing, but I didn’t really realize that until now. So I left my job and started weaving, selling, and teaching birch full time. I did that in 2013. I’ve just been weaving all the time and as much as possible for 5 years now.
G: What were some of your emotions around that, or fears, or reliefs once you decided to fully dive in?
B: I feel fairly accomplished and successful now, but at the beginning it was hard and I was like, "What am I doing?!" I also really loved [my work] prior to the internship. I worked for 5 years in social work in Baltimore and I really did love my job in St. Paul in the shelter. I really enjoyed being a part of the solution and working with people. It was hard to leave. I felt very selfish for leaving, and doing art is kind of a selfish profession, so I teach a lot. Selling your art can be kind of a weird feeling when you spend all this time and you can remember the tree that you took the bark off of. Then you spend all this time weaving a basket and even when there were problems, you stuck with it. You know you put all this effort in and then you do a little show and dance and someone buys it, and then it's gone, and you’re like "Oh, now I just have this green money." So I found that I have to have good balance between selling items and teaching and I try to do 60/40 - 60% teaching and interacting, harvesting, doing my birch outreach and telling people about the process of basket weaving.
G: The satistfaciton you get from doing service work, do you feel like you get that with what you’re doing now?
B: It's different, I have hopes of somehow making both of those realms of my life intersect more, so maybe I'll weave baskets with homeless people someday, that is a goal. Classes are expensive and I’m always trying to teach at a more reasonable cost. There’s something about when you teach somebody how to make something; when I see the students get it, or finish their basket, and the pride that they have in their basket or in themselves, and I've given people “weaver fever”! A lot of my students will continue to weave and every time I've seen a basket that they've made since, it gives me a lot of pride. I also think there are mental health benefits with weaving. It’s always been kind of this joke about people weaving baskets in mental institutions, but I think there’s a lot of mental health benefits about organizing and processing. People have a general need to connect with nature, and taking natural materials and making them into a functional form is part of that. So I feel like I am doing some good work with it, but I want to do more. I’m always trying to see how many more people I can infect with baskets.
G: What keeps you up at night? Related to weaving or not.
G: Do you want to expand on that?
B: I think it's pretty self explanatory, and police brutality, too. I'm always asking why am I doing what I’m doing, what’s the point of it all, and I wonder in times like now when there is so much going on with social injustice and systematic oppression of people, how is this helping? I’m a crafts person, but I’m really an artist. A lot of the people who are in the scene see a big difference between those two, but I don't. I feel like everything I make is a piece of artwork. I’m really connected and I feel too much. Also, I work with birch bark, which in Minnesota, especially in northern Minnesota, native people are known for being the the best and most prolific and historically the starters of basket weaving. A lot of people will come at me with misappropriation of culture and see me as making a profit off of someone else’s culture, but I try to be very mindful that the baskets I sell and the type of basketry I do is traditionally Scandinavian and Russian, so it’s of my people - so that has kept me up at night. Yeah, and money, why do we need it? Why can’t we just trade and barter?
G: Do you consider yourself a women in business or an entrepreneur? Or do you feel you're redefining what that means?
B: Sometimes I forget that I’m a woman, I’ll be honest. I'll walk by a window and see my reflection and think, "What! That’s me?" I forget that I’m a woman and that I’m short. I honestly forget about gender things a lot of times and what gender other people are. I’m not usually thinking that I represent a gender, but I am woman. I'm proud to be a woman and owning a business. I think that I'm redefining it because most of my students are women but most of my mentors are men. I use tools and I have cuts on my hands and bruises all over and I don’t own any makeup. This is a job. I don’t buy kits. It’s about the harvesting of my materials and processing it. I have to convince my parents almost every other month that I do have a real job; Basket Weaver is a real job. Little side note: I was researching “Are there any robots that weave baskets?” There is this big fear that robots are going to be taking over everybody’s jobs and so I was like, “Well I don't know if robots can take over my job!” So I started researching, "Are there robots that can weave baskets?" and I haven't found any. There is a youtube video that says "Robot makes basket" and it’s a robot that picks up a basketball and throws it and it goes in the hoop and makes it … that kind of basket! The only proof I could find is a robot just gluing veneer, but it’s not weaving it. I think that it’s one of the few crafts that cannot be made by machines. There are factory baskets, people, assembly line, yeah. The material might be machine processed, and there might be some machines in some of the layout of it, but as far as I know, robots can't make baskets, only people can. My conclusion is that I’m not going to be out of a job any time soon.
B: Oh bike obviously! I mean I do love my car. I'm 31 and technically I’ve never owned a car until this year. I always said it was part of my business plan not to own a car because then I’d have to network with people to get rides to different places. Harvesting was always interesting because I’d always have to convince people to come pick me up in the middle of the woods and take me out to a different section of the woods. That was always kind of fun and interesting, but now that I have a car it’s a lot easier. There was this one path that was kind of off-road and I could bring all the people in my car, a Subaru Forester, and I kept yelling, “It's forest-ing!” But I love biking, love love love biking. Biking in the street with the cars, it helps me think and process. I like the wind in my face. I don’t enjoy driving ever, but it has made my life easier.
G: What do you like about yourself and what makes you special?
B: Awwwwww. That’s a good question ... I like my creativity. I like my emotions. I like that I feel so much, because I feel like I can’t help but express [my emotions], and sometimes that makes people uncomfortable, but I think it shows people that they're allowed to feel, too, and I like that. I also like my butt.
*World’s biggest freshwater lake by surface area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Superior
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