There was a time in the not too distant past when O'odham Indians lived lightly upon the desert earth. Their homes were brush shelters that could be easily built and readily abandoned.

Living in such a manner meant that the material needs of the O'odham were few. Their personal possessions were made from supplies provided by nature and most of them were portable. They had no cupboards, no chests of drawers, and no metal containers. What they had instead, the women made themselves - baskets. Baskets were the drawers, cupboards, many of the containers, and storage bins. Baskets kept food from touching the ground; basketry mats kept one's sleeping body separated from the soil.

In times gone by, O'odham basket makers fashioned their products in two principal ways; plaiting and coiling. Plaiting was used for sleeping mats, eating mats, the backing for infants' cradles, hoods for infants' cradles, elongated "medicine baskets" used as containers for fetishes, and for utilitarian baskets as well. The strands used for plaiting were made from leaves of the sotol. Although plaiting is perhaps the simplest and most basic of basketry techniques, there are no longer any Tohono O'odham basket makers who use it.

Today's O'odham Indian women probably make more baskets than do basket makers of any other tribe in North America. The technique used is coiling. An outer sewing or binding element is coiled around a foundation made from a bundle of fine strands of beargrass.  In the old days the light color binding element consisted of the new shoots of willow which come out on trees in the spring. This has been substituted for in today's coiled baskets with the new growth of leaves of yucca as these emerge in summer to be picked June through September. The green in O'odham baskets comes from the old leaves of the same yucca. These are harvested in December and January.

The black used to make designs in both old and new baskets comes from the white-seeded race of devil's claw, a normally wild plant but one which the O'odham have been in the process of domesticating for centuries. The dark red that appears in some baskets comes from the straight roots of banana yucca.

Anita Antone, who has been demonstrating basket making at Tumacácori since 1972, made her first baskets before she went away as a first grade student at the Phoenix Indian School. She grew up in the village of Big Fields on the O'odham Indian Reservation where she learned to make baskets from her grandmother, "Buried Leaves", whose non-Indian name was Maria Elena Jose. Anita's mother was a basket maker too, but her mother's mother was a more patient teacher. A frequently asked question is "how long does it take to make a basket?" The answer is "until it's done". It might take weeks, months, or even years.