By Native Hands describes the history and context of Native American basketry with full-color photographs and scholarly text. The objects are brought to life in words and pictures, including such rare objects as a feathered Pomo blazing sun basket that took three years to create. This book presents baskets from every major geographic region of North America, with examples from the Choctaw, Panamint Shoshone, Salish, Ojibwa, and many others.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Catherine Marshall Gardiner had begun to collect woven baskets from Native American cultures across the continent. Her collection, the first donation to the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in 1923, is widely known as one of the finest and most representative Native American basketry collections. It now includes baskets from 88 tribes, almost all of the basket-making tribes in North America.

The contributors include Stephen W. Cook, Betty J. Duggan, Dawn Glinsmann, William Ashley Harris, and Joyce Herold.