INDIAN TOWNSHIP (AP) – Mary Mitchell Gabriel, a master Passamaquoddy basket maker who received national recognition for her craft, died Saturday at her home. She was 95.

Gabriel learned the art of basket making from her grandmother, Julia Mell, more than 85 years ago.

She taught her daughters how to make baskets, and she and her daughter Sylvia, who died last year, often demonstrated basket making to tribal youngsters.

“She was the oldest tribal member and a respected basket maker,” said Indian Township tribal historian Donald Soctomah. “She passed on her cultural and traditional values that she learned to her children.”

Gabriel’s baskets have been displayed at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., the Bangor International Airport, the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor and numerous galleries.

In 1994, she was honored in Washington, D.C., by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was one of 11 folk artists, and the only one from New England, out of 220 nominees to receive a $10,000 National Heritage Fellowship award.

Wayne Newell, director of bilingual education at Indian Township, said Gabriel had a dynamic personality and was full of energy to the end. She was fluent in the Passamaquoddy language, one of the oldest languages in North America.

“Wherever she was, she would use the language first, so she was a good model for young ones to emulate. She was somebody that didn’t say be proud,’ she was somebody that just lived it,” Newell said.

Theresa Secord, a Penobscot basket maker and executive director of the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance, called Gabriel a “treasure.” Gabriel was a founding member of the alliance, which began in 1993.

Secord said Gabriel was one of five “phenomenal” basket makers to emerge in the past 100 years.

“She would be right in there because her work is unbelievable,” she said.