Baskets are containers. Bags, boxes, pans, tubs, buckets, pails, pouches, cases, sacks, bowls and basins remain indispensable to the activities of daily life. Instead of hand-crafted baskets, which were very important to the Snuneymuxw but time consuming to make, Snuneymuxw families now use plastic, metal and ceramic containers.

When trade with Europeans began in the late 1700s, iron and copper pots were soon being used to replace baskets to boil water and prepare food. Today, a mesh onion sac serves the same purpose as a perforated clamming basket, and a plastic pail makes an excellent replacement for a berry basket. Grocery bags and foods from the grocery store shelves are more common than living off the dwindling resources of the land. The Snuneymuxw Elders are working to educate their people about healthy, traditional foods, to get them back to the nutritious, local diet that was once what one Elder described as "our food cupboard."

Even industrial workers found a use for baskets - in the early days of Nanaimo's coal trade, canoes and woven baskets were kept busy as Snuneymuxw workers paddled coal out to ships waiting in Nanaimo Harbour. Baskets were important items in the early fur-trading posts. By the 1880s, a tourist trade in baskets was a source of income for Snuneymuxw women, who made extra money selling small, fine, lidded baskets, basket-woven suitcases and vase-shaped baskets. The example here is woven around a factory-produced ketchup bottle. They also made more traditional basket shapes with new imbrications or decorative designs, often with representations of ducks, whales, canoes and other figures. These were purchased by settlers, and later by collectors and tourists.