Identity By Design Native Women's Clothing

I will be in DC on March 31st and would be glad to report back to my extended family. 🙂

dovelady wrote: Hi Optomistic. 🙂

Have you been able to attend the show yet? If so, can you give us a report. It was fantastic seeing these dresses on the computer, I can’t imagine how breathtaking it would be to see them in person. 🙂

Yes, I was able to go to the exhibit. I just need to get the film developed and write up some info about the exhibit before I post.

Please give me until mid-next week. Thanks!

dovelady wrote: This is just at test to see if I can still figure out how to do attachments. This is a lid to a birch bark box that I’m making. It is not an original design. It’s from a class I took a few years ago. I hope to revive my interest in quillwork and start making my own designs sometime this year.

Barb,

I just had to post and tell you this is just beautiful!:) You have a special gift.

Shirley

Identity By Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses

Native women have always had an important role in preserving cultural traditions and values. The elaborately beaded dresses that Plains women made-and still make and wear-are both beautiful garments and outward expressions of their tribal identity and family values. Historically, dresses were the canvases upon which Plains women expressed their creativity, marked significant events (such as marriage or a family member’s military service), and displayed family pride.

Images found on early painted muslin dresses were often meant to honor an individual’s accomplishments in battle, to acknowledge a male family member’s valor, or to recognize a sacrifice. In most cases, men painted the battle scenes on dresses. A dress with these images would only be worn by a family member: a wife, mother, sister, daughter, or granddaughter.

The Assiniboine and Sioux are two separate tribes from the Northern Plains region, both situated on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana. They are just two nations out of more than 550 Native nations in the United States today who still adorn their clothing, accessories, and other implements with materials that reflect their surroundings and relate their beliefs and values. Each Native nation expresses itself in its own unique way – using different colors, symbols, designs, and materials. The Sioux are made up of three distinct but related groups that are separated by language dialects: the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota – and those groups are further divided into several bands. The Fort Peck Sioux include the Sisseton/Wahpeton, Yanktonai, Cuthead, Oglala, and Hunkpapa bands. The Fort Peck Assiniboine anre from the Canoe Paddler and Red Bottom bands. Check out the maps on the web at: http://www.nmai.edu/education

Resources and Materials Used to Make Dresses

In the late 1600’s before modern-day borders were established, the Assiniboine migrated south to Montana from Canada. The Sioux gradually moved to the areas now known as Montana and the Dakotas from Canada and Minnesota beginning around the mid 1800’s. The Assiniboine and Sioux found the area teeming with wildlife, including buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and mountain sheep. These animals were important for their meat and for the hides that provided clothing and shelter.

Native people used what was available in their surroundings. In the Northern Plains area, the hides most often used for clothing first came from buffalo, elk, deer, and mountain sheep. Dresses and shirts were mostly made out of deerhides and elkhides because the skins were thinner, while the thicker buffalo hides were used as robes or blankets.

The making of a dress took a great deal of work, which started with a hunt. Men hunted the animals from which the hides came; women did the work of preparing hides. Native people of the Plains have always maintained a close relationship to the land and its resources, and expressed their respect for the animals they took. While on a hunt, they offered prayers in thanks for the life of the animal, its spirit, and for all that the animal would provide. Today, Assiniboine/Sioux men still say a prayer and offer tobacco – which helps send the prayer – and promise to make good use of the animal.

The women work to prepare the hides by removing the hair and tanning the skin. It is messy, hard work and requires muscles and brains – the muscles of the women, and the brains of the animal! In one tanning method, the hide is first soaked in water mixed with ashes for several days. Then it is put on a wooded from and the hair is scraped off. Next, cooked brains of the animal are applied to the hide in order to soften it. The hide is then rinsed and stretched and pulled until – as one dressmaker says – your arms are “so tired, they feel like they will fall off!” This process is referred to as “brain-tanning” and is still done today to prepare hides that will be made into dresses, shirts, jackets, purses, and other items.

Decoration and Adornment

Native people of the Plains have long decorated their clothes and objects. Today, the heavily beaded dress is often thought of as the traditional style of clothing for Plains women. But before traders brought glass beads to the Plains, the materials used to decorate outfits for men and women came from the natural environment. Some of the earliest dresses and shirts were painted with natural materials, known as earth paints. Minerals and clays were among the first materials that would often be combined with buffalo fat and mixed in bowls made out of turtle shells to make paints. The hip bone of a buffalo, which when soaked in water becomes sponge-like, was sometimes used as a paintbrush. The painted images found on many early hides and dresses show scenes of men on horses in battle or on a hunt. They tell stories of the bravery and honor of a husband, son or father.

In addition to paints, people of the Plains used other natural materials to adorn their clothing. Most often the materials used were porcupine quills, animal teeth, such as those of elk; bone; bird or animal claws, such as those of bear; and shells that were most often acquired through the trade with other tribes or non-Natives. The designs on dresses and the materials used reflect the people’s respect for the animals and the land.

In the past, elk teeth on dresses symbolized wealth and reflected the value the people of the Plains placed on the elk. Today, mountain designs on dresses show how they value the land and surroundings.

Porcupines are found along rivers and streams in great numbers in the Northern Plains. The sharp, needle-like quills that grow on porcupines were among the first materials used to decorate clothing. Porcupine quills were softened, flattened, and wrapped or woven around other material. They were also dyed different colors and used to make detailed designs. Natural materials such as plants, flowers, and berries were used to dye quills.

The process of beading is much easier than quillwork, since the quills have to be pulled from the hide, washed, dyed, dried, sorted by size, and then softened in the mouth and flattened. Although more difficult and timeconsuming than beadwork, quillwork is still done by Plains artists today. Native people of the Plains continue to sue the natural resources from their surroundings to make dresses. Today, they may buy hides and materials, or may hunt and gather what they need. Either way, they still honor the animals and the land – and the way of their grandmothers, grandfathers, and the ancestors of generations past.

Plains Dresses: Layers of Meaning

A dress connects a girl to her tribe, her community, her family, and her ancestors. The dresses that girls and women wear are full of meaning, sometimes decorated with beads in designs and symbols that tell stories in honor of family members. Long ago, the decorations on a woman’s dress signaled her family’s ability to trade for materials, or that her husband or father was a good provider. Many elk teeth on a dress meant great wealth. In the Crow tribe, dresses covered in elk teeth were sometimes given to a new daughter-in-law by her husband’s family. The only elk teeth used on dresses are the two ivory eyeteeth. In the past, a boy would collect elk teeth over many years of hunting and would save them to be sewn by his mother or sisters on a dress for the woman he would marry.

Resources

To see and learn more about Plains dresses and objects featured in the National Museum of the American Indian exhibit, Identity by Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses, go to: http://www.nmai.si.edu and click on “Exhibitions!”

For further information on other decorative material used on Plains dresses and the introduction of glass beads on the Plains, go to: http://www.bbhc.org/pim/faq.cfm

To learn more about elk, their habits, and elk conservation efforts, visit: http://www.rmef.org

Acknowledgements

Joyce, Juanita, and Jessica Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine/Sioux); Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), NMAI; and Kakwireiosta Hall (Mohawk/Cherokee)

Project Manager, Writer, Developer: Leslie Logan (Seneca), NMAI

Editor: Edwin Schupman (Muscogee), Genevieve Simermeyer (Osage), Elizabeth Gische, NMAI

Design and Production: Grafik, Alexandria, VA

More images from NMAI

dovelady wrote: Thank you so much for the quotes and pictures. If only those beads & clothes could talk! What things they might say about their owners! What history we might learn. What heart songs we might hear. 🙂

You are very welcome. Again, sorry that it took so long.