Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c.1780 - 1980 9780228013723

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Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History martha langford and sandra paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw

Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion c. 1780 –1980

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0398-4 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0399-1 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Object lives and global histories in northern North America : material culture in motion, c. 1780-1980 / edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw. Names: Lemire, Beverly, 1950- editor. | Peers, Laura L. (Laura Lynn), editor. | Whitelaw, Anne, 1966- editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200312936 | isbn 9780228003991 (paper) | isbn 9780228003984 (cloth) Subjects: lcsh: Indigenous peoples—Material culture—Canada— History—Case studies. | lcsh: Indigenous art—Canada—Case studies. | lcsh: Cultural relations—History—Case studies. | lcgft: Case studies. Classification: lcc e78.c2 o25 2021 | ddc 971.004/97—dc23

This book was designed and typeset in Minion 11/14 by studio oneonone.

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Maps | xi Introduction | 3 Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw 1 Object Lives: Innovating Methodology | 26 Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw sidebar 1 Management and Methodology | 53 Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw 2 Crossing Worlds: Hide Coats, Relationships, and Identity in Rupert’s Land and Britain | 55 Laura Peers 3 “A Typical Canadian Outfit”: The Red River Coat | 82 Cynthia Cooper sidebar 2 The Huron-Wendat Capot | 108 Cynthia Cooper sidebar 3 The Red River Coat and Its Commercial Promotion | 112 Cynthia Cooper 4 Colonizing Winter: Tobogganing, Toboggan Suits, and Imperial Agendas in the Northlands, c. 1800–1900 | 115 Beverly Lemire sidebar 4 Gifts of Empire | 145 Beverly Lemire 5 Peter Rindisbacher and the Imagined North: Circulations, Realities, and Representations | 149 Julie-Ann Mercer

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6 The Wampum and the Print: Objects Tied to Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi’s London Visit, 1824–1825 | 176 Jonathan Lainey and Anne Whitelaw sidebar 5 Active Imperial Networks | 200 Jonathan Lainey and Anne Whitelaw 7 A Brief History of a Complicated Sweater: Appropriation, Arctic Sovereignty, and Postwar Winter Fashion | 203 Laurie K. Bertram 8 Clare Sheridan: British Writer, Sculptor, and Collector in Blackfoot Country, 1937 | 228 Sarah Carter 9 Dolls, Women’s Art, and Indigenous Networks in the Borderlands of Northern North America, 1885–1945 | 261 Katie Pollock 10 Dew Claw Bags, Indigenous Women, and Material Culture in History and Practice | 289 Judy Half 11 Inscribing the North West: Hide Jackets and Colonial Surveyors | 312 Susan Berry sidebar 6 Jackets in Circulation | 342 Susan Berry 12 From the Sanatorium to the Museum and Beyond: The Circulation of Art and Craft Made by Indigenous Patients at Tuberculosis Hospitals | 346 Sara Komarnisky Figures | 377 Bibliography | 381 Contributors | 419 Index | 423

Acknowledgments

Project goals are realized only through the combined efforts and resources of many people and institutions. The Object Lives project began with research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and we are grateful for the support provided. In addition, the University of Alberta committed considerable resources that enabled our team to work effectively toward our goals. We acknowledge this important assistance from many quarters. Contributions also came from several people in the formative and early stages of the project, including Anne de Stecher. The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University in Montreal likewise provided space and support for our Montreal team meeting. This was important, as too was the substantial assistance of the McCord Museum in Montreal, including the active assistance of curator Guislaine Lemay, whose interventions added to our progress over an extended period. The McCord Museum’s contributions to our research agenda were timely and essential. Curatorial assistance was instrumental in every location where the team assembled, particularly at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in England, where we first gathered face-to-face for our initial engagement with museum-held objects. We thank the conservation and collections management staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum who facilitated our visit and provided insightful contributions to our discussions. We thank Jacqueline Vincent of the Brechin Group for her careful and

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acknowledgments

timely assistance in image delivery from Library and Archives Canada. Our project profited from the interventions of museum professionals at every stop on our path. Melanie Marvin was a central administrative figure who served us effectively over years. Her efficiency and insights contributed to our goals. Sarah Nesbitt also made significant contributions, including at the Montreal team meeting. Likewise, the administrative staff of all the home departments of team members provided important contributions of many kinds, particularly Lia Watkin of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta and Barb Baker, formerly of the same department. Our thanks also to Jonathan Crago at McGill-Queen’s University Press. His support and interest in this venture encouraged us throughout the process. Similarly, we thank our anonymous readers, whose insightful and helpful comments made this a stronger account of our research. Family and friends lived with us and encouraged us throughout the years of this endeavour: our heartfelt thanks to all of them.

Opposite Map 1. A Map of the North-Pole and the Parts Adjoining, 1680. Wikimedia Commons.

Map 2. Red River Settlement and Rupert’s Land, with global insert.

Map 3. Blackfeet Reservation, Blood Reserve, and Peigan Reserve.

Map 4. Treaty Territories 4, 6, 7, 8, and 10, with borderland.

Map 5. Borderlands across the 49th Parallel.

Map 6. Detail of the Blackfeet, Rocky Boy, and Fort Belknap Reservations and the Kainai and Piikani Reserves.

Map 7. Northern regions of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, with Tucho (Great Slave Lake) in the Northwest Territories, Kai’till’thu/Atipaskâw Sâkanhikan (Lake Athabasca), and surrounding rivers, places, and peoples.

Map 8. Dr Robert Bell’s Athabasca River survey map, drawn by A.S. Cochrane, 1884. Opposite Map 9. Dr Robert Bell’s map for the Mackenzie Basin report, 1884.

Map 10. North American map of select tuberculosis hospitals and select museums, with global insert.

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America

Introduction beverly lemi re, l aura peers, and anne whitelaw

This volume re-envisions the histories of northern North America within a global context by focusing on the trajectories, or “lives,” of material culture that flowed to and from the region between the eighteenth and the twentyfirst centuries and by highlighting the critical links that tie this region to the wider world. The making, reworking, adoption, and hijacking of global material flows underscore the agency of Indigenous, settler, and imperial groups as they interacted through material culture within the broader landscape of historical adaptation, migration, colonial and imperial processes, and resistance.1 The volume focuses on specific kinds of objects: hide coats, trade goods, dolls, items made in sanatoria by Indigenous tubercular patients, Icelandic sweaters, wampum belts, lithographic representations of Indigenous peoples, toboggans, and deer hoof bags. We address their specific contexts of production and circulation within the larger historical processes in which they were enmeshed, a method that supports a nuanced understanding of how colonial and imperial processes work on the ground and how they are linked to identities and social relationships that take form in relation to broad practices of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. These case studies are also literally grounded in cultural and geographical landscapes, whether Indigenous ones or those constructed by incomers (including conceptions of “the North”). These landscapes, in turn, are set within global landscapes of trade and politics; material culture is foundational to understanding cross-cultural relations and local ways of survival over the past several centuries.

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With a focus on materiality, Object Lives and Global Histories provides a key analytical and methodological lens through which to explore complex cross-cultural relationships and diverse community histories. This focus is grounded in an acknowledgment of the complex, continuing presence and agencies of Indigenous peoples of many cultures across the landscape that we address, including what became Canada. The interlayered presence of Indigenous peoples across northern North America – visualized in powerful and dynamic ways by maps such as the one at https://native-land.ca – was a key starting point for this volume. Equally, our perspective regarded as fundamental the concept that many of the items of visual and material culture on which the chapters in this volume focus are expressions of Indigenous agencies and sovereignties – political, economic, social – and of living links with the past and present. Our analyses begin in the colonial era and explore many points of crosscultural contact within these histories, including those that are “not a place, or an abstract concept, or a space to experience strangeness” but, as Laura Peers describes, “something which existed within [people] themselves, in the marriages of their parents, and their sense of heritage and identity.”2 As well, we assess the equivocal networks of travel and exchange and the significance of the peoples and things moving along these channels, including Indigenous peoples themselves, along with their powerful arts. This volume assesses the colonial and imperial purposes expressed in the material systems that we interrogate. Powerful institutional structures figure in these histories, against which colonial, imperial, and postcolonial histories are told, although there are more subaltern narratives here than histories of elites. The collective material focus of the chapters and of the collaborative methodology of research behind them produces a different kind of historical analysis, with attention to embodied items whose trajectories crossed and indeed rejected cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries and, at times, defied colonial authorities and their intentions. Among the themes that emerge across these chapters is the powerful persistence of creative artistry among Indigenous peoples of northern North America. Although these case studies are based largely on items in museum collections, we do not focus exclusively on the imperial actors who enabled the collection of these Indigenous arts; however, we do acknowledge that the weight of these collecting processes shaped our access and analyses.3 Steven Loft notes that “decolonization is a process of unbinding imperialist conceptions of knowledge from Indigenous ones,”4 including the recognition of the

Introduction

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power of these arts at the time of their production and today. In this context, given the complexity of historically and culturally situated terminology, the term Métis/Metis is nuanced differently by authors across the volume. This is but one of the negotiations by team members undertaken in recognition of the complex social and material histories being addressed. Indeed, Métis scholar Sherry Farrell Racette observes that “objects [are] encoded with knowledge, although they are sometimes impenetrable and difficult to understand … Through the power of colour and design, the objects in museum collections not only speak a powerful aesthetic, they also reveal critical information about the worlds and circumstances in which they were created.”5 As a collaborative research group, we looked slowly and respectfully at the evidence within Indigenous material culture, attentive to observations and flashes of insight and to Indigenous voices represented by and linked to the material culture itself. Equally, we examined the materials of settler colonialism and imperial culture, attentive to their purpose, making, and circulation. We sought to understand the many ways that Indigenous agency is reflected in the arts to be found in museum and other collections, while acknowledging the fraught histories of the colonial and national authorities who organized the use and making of material media of various kinds to normalize colonization and Indigenous suppression.

t h e p ro j e c t This volume emerged from the four-year research project Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada allowed the possibility of collaboration across different kinds of institutions and geographical spaces. As this body continues to privilege scholars based in universities and other research institutions such as museums – a funding model in the process of change – the research team reflected this orientation. As we began our work, our nascent team members went through various shifts and life changes, which led to the team’s composition having fewer Indigenous participants than was initially envisioned. The final team, however, included strong Indigenous members and non-Indigenous members with longstanding ties to Indigenous communities around material culture. Although the project was never intended to be a community-based partnership with Indigenous communities, we are pleased to have brought Indigenous voices and perspectives into the research and writing process, including the dialogue between

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Judy Half and Beverly Lemire that forms chapter 10. We are also indebted to additional Indigenous intermediaries and correspondents who generously worked with team members to inform our analysis. These individuals are identified and thanked in specific chapters. Our team had a balance of established and early career members, and the more senior among us used the process to mentor participants. The team’s collaborative methodology supported a diversity of voices and perspectives, as reflected in the nature of the chapters included here. As described in chapter 1, the team comprised historians, art historians, ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and curators affiliated with institutions ranging geographically from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. The team met face-to-face annually across four years to explore collections at Oxford, at the McCord Museum in Montreal, and at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Our monthly virtual meetings are described in the discussion of methodology in chapter 1. On each occasion, we pooled knowledge and observations, offered and enquired about diverse perspectives, and brought multiple lifeways and disciplinary toolkits and focuses to our work; the process became an intriguing nexus for Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of understanding the material culture on which we focused. As one of this manuscript’s anonymous readers noted, “dialogue was at the heart of this project’s methodology.”

l o c at i n g m ater i a l c u lt u re a n d re s e a rch i n t i m e a n d s pace The volume’s material and decolonial analyses are innovatively positioned within regional, Indigenous, and broad global processes. Three core issues orient our research paradigms and this volume, all of which we seek to elaborate in various ways. One of these issues is the construction of space and place as reflected in our focus on northern North America and the concept of “the North.” Another is the issue of temporal focus; our work includes but ranges outside the usual academic frameworks of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linking processes rooted in these eras to the events of more recent periods. This vantage point acknowledges persistence and continuity among Indigenous peoples, even as colonial policies and projects (and resistances) evolved over time. Thus we examine manners of trade and contact from the very beginning of the eighteenth century (and earlier) to the present day. The third issue is the location of our research in relation to existing literature

Introduction

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both on global material culture and entangled cultures and on the processes of cultural contact and mutual accommodation that accompanied imperial and colonial dynamics across the period we study. Again, although we draw strongly on existing literatures, we also see this volume as ranging outside these frames, deconstructing them, and positing a new structure for understanding these histories.

Northern North America and the North Recent scholarship on global, European, Eurocolonial, and Atlantic World histories shares a common focus that largely overlooks the northern realms, instead giving extensive attention to Eurasia, to temperate, tropical, and plantation regions, and to connections with Africa.6 This focus on settler colonial and plantation zones is fully comprehensible given the historical weight of the mass enslavement of Africans and its profound legacy. However, this focus is not aimed solely at understanding such momentous historical crimes. In many instances, a narrow range of study reflects the preference of scholars to address metropolitan issues alone, without attending to networks of influence and to the breadth of historical actors.7 Indeed, until recent years, Scandinavia has rarely been incorporated into “European” material culture projects, which have more commonly focused on Britain, France, Spain, and Italy as normative sites.8 There is a signal value in wide-ranging assessments of the Indigenous spaces of northern North America, the trade materials issuing into and from these domains, and the various northern and global linkages effecting multidirectional influences. Indigenous communities defined these spaces, understood the lands on which they lived, and built ancient living cultures entwined with the land. Colonial authorities approached these regions with worldviews at odds with this lived reality. Among the many repercussions that ensued was a frequent intellectual belittlement of these regions, a colonial legacy still being addressed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin consider geographical spaces that they term “Northscapes” and their place in the Western academy, asking the question “Is there a history of the North?” – which they answer in the negative. They note the longstanding “marginal importance until recent times” of places defined by winters of ice and snow, beginning with the views of classical writers, a perspective that later permeated the academy. The long winters and the predominance of Indigenous populations encouraged Europeans to write their histories from a Eurocentric vantage point as opposed to recording

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histories of this region and its peoples. The absence of a “general history of the North” is the legacy of the neglect of peoples, spaces, and histories by a colonial academy, even as decolonization ensues.9 Scholars of multiple languages and ethnicities are challenging what counts as significant cultural and territorial constituencies, insisting that northern regions be counted.10 Lassi Heininen and Chris Southcott observe that “[a] new region has recently emerged in the world. Its geographical components have always existed, but its identity as a region is quite recent.” The peoples of northern regions have recently “pushed aside” the colonial perspective of a northern “frontier” and “replaced [it] with the notion of homeland.”11 Throughout the long colonial era, Indigenous peoples retained their rich histories, which they had transmitted with aspiration and agency over generations. To address the gap in academic scholarship, Jørgensen and Sörlin urge the creation of “relational human history” with attention to Indigenous peoples, spaces, and realms.12 Our project attends to myriad northern spaces – intentionally and productively – knitting together place and material culture in the active networks shaped by myriad actors. We contribute to the development of a multivocal set of histories that seek to expand conventional understandings of the North.

Chronology of This Study Histories of (global) material culture, the travels of Indigenous people, or colonial transmission of their arts and material culture most frequently appear within defined chronologies, such as the framework of the long eighteenth or long nineteenth century.13 These chronologies arise out of longstanding patterns and practices that emerged within the Western academy. There is rationality in this scholarly template, allowing a sharp focus on individuals, systems of exchange, or specific events where such exchanges or representations took place. However, studies of global trade, as well as of Indigenous peoples, emphatically challenge such paradigms. Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver has crafted a study of Indigenous peoples in the Atlantic World across millennia, placing America’s Indigenous peoples at the centre of the “making of the modern world.”14 Coll Thrush takes a similar tack, tracing the powerful presence of Indigenous travellers to London from throughout the British Empire from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Like Weaver, Thrush shatters exclusionary categories and provides fulsome evidence of the voices, presence, and significance of Indigenous people who

Introduction

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were voluntary or involuntary travellers “with cultural and political impacts far outweighing their head count … a new kind of London story.”15 Similarly, Beverly Lemire traces the entangled movements of trade goods, peoples, and material culture across three and a half centuries, finding that more capacious chronologies allow a different sort of analysis outside standard time frames.16 We follow an intentionally atypical timeline to pose a richer array of questions and consider a wide range of issues, all of which emerge from entanglements of Indigenous cultures, colonial policies, and imperial design. Unsettling well-worn Western chronologies argues for the value of different time frames. Gregory Younging observes the knowledge proffered by Anishinaabe author Kim Blaeser regarding “several characteristics of contemporary Indigenous Literatures,” one of which is that they “stretch across large expanses of time … displaying the Indigenous concept that all time is closely connected and that actions can transcend time.”17 The timescape employed in this volume can also be seen as another facet of Indigenizing the academy through different valuations of temporality.

Entanglements The case studies in this volume are deeply informed by the complex entanglements of objects, peoples, and cultures. The concept of “entanglement” was originally proposed by Nicholas Thomas in regard to historic encounters between Pacific Islanders and Europeans;18 this concept defies older concepts of superficial acculturation and attends to the nuances of accommodation and resistance. Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton’s study “Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European Histories” picks up this concept with respect to the early modern Atlantic World, noting how sixteenth-century European interlocutors struggled to define and understand the lands and Indigenous peoples they encountered in places where the landscape itself “defies the imposition of a European order of things.”19 The initial perplexity among European colonists and their dependence on Indigenous knowledge and technologies took different forms over time as colonial power grew, settlers multiplied, and their claims over spaces advanced, even as Indigenous peoples persisted in their ancient territories. Within these scenarios, the pursuit of entangled histories offers wider possibilities for “paying attention to the agentive capacities of all actors.” This emphasis is particularly important in global, comparative, and transnational histories, many of which “continue to focus

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exclusively on the impact that Europeans had on ‘others’” or to focus on Europeans’ “‘representations’ of the latter.”20 Entanglement need not refer to a shared experience of history, as Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche note: Cross-cultural histories require a dislocated vision because they are not, in fact, unitary histories at all. A unitary history is a shared theatre of action and meaning, and it can be seen in two or more ways … But colonialism in the Pacific and Australia over the last two centuries does not constitute a shared theatre of action and meaning, like an industrial struggle, that is merely perceived in different ways. Just as indigenous art is constituted in different ways to European art, indigenous historical consciousness is not necessarily defined around the same events or chronologies as European narrative. It may occupy a different ground altogether.21 They go on to state that to some extent, “over some phases of the crosscultural encounter in this region, there was, in fact, no encounter. That is, European and indigenous imaginings of place, self, sociality and otherness were effectively autonomous, they were introspective, they were not caught up in dialogue … [T]he extent to which parties to an encounter grasp or partake of each other’s values is variable, and often surprisingly limited.”22 Material culture reflects these often untranslated meanings of encounters as well as those that were translated. One of the key elements in the Object Lives research and analysis process was our attention to the wider set of actors involved in material culture, including a focus on Indigenous meanings of things and on Indigenous agency in the face of “asymmetrical power relationships.”23 Goods arriving in northern North America from global commercial networks, goods made by Indigenous women and men, goods acquired by Indigenous people in trade with European or Euro-American intermediaries, and the interactions that ensued are at the core of this book, as are the colonial-made wares inspired by Indigenous technologies and used for different purposes. We proceed from the belief that “the material world … affects human relations,”24 and through deep analysis of selected materials, we assess both the complex global interactions emerging from this region of North America, which continues to be shaped by Indigenous peoples as well as by settler colonial and imperial actors, and the profoundly important circulation of material culture and Indigenous knowledge outward along global networks.

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rethinking g lobal history, norther n net wor ks, a nd mater ia lit y Together, the transgeographic flows of material culture and trade networks that we explore, which were core aspects of imperial and colonial processes, and the time frame of our research across the early modern and modern periods place our work firmly within the remit of global history. Global histories are crafted either from various vantage points – including within webbed networks – or through the aegis of one commodity,25 but they share a supranational stance that emphasizes connective courses, including across geographies and borders and through cross-cultural circuits, whether institutional or societal. More attention is being paid to global history, promising a wider extranational perspective with a larger cast of actors and the capacity to ask “big questions,” and in the best of such histories, agency is traced to a panoply of forces. As well, this style of history recognizes many past exclusions.26 The impact of global flows provides a distinctive perspective, central to the project that produced this volume. A leitmotif in global history is networks, along which people, products, and information moved, directly or through intermediary chains, as they came into contact with diverse individuals and were interpreted and reinterpreted in new contexts. The early modern globalizing project of 1500–1820 is much debated, although it is generally agreed that globalism was powerfully developed by 1700 and realized in new forms by the 1800s due to advancements in technologies of production, travel, and communication.27 Historians of this process typically emphasize imperial and commercial networks built through tropical and equatorial zones, the regions with the largest world populations and subsequent colonial development of plantation – slave-based – production and hugely profitable commodity trade.28 These histories of the Global South have received substantial scholarly attention given the far-reaching economic, racial, and cultural effects engendered by those events. Still, global tides flowed in other latitudes, and our orientation was to northern North America and to questions about the currents moving through and beyond this region, plus the peoples touched and the objects created and circulated. “The North” is a region as much created by European imagination as by geography and politics, and it emerged as a concept along with the expansion of European empires and Euro-American nation-states and their quests for resources that might (or might not) be located in the region.29 This entanglement of European politics and Indigenous realities, notably the climate of the

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region, which itself contributed strongly to the European imaginary of “the North,” forced Europeans living in this space to adopt and adapt Indigenous technologies and social practices. In 1786, for example, a Scots trader wrote from a new Hudson’s Bay Company post, noting his need of snowshoes – and the Indigenous women to make them: “I do not know what to do without these articles[;] see what it is to have no [Indigenous] wives. Try and get Rackets [snowshoes] – there is no stirring without them.”30 From first contact and beyond, Indigenous knowledge of lands and seasons was necessary for European survival.31 Cultural entanglements were also facilitated by the geography of the North, whose regions are distinctive because of their proximity at these latitudes, compared to equatorial zones. Northern peoples forged sustained links across these regions with implications yet to be fully realized.32 A Map of the North-Pole and the Parts Adjoining, produced in 1680 in Oxford (see map 1), summarizes extant European knowledge of travel and enterprise in northern climes at that date and visualizes many of the European imaginings and expectations that produced “the North.” This is a map of European hopes for the region, even as it demonstrates Indigenous knowledges or technologies. It shows contacts between various European nationalities and Sami, Greenlandic, Inuit, and innumerable other Indigenous peoples, among others, ordering European information that would define future journeys. The map notations in Hudson Bay of “New Denmark” and “New North Wales” record failed attempts to fix a colonial foothold on Indigenous lands at that time. The Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) received its royal charter from the English king in 1670, and the hbc worked to gain commercial traction with early trading forts; it remained a pivotal presence in many of the histories we address. Depictions on this map of whaling and sealing by European and Greenlandic Inuit hunters confirm the natural riches in higher latitudes and denote seasonal migrations, including by fishing and whaling fleets from southerly to more northerly seas, cycles of long duration. Competition among these hunters is implied. This map summarizes generations of informal and formal adventuring by Europeans along ocean highways that were also dynamic Indigenous spaces. This last fact is crucial. Formalized European knowledge was just one element of the myriad facets of the knowledge that was needed to survive in these regions. Contacts multiplied at local settlements (temporary or longstanding), and colonial expeditions adopted new strategies in the centuries that we study.33 By 1700 routine interactions took place among the autochthonous residents, as well as between these residents and incomers to these lands, resetting the balance of this hemisphere, with

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Indigenous peoples and colonists shaping encounters as they could.34 Although no Inuit or other Indigenous commentators are acknowledged on this map, their knowledge infuses this document, gained through social interactions and mediated by European desires. Seeing beyond the surface motifs of printed materials and decorated items is one of the methodological challenges of this project,35 creatively addressed by contributors to this volume. This project positions northern North America within global networks that transcended national narratives, the agendas of a single empire, and the responses to imperialism by Indigenous peoples. The histories we explore are marked by Indigenous adaptation and persistence, plus various imperial attempts at commercial enterprise and colonial settlement. Colonial and national programs followed from the late eighteenth century onward, with intensifying administrative intrusions into Indigenous lands and societies throughout the twentieth century. Despite the significance of later national policies, we concur with Adele Perry, who rejects “the presumption that the modern nation-state is the best or most natural container of history.”36 The period we assess is illuminated by the material culture generated during colonization, settlement, and the expansion of national governments, as well as by phases of Indigenous resistance and strategic responses. At the same time, scholars of the Arctic and circumpolar world also adopted a comparative and networked perspective, and the history of the polar North, in particular, has attracted intense attention within both imperial and environmental history and within Inuit systems of knowledge.37 Nonetheless, vital elements of global and imperial histories remain opaque, including critical features of northern regions, Indigenous peoples, and the linkages wherein they acted. The prevailing power of national histories often militates against comparative and global treatments of northern spaces; national histories of various kinds also remain a powerful framework of analysis, popular among both public and academic audiences. Still, scholars increasingly recognize the value of assessing northern regions as parts of complex cultural and economic systems with important, far-reaching courses.38 In this volume, Indigenous agency is deeply manifest in material case studies and in the museum collections from which we drew them. Museums currently participate in many decolonizing projects, working directly with Indigenous communities to serve their defined needs.39 We worked in support of that goal, but our core aim was to complicate and Indigenize the literature on global history and to Indigenize those historical narratives, including (and especially) at the imperial centres represented by metropolitan museum

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collections.40 Despite key works by Jace Weaver, Marcy Norton, and others, the voices and perspectives of Indigenous peoples remain underrepresented in the narratives of global, imperial, and Atlantic World histories.41 We sought to amend this through our focus on largely Indigenous material culture, which has in turn not always been integrated into global histories. Indeed, Tony Ballantyne challenges scholars to “recover the participation of various colonized groups and non-white diasporic communities in these [global] webs and remain sensitive to the occlusions and gaps within these patterns of exchange.”42 That was a primary objective of our research. At the core of the “object lives and global histories” addressed in this volume are Indigenous creations – including things made in settler colonial societies and institutions and shaped by Indigenous cultures. We also trace the profound influences that these items and their Indigenous makers and distributors had on colonial societies, metropolitan regions, and imperial cultures.43 The Wendat petitions to King George, Indigenous-made gifts to Lord Selkirk at his marriage, and the translations of Indigenous tobogganing into a colonial sport reflect such complex histories. Globalism unsettled European and colonial cultures even as colonial settlements advanced across northern North America. These realms were connected by myriad channels, with multidirectional currents transmitting fine arts, crafts, fashions, and souvenirs, as well as by the cyclical endeavours of diplomats, military personnel, and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sporting teams. The “agency of things” is another concept integral to our analysis, a paradigm first proposed by Alfred Gell and now accepted as “part of an emerging attempt to take the material world seriously in terms of how it affects human relations” – what Chris Gosden terms the “effects that things have on people.”44 We interrogate a surprising array of “things,” with a focus on their systems of use and meanings, addressing the global from varied geographic positions within northern latitudes. Location and directional flows are critical concerns. We recognize the many generative “contact zones” in northern North America, along with the power of objects created and distributed at these locales.45 The flow and counterflow of people, described by Michael Fisher,46 also applies to the cycles of entangled influences linking communities and territories across vast landscapes. Reciprocally, with Indigenous team member input, we acknowledge Indigenous perspectives, and we query the concept of “objects,” considering some material forms to have forms of animate personification.47 Gell’s concept of the agency of things is very much

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part of a European cultural understanding of material culture and its circulation; we seek to query and add to that perspective in these chapters. We join a growing body of scholars in many disciplines who extend their views beyond formal borders, including those who complicate national regions;48 in sum, “an increasing chorus … has argued that the settler nation need not be the only or even the most important frame for historical scholarship.”49 Accessing the deep knowledge that objects materialize to move beyond governmental systems and hierarchies of knowledge requires attention to orality and Indigenous ways of knowing – that is, “unbinding imperialist conceptions of knowledge from Indigenous ones.”50 In this way, we add to discourses that challenge disciplinary orthodoxies, and we use material culture as a means to track historical change and historical actors from this region and beyond. We place the northern regions of North America within a global world and within a colonial-postcolonial context viewed through the critical study of material culture. The decolonization of the academy is a long-term, “messy” project that, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes, is set within difficult terrain: “The intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place.”51 We acknowledge the distorting imperial legacies of knowledge hierarchies, and we seek to work against and through these impediments, honouring Indigenous ways of knowing and the Indigenous knowledge keepers who are within our collaborative group or allied with our collaborative membership. The Object Lives project addressed these issues by seeking to “decentre” our analysis of this region, its materiality, and its connections and by bringing new collaborative analyses to bear on historical evidence. Natalie Zemon Davis advocates “decentering” as a process that “involves the stance and the subject matter of the historian,” noting that “[t]he decentering historian … widens his or her scope, socially and geographically, and introduces plural voices into the account.”52 Such a perspective can reveal vital narratives or networks previously in the shadows. Indigenous scholars have led critical analyses of academic paradigms and institutional practices, emphasizing the need to fundamentally challenge hegemonic structures. Smith reminds us of the value of “oral ways of knowing” that exist outside the boundaries of the traditional academy, with its long history of othering.53 The multivocal nature

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of this project, our respect for myriad sites of knowledge, and our deep regard for the material cultures of Indigenous peoples add to the transformations within the academy involved in decolonizing and Indigenizing its spaces. The objects selected for close study and the focus of this volume open new vistas on northern regions and peoples, as well as on linkages and cultural changes amid imperial, colonial, and postcolonial survival and representation. Given the cross-cultural and political power of fashion, clothing of various sorts animated our research and animates this narrative, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century fads ranging from tobogganing suits and children’s Red River coats to Icelandic sweaters. Indigenous peoples as historical actors and as makers provided a focus for our research, as did crosscultural representations of Indigenous communities in distinctively mobile colonial media, such as prints and photographs. We investigated the various stages of global interactions through materials created, bought, consumed, or deployed by Indigenous peoples, along with those used by settlers and subsequent collector organizations, institutions, and networks. We use these material focuses to illuminate northern lives lived with and through objects amid the thickening of global links and technologies. Our multidisciplinary, collective work provides essential new knowledge about the peoples and objects entwined in the globalized history of northern North America.

t h e cha p ters Chapter 1 explores the new research methods that emerged from this project, one that integrated the study of material culture with multidisciplinary sets of knowledge, including Indigenous ways of knowing. This methodological assessment is part of our innovative, self-reflexive study. Interdisciplinary teamwork is not new. However, our longitudinal study, integrating the collective and collaborative study of material culture plus scheduled reflection and debate, is methodologically original. Its consciously structured format drew on our diverse expertise to produce the best results. “Close looking” and “slow looking” became watchwords of our practice, first discussed in our online blog.54 We also acknowledged the multiple ways of looking and sources of insight and “seeing,” investigating objects that varied widely in form and context. We approached these materials with humility; this disposition was key, for if you did not start from a humble position, the objects would soon bring you to that stance. The invaluable questions that emerged through close looking were answered best through open dialogue. The results astonished and

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intrigued. The methodology we devised is an invaluable tool that allows us to see more clearly, irrespective of the materials examined. The social and political power of clothing within intersecting cultural histories was a recurring theme in our collaborative study and became the focus of several chapters in this volume. Coats were emblems of alliance, status, race, and rank: painted and quilled hide coats signalled fur trade status; children’s Red River coats harkened to a contested colonial history; blanket coats used for club uniforms demonstrated colonial intent; and embroidered and beaded hide jackets made for sale to settler colonial buyers, including colonial officials, asserted continuing Indigenous identities. Laura Peers unpacks the first of these histories, examining the meanings of painted hide coats in chapter 2. These spectacular garments arose within the distinctive cultural “hybridity of the fur trade,”55 while also being influenced by global forces. The Western-style tailoring of these garments signals the sharing of material aesthetics and skills between British male tailors working for the hbc and skilled Indigenous women attached to trading forts. The painting and quillwork embroidery demonstrate the singular expertise of Indigenous practitioners working within rich systems of spiritual meanings and cultural aesthetics. Peers questions the context of the making and purpose of these garments within fur trade communities. Different imperatives shaped meanings when the coats travelled back to Britain, a process comprising a more hidden history of these coats. In the imperial metropole, the fate of these coats, which ranged from prestigious garments to “curiosities” to be archived, was determined by anxiety around racially hybrid garments. Yet power resided and resides in the fibres of these garments, whose present-day value may include their service to contemporary Indigenous makers and communities. Coats figure as well in chapters 3 and 4 by Cynthia Cooper and Beverly Lemire. Both parse the routes taken by the colonial blanket coat, or capot, a blanket-cloth garment that emerged from colonial interactions to become the everyday wear of fur traders, settlers, and Indigenous peoples of northern North America from the seventeenth century onward. This coat was later imbued with other characteristics that shifted with location and wearers. Cooper tracks this garment’s representations as the politicized garb of Red River Métis populations around the mid-nineteenth century. Métis resistance to Canadian government ambitions in the 1860s and 1885 led to charged depictions of this garb by settler Canadians; however, by the 1900s this garment had transitioned to become a marker of nationhood, one assigned as part of an essential winter wardrobe for Canadian children. The emergence of the

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Red River coat as classic Canadian children’s wear opens new perspectives on the creation of colonial culture aligned with new nationalisms and the politicization of twentieth-century children’s apparel. Canadianness among young, white, female children could be defined by a girl in a navy Red River coat with a red sash and toque; a “Canadian Girl Doll” of this description, circa 1950, sporting these garments, plus moccasins and snowshoes, is part of the collection of a British museum.56 Coats served political ends. Beverly Lemire traces the use of blanket coats in the popularization of the colonial winter sport of tobogganing, an appropriation of Indigenous technology allied with the colonial seizure of land. From the 1870s onward, this pursuit became a model of colonial winter sporting culture, a craze that swept northern North America and wider parts of the British Empire and northern Europe. Thousands of clubs sprang up throughout Canada and the United States, with membership defined by ranked members in colourful blanket coats, a public militarism in keeping with colonial policies. Clubmen appeared at massed public events emphasizing racialized fraternal organizations. Sporting claims to winter landscapes reinforced colonial claims of all sorts. The meaning of winter was revised through this pastime. In both cases, Indigenous technology and capacities were repurposed in support of racialized colonial and imperial aims. Several chapters in this collection employ art historical methodologies, pushing the boundaries of these methods to advance insights and understanding of historical themes. Nineteenth-century print media that circulated through transnational imperial networks depicted Indigenous leaders and populations in ways interrogated in this volume. In chapter 5, Julie-Ann Mercer explores several of the seminal works by Swiss artist Peter Rindisbacher, a new arrival at the Red River Settlement in 1821. Mercer opens new interpretive avenues through her study of iterations of Rindisbacher’s images, whose circulation in Britain and northern North America speaks to their colonial purposes. Mercer explains that lithographic reproduction, in particular, allowed a wider, inexpensive distribution, constructing “standard settler colonial narratives.” She interrogates the purposes served by a single watercolour scene, as compared to the variants produced by London-based lithographers noted for popular imperial works. Lithographs allowed virtual travel across northern landscapes and imagined encounters with Indigenous peoples; they also showcased the presence of colonial authorities, reassuring to many viewers. The narratives constructed by these lithographs supported core precepts of imperial policy. The wider market for scenes of Indigenous people engaged in diplomacy, especially those travelling to London, is analyzed further by

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Jonathan Lainey, of the Huron-Wendat Nation, and Anne Whitelaw in chapter 6. The visual representations of wampum in the hands of Wendat diplomats in London and the popular prints of Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (1825) and Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (1825) contain ineffable symbolic richness. These authors assess how and why these images travelled. As well, they note that many non-Indigenous viewers might mistake the significance of the materials displayed in these ethnographic images. Lainey and Whitelaw illuminate the material politics of diplomacy as practised by the Wendat and the imperial system within which these politics were deployed; their insights come from reading against the intent of those producing and circulating these powerful images. The time and place of colonial encounters changes over the course of this volume, along with material culture, as more contemporary histories are assessed in the remaining chapters. Laurie K. Bertram turns to wider landscapes and cultures of the North in chapter 7, specifically in Greenland, Iceland, and colonial Denmark, as well as to networks through North America that sometimes had competing colonial aims. She examines Icelandic “Eskimo sweaters,” a twentieth-century fashion implicated in a wide range of colonial practices and Indigenous histories among Greenlandic peoples. Twentiethcentury politics of appropriation and competing nationalist narratives in Scandinavia and Greenland underpinned the promotion and circulation of designs, ultimately encapsulated in a distinctive yarn and pattern defined as the “Icelandic” sweater. The history of this garment illuminates the unique geopolitics of northern latitudes and their landscapes in intriguing ways. Sarah Carter takes a more personal tack in chapter 8, investigating the relationship of Clare Sheridan with the 1930s Blackfoot and Blackfeet communities of Alberta and Montana. Sheridan’s elite British rank and investment in imperial purposes underlay her relations with families and individuals on the Kainai (Blood) Reserve; the months she spent there reflect the personal and temporal ties across imperial and Indigenous spaces and the material and artistic representations of these shared events. A sojourner in Kainai territory, Sheridan was looking for solace from grief while collecting arts and material culture for personal purposes. Although her Kainai hosts, too, had particular reasons for their interactions with Sheridan, which included giving her gifts, she claimed a unique connection with them and expressed concern about the dire conditions on their reserve. However, Sheridan also used many of the racial stereotypes and tropes of the era and swept up every piece of spiritual and symbolic art that came to hand, at a time when collecting “Indian” arts

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and crafts appealed to populations of many kinds, whether based in Britain or in northern North America. The significance of this gifting, making, sale, and collecting is a recurring focus in subsequent chapters. Indigenous communities recognized the importance of making and selling their creative works as they grappled with a variety of political, economic, and cultural challenges aimed at the extirpation of their culture. Art production, of all kinds, increased over the twentieth century for various markets and buyers, a strategy that extended widely. The case studies in this volume illustrate the critical importance of these initiatives for community survival and cultural agency. Katie Pollock’s focus, in chapter 9, is on the borderlands along the 49th parallel and the challenges of survival faced by Metis peoples from 1885 to the 1930s, whose ties to land and community were opposed or constrained by settler colonial officialdom. Pollock’s new insights focus on the dolls crafted as souvenirs in the early twentieth century, particularly those creations celebrating the quotidian dress of local Metis men and women. Indigenous survivance was materialized in dolls carved and dressed to reflect their makers and their lives. Indeed, “survivance” is a recurring theme in these chapters, where, as Gerald Vizenor notes, it reveals “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories … renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.”57 Pollock’s chapter further extends Ruth Phillips’s important analysis of souvenir art in northeastern North America to new landscapes and new peoples.58 Artists responded to opportunities and challenges by producing works distinct to the borderlands, as illuminated through the study of material culture. The Indigenous peoples of the borderlands sustained networks and kinship ties that pushed north, going deep into what became Alberta, a history that Judy Half explores in conversation with Beverly Lemire in chapter 10. Half assesses the materiality and spirituality embedded in dew claw bags to assess histories of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, positioning this nation and her family, especially the women of her family, within the wider remit of the colonial West. Half is a knowledge keeper from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation and interrogates Indigenous experiences in twentieth-century settler colonial Alberta, where powerful state and church apparatuses worked to expunge ceremonial knowledge and traditional (material) practice. Her deep commitment to the decolonization of Nehiyaw (Cree) history in what is now northern Alberta and Saskatchewan is a driving force in her scholarship and contribution to this volume. Her material focus is dew claw bags, female-made containers that held items essential for ceremonial rites and traditional purposes. Half

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explores the challenges faced by ceremonialists within her community, including female relatives. Settler colonial administrations, both religious and secular, sought to quash traditional knowledge, including medicinal as well as spiritual practices. These forces intensified after the forced amalgamation of communities to establish the Saddle Lake Cree Reserve. Over time, features of the dew claw bags evolved as makers responded to commercial markets and economic need; bags in museum collections can now be differentiated by their intended purpose and use. The politics of museum collection and display are deftly critiqued in this analysis. The beautifully embroidered hide jackets assessed by Susan Berry in chapter 11 reflect further stages of intervention into northern lands in pursuit of colonial economic development in areas now known as northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. These singular garments also signal the status of the beaded hide coat as a quintessential souvenir art of the North West in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Their significance for creators and collectors illuminates another facet of colonial history. These garments were sought by sojourners at the margins of settler Canada, which were nevertheless in the heart of Indigenous landscapes. These incomers were most often aligned with scientific and industrial ventures that were either national or international, propelling men into Indigenous communities in a pattern first begun by the hbc. Meteorologists, geologists, and surveyors served the interests of large-scale science and industry and marked their exploits by purchasing souvenirs to wear or to closet once at home. Berry’s close readings of the jackets in collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues – Ekti Margaret Cardinal, Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses, and Roy Salopree – demonstrate women’s creative facility with hide-based beadwork in communities across the North. The jackets were market commodities but also statements of presence and persistence as the fur trade world waned and other colonial frameworks were set in place. Still, as Berry makes clear, traditional cultural priorities infused the making of these hide jackets, from the sharing of the moose and the tanning of the hide to the tailoring and embroidering with quillwork and beads. Indigenous culture persisted in many contexts in spite of the settler colonial apparatus. Among the most powerful and painful institutional settings were those associated with the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease of epidemic proportions in Indigenous communities by the mid-twentieth century. Institutional structures became more elaborate and prescriptive, including in the administration of Indigenous health. In chapter 12, Sara Komarnisky analyzes the materials of

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cultural survival within the tuberculosis hospitals devised for Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. She also emphasizes that these hospitals became major sources of Indigenous arts and crafts, although they are rarely, if ever, considered as such. The “therapeutic encounters” described by Komarnisky include networks moving Indigenous peoples and other transnational networks moving Indigenous art. Anonymity prevailed among female-made arts, whereas many male carvers can be identified, partly breaking the boundary of “anonymous care.”59 As collectors assembled works from Indigenous patients, aesthetic categories evolved. However, as Komarnisky shows, the artworks themselves may yet serve higher ends. Where makers are named and their origins are known, the possibility exists to link extant artworks with present-day Indigenous families and community members. Family histories may now be recovered. Komarnisky demonstrates the larger issues of Indigenous health and healing that are encapsulated in stone carvings, beaded belts, and Inuit-made dolls. As the chapter summaries make clear, analysis of material culture is at the heart of this project as a means to inform and illuminate written and archival records most often produced by people in dominant positions who were uninterested in or antagonistic to the persistence and creative evolution of Indigenous communities and cultures. Collaborative analysis reveals the multiple ways that objects can be “seen” and their meanings discerned through attention to Indigenous ways of knowing and through close looking aligned with close listening, where “the power of colour and design … [can] reveal critical information about the worlds and circumstances in which … [objects] were created.”60 The fact that years were spent working on this project is another of its strengths, a testament to the commitment expressed in myriad ways by all the collaborators. This volume is a retelling of global passages that accounts for Indigenous spaces and the roles played by the heterogeneous peoples in northern North America and beyond.

notes We worked to format this volume in accordance with the invaluable advice of Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style. All errors and omission are our own. 1 The concept of “object lives” was presented first in Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography of Things.” 2 Peers, “‘Many Tender Ties,’” 291.

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3 Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories”; Phillips, Museum Pieces; Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips, eds, Sensible Objects; Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums. 4 Loft, “Who Me?” 81. 5 Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 285. 6 Such works include Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery; Styles and Vickery, eds, Gender, Taste, and Material Culture; Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created; Pomeranz, Great Divergence; Giraldez, Age of Trade; Warsh, American Baroque; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic; Roy and Riello, eds, Global Economic History; Wimmler, Sun King’s Atlantic; and Priyadarshini, Chinese Porcelain. 7 For a pithy critique of blinkered scholarship, see Clunas, “Modernity Local and Global.” 8 A recent exception was the European-funded project Fashioning the Early Modern, which included several Scandinavian sites in its analysis. Welch, Fashioning the Early Modern. 9 Jørgensen and Sörlin, eds, Northscapes, 1–2. 10 Leane, “Antarctic in Literature,” 57; Hansson, “Arctic in Literature,” 45. See also Chartier, What Is the “Imagined North”?. 11 Heininen and Southcott, eds, Globalization and the Circumpolar North, 1. 12 Jørgensen and Sörlin, eds, Northscapes, 2. 13 For example, see Helland, Lemire, and Buis, eds, Craft, Community and the Material Culture; Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe; Gerritsen and Riello, eds, Global Lives of Things; Morgan, Travellers through Empire; Biedermann, Gerritsen, and Riello, eds, Global Gifts. Exceptions include Thrush, Indigenous London; and Lemire and Riello, eds, Dressing Global Bodies. 14 Weaver, Red Atlantic. 15 Thrush, Indigenous London, 3. 16 Lemire, Global Trade. 17 Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style, 13–14. 18 Thomas, Entangled Objects. 19 Bauer and Norton, “Introduction,” 1. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Thomas and Losche, eds, Double Vision, 4. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Lässig, “History of Knowledge,” 37. 24 Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?” 196. 25 Examples include Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives; Ballantyne and Burton, Empires and the Reach; and Riello, Cotton. 26 Hunt, Writing History. 27 Lemire, Global Trade.

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28 Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe; Pierce and Otsuka, eds, At the Crossroads; Giraldez, Age of Trade. 29 Jørgensen and Sörlin, eds, Northscapes, 1–2; Heininen and Southcott, eds, Globalization and the Circumpolar North; Leane, “Antarctica in Literature.” 30 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 55. 31 Mancall, “Raw and the Cold,” 7. 32 I thank Dr Laurie K. Bertram for her many insights on these implications. 33 Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 41–63; Axtell, “At the Water’s Edge”; Gilbert, “Beothuk-European Contact”; Turgeon, “French Fishers.” 34 Mancall, “Raw and the Cold,” 7. 35 Jones and Hoskins, “Mark on Paper.” 36 Perry, Colonial Relations, 15. 37 Since about 2000, comparative studies of the “British World” have brought broad colonial geographies into conversation with each other. Examples include Buckner and Francis, eds, Rediscovering the British World; Buckner and Francis, eds, Canada and the British World; Dubinsky, Perry, and Yu, eds, Within and Without the Nation; Morgan, Building Better Britains?; Weaver, Great Land Rush; and Perry, Colonial Relations. Arctic and circumpolar studies are also a focus of intensive research, encompassing the geopolitics of circumpolar boundaries, Inuit health, and European historical imaginaries of the polar regions. For example, see Dodds and Nuttall, Scramble for the Poles; Nuttall, Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics; Bockstoce, White Fox and Icy Seas; Parlee and Wray, “Gender and the Social Dimensions”; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit; Chartier, What Is the “Imagined North”?; Powell, Studying Arctic Fields; Heininen and Southcott, eds, Globalization and the Circumpolar North; Leane, “Antarctica in Literature”; Hansson, “Arctic in Literature”; and Nuttall, Christensen, and Siegert, eds, Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions. 38 For example, see Schlesinger, World Trimmed with Fur; and Mancall, “Raw and the Cold.” 39 The several examples of such projects include the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (https://carleton.ca/grasac) and the Blackfoot Shirts project (http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts). 40 Thrush, Indigenous London; Weaver, Red Atlantic; University of Kent, Beyond the Spectacle. 41 Weaver, Red Atlantic; Norton, Sacred Gifts; Mancall, ed., Atlantic World and Virginia; Leibsohn, “Made in China”; Dean and Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents.” 42 Ballantyne, “Changing Shape,” 451. 43 Thrush, Indigenous London. 44 Gell, Art and Agency; Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?” 193, 196. 45 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. 46 Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism.

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47 Gregory Younging notes the importance of the embedded colonial meanings inscribed in words describing Indigenous-made objects, exemplified in Western dictionary definitions of the word “artifact.” Younging states that adherence to these definitions, “when applied to Indigenous cultural materials, risks stripping the materials of their essential connection to specific Indigenous Peoples and their forms of expression” and “risks stripping them of their connection to the present.” He proposes direct consultation with Indigenous people expert in their own material culture, a process we endeavoured to apply. Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style, 52–3. 48 Langford, “Introduction.” 49 Dubinsky, Perry, and Yu, “Introduction,” 4. 50 Loft, “Who Me?” 81. 51 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, xii. 52 Zemon Davis, “Decentering History,” 190. 53 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 34. 54 See http://objectlives.com. 55 Peers, “‘Many Tender Ties,’” 295. 56 Bowes Museum, toy.167. 57 Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii. 58 Phillips, Trading Identities. 59 Stevenson, Life beside Itself, 75–100. 60 Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 285.

1 Object Lives Innovating Methodology beverly lemire, laura peers, and anne whitelaw

One of the defining strengths of our project was the methodology developed through our collaborative research, which enabled us to focus on analyses that challenge and extend established scholarly perspectives. Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America, which began as a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, maps the global circulation of objects from (and to) northern North America in order to understand the transformational power of objects in this process. Our research focused on this geographic expanse without privileging the nation-states constructed over this period but rather recognizing the historic circuits of influence embedded in this region and entangled in wider global and imperial networks. We understand this vast region as Indigenous land, which persists as such despite colonization, the development of nation-states, and myriad imperial influences. Central to our work are Indigenous peoples, Indigenous-made things, and Indigenous-influenced objects that circulated within contested colonial and postcolonial spaces. We believe that our nuanced focus on specific items of material culture can revise understandings of northern North America and the global influences that flowed in and out of this landscape. The findings of the Object Lives team illuminate histories of northern North America and its peoples, as well as global history generally, through the lives of things that emerged from these precincts. The methodology we pursued is key to these arguments and is broadly useful across the humanities and social sciences.

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Although the humanities and social sciences have explored material and visual sources, the methodology for using these sources has posed a central challenge. There are many richly crafted object analyses often used as examples for research1 but few methodological guidelines for working with material and visual evidence that do justice to the material realities of things, that link information about processes of production, materials of construction, and the histories of objects from construction to the present day, and that place such materially based understandings within broader analyses of the contexts and meanings of such materials, including across Indigenous communities. Equally, theorizing about material and visual culture often seems detached from the things themselves, notably their physical forms and textures and their corporeal and sensory essences. We join in recent efforts to acknowledge the power of materiality, with a focus on historic contexts that resonate into the present.2 To complicate matters, related but distinct disciplinary approaches to material and visual culture have developed around art history, social and economic history, material culture and museum studies, and material anthropology.3 Many of these approaches provide valuable perspectives but are seldom linked across disciplines. Nor do they routinely address the processes of collaborative, interactive, longitudinal projects that incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing. Recently, however, researchers have begun to employ collaborative research models in the study of material culture, blending and adapting methodologies across academic fields. These initiatives vary with the aims of the projects, the networks of researchers, the publics that they serve, and the resources available for their enterprises. Cross-disciplinary practice remains a critical ingredient of these agendas, as research teams meet, observe, discuss, and prioritize processes, bringing widely different expertise to bear. In stretching disciplinary boundaries, sometimes to the creative discomfort of participants, this practice enables researchers to devise innovative techniques for creating shared knowledge that often moves beyond the academy and into communities at large. The methodology used by the Object Lives team drew on and developed this collaborative, longitudinal, multidisciplinary approach in honouring the distinct knowledge of Indigenous colleagues. Examples of such multidisciplinary work include the project East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, in which a team traced the impact of material culture originating on the Indian subcontinent and its effects in creating a distinctive domesticity in England, drawing on thirty case studies to demonstrate the vibrant life stories of homes and objects as shaped through cross-cultural interactions. This project incorporated

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academic, museum, and heritage researchers, as well as local historical societies, enabling the team to examine “the ways in which material culture help to mediate wider historical processes, such as family formation and reproduction, the creation and maintenance of trade networks, and the operation of political and military systems.”4 Another example is the Scottish project The Matter of Slavery in Scotland, a collaborative venture involving museums, university academics, and members of the public. This short-term project “aims to raise public awareness and understanding of the difficult, and longneglected, topic of Scotland’s historic connections with the Atlantic slave system” and to “develop strategies and methodologies to help fill the gap.” Attention to material culture – past and present – informs this important initiative, with the reorientation of museum exhibitions being one of its aims.5 In these undertakings, technologies ranging from magnification devices to the Internet are employed to analyze artifacts or to mediate the interactions of the team as its members preserve and disseminate their findings. These projects, although widely different thematically, demonstrate that ambitious collaborations that employ the analysis of material culture are a route to more richly informed understandings of the past, with implications for the present and future. In North America one of the earliest such endeavours was the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (grasac), led by Ruth Phillips at Carleton University in Ottawa. The team addressed historic Indigenous material and visual culture and employed cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary perspectives and collaboration informed by Indigenous research methodologies and ways of knowing. Launched in 2004, this project has evolved into an international research partnership that links Indigenous communities, museums, and university researchers by employing “web-based software tools … to enable remote collaboration and sharing.”6 grasac’s initial aims were to create a database of Indigenous material culture held by museums globally for use by community, museum, and university scholars and to enhance our understanding of the curated objects by employing the cross-cultural, multidisciplinary team research process involved in creating database entries.7 This ground-breaking alliance tracked the route of artifacts to sometimes distant museums and made these things virtually accessible to Indigenous communities of origin. Such interdisciplinary, collaborative ventures have demonstrated the questions that such research can address, the breadth of the disciplinary focuses that it can bring to bear, and the wide publics that it can serve.

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Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America began as a desire to understand how northern North America shaped and was shaped by connections arising from trade, colonialism, and migration, with flows of objects extending their influences into global arenas. Our premise was that it is only through the close intersectional analysis of material culture that such influences can be understood. Our choice of objects was guided by their ability to open new vistas on northern regions and peoples, including global linkages, material evolutions, and imperial-postcolonial survival and representation. The contributions of Indigenous peoples figured centrally in this circulation and, ultimately, in many of the objects we studied. Much of our work also involved investigating stages of global interactions through materials created, bought, consumed, or deployed by Indigenous peoples, along with those used by settlers, collectors, and disparate populations within and outside North America. Key to achieving these aims was a methodology that involved a multidisciplinary team informed by Indigenous knowledges working collaboratively in an environment of trust and mutual respect for each member’s skills and ways of knowing. We came from art history, anthropology, museum curatorship and museum anthropology, social, gender, and economic history, and Indigenous cultural studies. We built on models such as grasac, with each member contributing different expertise and skill sets while drawing on different backgrounds. Object Lives was not conceived of as a community-based project, although many of the members have deep connections to communities that inform their work. Our research interests included nineteenth-century Nordic fishing techniques, sailors’ trousers in the early modern period, Wendat cultural and political history and its material and textual legacies, gendered settlement and Indigenous resistance in western North America, nineteenthcentury visual culture and fashion, twentieth-century sanatoria for North American Indigenous patients, and the living material culture of western Plains First Nations. The team included senior and early career scholars, academics, museum professionals, and object makers, this diversity in membership being critical to our research agenda. We were convinced that the multidisciplinary skills and cultural, community, and professional perspectives of this group would enrich our findings. The commonalities were a commitment to the project goals and a willingness to experiment with research methodologies in order to realize these aims. What happened when we first brought the team together around a table laden with historic artifacts in a museum research space proved the benefits of this diversity and set the pattern for a methodological process that became a defining characteristic of this project.

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d i s c u s s i o n a n d ref i n i n g o b j e c t ive s Before we looked together at physical objects, however, we engaged in a monthly schedule of teleconference discussions during which we gave short research presentations on objects that were of particular interest to each of us, using images that all team members could download and follow along with the speaker, as a way of beginning discussions that involved as many perspectives as possible. These meetings formed the backbone of our process. The multivocality of these meetings wove a deep methodological thread that knit the group together. There were sometimes awkward discussions, complicated by uneven sound quality imposed by our use of the least complex communication technology to allow for the different institutional settings and huge geographic spaces that we spanned. The fact that we had to listen very carefully to each other helped to create a research environment in which we acknowledged, trusted, and respected each other’s distinct contributions. We attended to all voices on our team. During these meetings, we adopted the practice of encouraging every team member to comment on research presentations and allowed the diversity of perspectives to spark further discussion. Importantly, we also established each participant as simultaneously expert and learner: in each discussion, everyone had something to contribute and something to gain. By the time we assembled for our first group research session at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, we were comfortable with a style of respectful but robust, sometimes startling, exchanges across a wide range of disciplines and topics. We noted the limits of our knowing and understood the diverse expertise in our midst. Questions swelled to a global size and narrowed to the gauge of a glass bead. We began to discern our own areas of interest through the objects and collections that enthralled us, and we realized anew the power of objects to shape our findings. One of the issues that we wrestled with methodologically during this early phase was the extent to which we would link museum-based artifact research with deep community-based collaboration. Several of the team members had previously engaged in such collaborative work with Indigenous nations, including their own community.8 Indeed, team member Judy Half is a knowledge keeper from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, and Jonathan Lainey is a member of the Huron-Wendat Nation. What we hoped to do, however, involved a focus different from that of community-led work. Despite greatly respecting such projects, we wanted to use individual case studies across a broad range of cultures, communities, territories, and periods in order to

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understand global dynamics as they affected northern North America and vice versa. The orientation of this project thus shaped it in ways that differ markedly from community-based projects, although it was informed by such work in particular ways. This enterprise is more accurately described as object-based, with particular contributors linked to long-term Indigenous and non-Indigenous community-based work. These intersectional, multidisciplinary, and longitudinal alliances shaped our efforts.

wor kshops, discovery pro cess, a nd method olo g ica l innovation We built our collaborative foundations step-by-step. During the teleconferences, we began working toward a list of potential objects for study at our first face-to-face meeting at the Pitt Rivers Museum: team members suggested what objects they wanted to examine, what they knew about and could comment on, and what they hoped to learn from these things. “Close looking” began during the process of selecting a few key objects for collective analysis from among thousands of potential candidates and allotting extensive time for their study. Intriguingly, the objects that appealed most powerfully were those that had crossed boundaries during multiethnic exchanges or crosscultural negotiations that often involved movement across place and time. These artifacts challenged easy categorization and offered great potential insights. The test, thereafter, was to deepen and expand our understanding in order to concretize our findings, an observation-based form of research that carries inherent challenges.9 Our first meeting in Oxford revealed the possibilities of collaborative looking and thinking. For some of us – particularly those of us with a background in museums, curatorship, and conservation – the object-centred give and take of ideas, information, and questions was a normal working method. For others more accustomed to working in solitary pursuit of knowledge, the revelation of working with others and with a direct connection to the object was ground-shifting. The team’s discovery process – developed at the Pitt Rivers Museum and illustrated at http://objectlives.com/discovery-process – involved structured and unstructured elements: each of us led the analysis of one of the objects and was responsible for describing that object and for situating it within particular historical and material contexts; and then the rest of us asked questions. Members commented and probed, extending knowledge and offering imaginative speculations. We were guided in some

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of our conversations by the research notes accompanying each artifact, the result of decades of insights gathered by Pitt Rivers Museum staff from researchers and knowledge keepers. However, curatorial entries are not sufficient in themselves. In the discussions among the Object Lives team members, the established insights were expanded by openness to “undisciplined” questions – contributions from team members whose expertise was not explicitly tied to the object, or object category, under consideration. One example of such a fruitful exchange was the discussion accompanying a hide garment that was clearly Indigenous made but had been described up to that point as being of “European pattern … copied from a European dressing gown” (see figures 2.4 to 2.6). Both Beverly Lemire and Cynthia Cooper contributed to the discussion about the nature of this garment, which seemed to be modelled on a banyan, a popular form of men’s attire from the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth century worn in the home as a kind of dressing gown by men of the middle and upper-middle classes. This occasioned a broader conversation about the initial trajectory of the kimono – from which banyans developed – as an honorific gift to European traders in seventeenth-century Japan and about how the prestige associated with this garment (called a “banyan” in English) led to its wider manufacture in India for European markets. Ultimately, banyans were also made in Europe and its colonies.10 The movement of Europeans and European-trained tailors to fur posts and settlements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America was another point of discussion arising from our exploration of this hide garment, along with the transmission of tailoring skills to Indigenous women and the appropriation and transformation of certain styles of clothing by Indigenous communities. The conversation crossed time periods, locations, and bodies of knowledge, refusing to stay within the bounds of a museum catalogue description or a scholarly discipline. Working directly with historic artifacts strengthened and magnified our discovery process. The sensory, visual, and intellectual stimuli afforded by historic fabrics, ribbons, quillwork, beadwork, hide, and shell were powerfully compelling, as were the forms and construction of wool and hide garments, wampum belts, a pad saddle, dew claw bags, mittens, and gauntlets. These material provocations and presences fuelled questions about the objects that opened our discussions to a wide range of broader issues concerning genre, object biography, and historical and cultural contexts, inviting people with diverse sets of knowledge – curatorial, conservation, historical, and Indigenous cultural – to weigh in and shift the discussion by offering

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expertise. The result was a richly textured, deeply historical, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary interrogation of objects, forcing us to challenge and query our own disciplines. A creative friction ensued as our chosen artifacts challenged our understandings. Several key elements of this distinctive research methodology cropped up repeatedly across the workshops at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the McCord Museum in Montreal, and the Royal Alberta Museum and the University of Alberta Museums in Edmonton.

Looking at Objects Our work with objects in museums proceeded simultaneously along Western and Indigenous lines. Although we looked at objects via Western constructs that privilege the ocularcentricity of European rational analyses and the Judaeo-Christian separation of things and persons, we were very much aware of these cultural biases, as prompted at times by team members Jonathan Lainey and Judy Half and informed by previous work that many of the team members had undertaken with Indigenous people. In addition to using the word (and concept of) “object,” we used personal pronouns in regard to makers (e.g., “would she have sewn the coat and made the quillwork?”), and in certain cases, we considered the implications of potential animacy or personhood. These Indigenous concepts were very much present as we worked within museum spaces. We moved back and forth along these cultural lines, adapting the deep visual analysis of art historical practice to include the Indigenous concept and social practice of visiting with relatives. As we began our object encounters, we explored each item closely, noting its materials, decorative techniques, and construction process. Akin to the “close reading” of textual sources and the formal analysis of art history, this endeavour involved what we thought of as “close looking” or “deep looking,” which entails noting and questioning every possible physical detail of the object, including the construction, whether the wool cloth was deeply napped, how embroidered motifs had been applied, and what modifications and repairs had been made to the object over time. Museum-based scholars have practised an equivalent form of “looking,” notably Dorothy K. Burnham, whose method was founded on her early career sketching artifacts for curatorial staff. This became a life-long habit in her bid to decipher the making and histories of cloth and clothing. Indeed, the technique of sketching remains an actively used curatorial tool.11 The sensory examination of objects is a

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longstanding practice when people interact with collections; however, techniques and expectations have changed over time. Eighteenth-century visitors to British collections expected to encounter objects with all their senses, whether by assessing the weight of a historic cane, feeling the texture of a stuffed reindeer, or detecting the smell of a displayed item. These tactile interactions, as well as visual analysis, were invaluable sources of evidence.12 Museum norms evolved over the following centuries, restricting and expanding access to objects in different ways and largely emphasizing sight as a way of knowing. Now technologies intensify our capacity to visually gauge artifacts down to their very fibres, as well as to know whether those fibres are spun with an S or a Z twist or whether they are moose hair or porcupine quill.13 Close looking was aided by magnifying lenses, photography (to isolate elements and record information noted as well as to record overall form), and a digital magnifying lens attached to a laptop, which produced enlarged images of weave structure, stitching, and fibres. One discussion following the deployment of the digital magnifier is captured in figure 1.1. This augmented “looking” process was creative and questioning, as we gauged the material elements under our gaze and sought to link this tangible information to other things that we knew about the item. “Looking” was in fact intensely dialogical. Figures 1.1 to 1.3 depict aspects of “close looking,” which involved repeated rounds of intense examination, sometimes in thoughtful silence and at other times accompanied by streams of questions, comments, and statements. Construction details, such as seams and patterns, linings and pockets, fabric structure, fibre spinning, and warp and weft, were considered to be integral to the overall understanding of the object and gave rise to numerous questions, including whether the seam was sewn with sinew or commercial linen thread, whether commercial linen thread was available at trading posts in that region at that time, who had access to such thread and through what social networks, and whether a European male tailor would have known how to process and use sinew thread. Wear and tear – from the scuff marks on a pair of moccasins to the folds and stains on a print – were also studied as evidence of the object’s history. We gave patient attention to small and large aspects of the artifacts, regarding them both as individuals and within groups, our observations being recorded by local graduate student volunteers, as well as by Julie-Ann Mercer, our administrative assistant and graduate researcher (see figure 1.2). Junior colleagues took on roles as interrogators, photographers, and amanuenses, interacting with senior scholars and museum staff as, at every point, the insistent materiality of the objects shaped our thoughts and actions. The

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1.1 “Close looking.” Left to right: Pitt Rivers Museum staff member, Jonathan Lainey, Laura Peers, and Judy Half study and discuss the decorative saddle bag, Pitt Rivers Museum, May 2015.

further we delved, the more questions arose, including about larger historic processes of making, repair, use, and collection, about cross-cultural influences in techniques and motifs, and about the sometimes spiritual resonance of design or materiality. Intense huddled conversations were matched by thoughtful silences as we grappled with the immediacy and power of these things (see figures 1.2 to 1.5). Our workshops confirmed the many ways that our understandings of historic objects were located within visual, sensory, and cultural frameworks, and we worked to disseminate these frameworks among our group. We intentionally shared frames of reference and communicated insights as we jointly examined objects and honed our skills of looking at and visiting with them.

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This collective intellectual labour was both like and very unlike print-based seminars, where the joint discussion of disembodied ideas, facts, and theories takes precedence. In addition to engaging in slow, intensive close looking and collective discussions of meaning, members used nearby museum displays and web-based collections to help illuminate what we studied in situ. In one instance, a group gathered around a display of Indigenous Greenlandic dress at the Pitt Rivers Museum as Laurie K. Bertram explained the cross-cultural contacts that influenced this apparel. As well, some of us visiting the nearby Ashmolean Museum congregated around a shell-decorated Algonquian mantle noted in the 1655 catalogue of John Tradescant’s collection.14 This garment exemplifies the cross-cultural links between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in what is now coastal Virginia. Our sharing of historical knowledge of relevant objects provoked questions that took us to the Internet and to museum galleries for comparative items through which to understand the things on the table in front of us. These strategies were not planned but instead emerged in practice and proved generative, adding information and giving rise to hypotheses that focused our collective close looking and our social visiting of things. For some team members, the experiences of shared object study had previously arisen in other contexts and in other projects. The defining characteristics of this venture were a longstanding foundation of trust and exchange and a commitment to the many voices that contributed thoughts and ideas. Further, some of the classic methodologies long used in the study of material culture do not take seriously, or problematize, the biases of “looking” and “seeing” that are inherent to Western cultural knowledge, professional education, and culturally based learning that trains the eye. Classic methodological guides, such as Jules Prown’s Mind in Matter, assume an essentialist way of seeing and a generic capacity to “see” irrespective of culture or schooling. As Prown notes, emphasis on description as part of methodological analysis – “an account of the physical dimensions, material, and articulation of the object” – can certainly be useful.15 But this emphasis is useful only if it is acknowledged as imperfect and partial, culturally located, and needing repeated revision. Such works do not assume that one might need to make offerings to Indigenous ancestors who are present in ancestral collections or that one might need to visit with objects of study as well as, or instead of, looking at them. They also assume that researchers will be working in isolation. Until literature on grasac and other projects began to emerge,16 no mention was made of collaborative endeavours or the layered interpretations that emerge

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1.2 Research assistant Katie Pollock (left) and collaborator Judy Half in discussion, their observations captured by administrative assistant Julie-Ann Mercer, Pitt Rivers Museum, May 2015.

from successive instances of close observation. Systematic reflection on objects in team contexts enriches our pool of knowledge and reveals gaps, particularly when we ponder the different ways of looking/seeing and the values that we prioritize during material assessments. Formalist categories rarely account for these realities. Our active methodology pushed past these limiting formulas. As we considered the ways that the close looking methodology of the Object Lives project intersected with the team’s various disciplinary backgrounds, we also thought about how these disciplines have shifted in regard to “looking.” The “material turn” has challenged in particular art history, a discipline known for its investment in the visual. Beginning in the late 1980s, art historians began both to expand the scope of objects included within the discipline’s analytical remit and to formulate new questions and frameworks. These undertakings paralleled developments in anthropology, where material anthropology became a lively source for exploring cultural meaning. Moreover, theory generated from both material anthropology’s and art history’s focus on objects began to influence analyses within a widening range of

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disciplines, including history and art history. Emerging analyses have been energized by attention to the material forms of photographs, whether albums, prints, or digital data, by embodied interactions with these forms, by an expansion of the range of visual sources to include advertising, postcards, media works, and the Internet, and by the study of popular culture objects such as beaded souvenirs.17 Most recently, a focus on digital heritage has reinforced sight – this time digitally enhanced or made possible online – as a key mode of engagement with material culture.18 In tandem, a recognition of the “visual” as the dominant sense of the twentieth century has resulted in critical analyses that eschew traditional questions of form and iconography, focusing instead on the study of representations and the conditions of their production, circulation, and reception and on the sensory and affective dimensions of materials.19 Although the expansion of the objects and methods of art history is salutary – particularly as it has afforded increased recognition of cultural production by communities hitherto absent from the “canon” of Western art – the focus on the image, even an expanded understanding of the image, has privileged narrative and representation at the expense of materiality. Indeed, the belief that all images are worthy of analysis bears the risk of ignoring the material support by which viewers access that image and thus the context of encounter that necessarily mediates the viewer’s understanding of the image. In his examination of the productive links between material culture studies and art history, Michael Yonan notes that historically, the discipline of art history paid close attention to the material character of the objects it studied: beyond even the analyses of sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts, historians of paintings – often described as “two dimensional” – considered the material support of works, the effects of paint application on a work’s public reception, and the experience of the faithful in front of a devotional painting. As the discipline’s practitioners increasingly privileged the image and debated the legitimacy of their iconographic readings of particular works of art, a proscribed understanding of the visual came to dominate. As Yonan writes, “art history has tricked itself into believing it is a discipline of images, when really it has always been a discipline of objects.”20 Analysis of the material history of paintings and prints, including the study of their lives as objects beyond simple questions of provenance and how they physically circulated from artist’s studio to collector or dealer to museum collection to reproduction, is necessary if we are to move beyond the simple exploration of representational narrative. A commitment to an understanding of the work of art as object, rather than as image, also reduces the tendency

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for paintings and prints to be viewed as illustrations of historical events or people, to be assessed for their representational accuracy. Indeed, in accordance with developments that have created material culture studies as a “post-disciplinary field,” our methodology escaped the conventions of standard approaches such as art history, linking perspectives from that and other fields to those of material anthropology, museum studies, and more.21 Although the documentary character of many of the image-based works examined throughout the Object Lives project was important, we remained attentive to their materiality, to their circulation as objects, and to what that circulation could tell us about how they might have resonated with different viewers or communities of viewers over the years. Such information is often difficult to obtain, and it remains largely speculative, but the question itself is an invaluable corrective to the assumption that an object’s imagistic meaning is ahistorical and remains fixed through time. Reprising historic practices of learning, we also engaged in nonvisual explorations of the texture, weight, scent, and sound of objects, using multisensory engagements as ways of learning, such as holding the wampum belt and feeling its weight, thinking about the smell of wet wool and its associations with the memory of winter garments drying indoors when looking at capots, or considering whether prints were framed or presented in albums. Such attention to sensory knowledge has become a key emphasis within material culture studies and material anthropology as a means to understand the whole object, with researchers encouraged to consider that “the sensible, physical characteristics of the thing trigger and thus contribute to the viewer’s sensory perceptions, which in turn trigger emotional and cognitive associations.”22 With assistance from Pitt Rivers Museum conservation staff, Judy Half reminded us of the dew claw bag’s life outside the museum by gently raising it and sounding its jingles, a powerfully evocative moment that demonstrated the latent power of things and their capacity, in Indigenous thought, for forms of animacy and personhood. Judy offered this teaching in combination with a subtle dance step that showed the bodily rhythmic patterns that would release sounds from the bag.23 The “material provocation” of these things had an immediate impact from the outset, which shifted with time as we engaged with the items and each other over the course of hours and days. At one point in Oxford, Laura Peers produced a draft mock-up of the hide coat (banyan) on the research table, sewn using a pattern made from the garment, and tried it on a member of the museum staff, producing a vivid impression of the size of the man who wore the historic coat and questions

1.3 Considering larger historical questions of making, usage, and representation. Left to right: Sarah Carter and Laura Peers (back row); Judy Half, Jonathan Lainey, Cynthia Cooper, Beverly Lemire, Anne Whitelaw, Sara Komarnisky, and Sarah Nesbitt (front row), Pitt Rivers Museum, May 2015.

about performativity, the experience of wearing such attire, and posture in relation to the snug placement of the shoulder seam in late-eighteenth-century coat patterns. The profound conversations we had were directly related to such deep explorations of materiality, to layers of “close looking” and social visiting, and to our physical interactions with the objects.

Object Biography: Provenance and Circulation As we considered the detailed physicality of the object in front of us, we thought at the same time about its life history – its provenance or biography. What was it made of? Where was it from? Who had made it, where, and under what circumstances? What value did an object have, when, and for whom? Was the value placed on this object commercial or spiritual, social, cultural, or gendered, or was it a combination? How were men or women defined by their relationships to the object, and did that change with time and place? Who collected it? How had it entered the museum collection and by what

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route? What had happened to this object over time: what repairs or marks of display or wear were visible? What was the particular circulation of this object over time? How had it been reclassified and intellectually transformed across its existence? To what extent did the nature of the specific museum now housing the object – a museum of social history, a museum of anthropology, or a regional museum – influence such reclassifications? What relationships were known between the maker, the maker’s community and family, the collector, and the object? We looked for tangible evidence of “object life” and “object movement” across cultures and distances not only in the object itself but also in its creation and categorization over time. This use of the “biography” of an object as a lens to understand its changing contexts and meanings has been a key focus of material anthropology since Igor Kopytoff ’s and Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work in 1986. Biography has been used to examine Indigenous material and the intellectual and political implications of its shifts across cultural boundaries, as well as many other kinds of material culture.24 Entanglement is a salient feature of the material culture we studied, reflecting processes often founded on Indigenous material systems and seminal in the cultural histories and purposes underlying many of the object engagements.25 We acknowledged these complexities, in keeping with Marcy Norton’s attention to the “subaltern technologies” characteristic of nonwhite peoples of the early modern Atlantic World. Norton observes the value of emphasizing “subaltern agency and ‘new materialism,’” of “allowing a sharper view of the intertwined processes of imperial and colonial dependence” on these technologies, and of “foregrounding the possibility of permeability, rather than only incommensurability, in the encounter between different ontologies, epistemologies, and other cultural systems.”26 Our focus was especially important to our methodology in addressing objects that had crossed cultural, geographical, and other boundaries. Sara Komarnisky, focusing on craft and art produced by Indigenous tubercular patients in hospitals and sanatoria, thought about the dislocations of communities and landscapes involved in such production. The apparent simplicity of a beaded belt produced in a sanatorium holds complex and troubling histories (see figure 1.4). Julie-Ann Mercer’s work on Peter Rindisbacher’s art, specifically prints produced from his work, also involves dislocated landscapes, from Red River to London, in the production and circulation of such things. Katie Pollock probes the significance of the dress assigned to souvenir dolls by local Metis makers in the borderland plains regions in the early twentieth century.

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Susan Berry’s work on hide jackets from northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories made at the turn of the twentieth century highlights specific communities of origin and their treaties, legislation against Indigenous hunting rights, and collectors who were part of attempts to impose assimilationist policies that altered, if not completely curtailed, modes of Indigenous cultural production. The biographies of the objects we examined involved shifts of meanings from those germane to Indigenous contexts of production to those imposed by collectors who were in some instances agents of government and industrial development engaged in the “modernization” of the North and its integration into globalized economies. The administrative control of northern Indigenous peoples was an intended part of this trajectory. The physical examination of objects led to analyses of entangled histories and biographies of objects. At the Pitt Rivers Museum and the McCord Museum, we saw the material results of “therapeutic encounters” in art and craft made by Indigenous patients in government-run tuberculosis hospitals, or sanatoria. Part of colonial medical policy, the objects made by Indigenous

1.4 Laurie K. Bertram (left) and Sara Kormarnisky assessing a mid-century beaded belt made in a US tuberculosis sanatorium for Native Americans, Pitt Rivers Museum, May 2015.

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internees linked medical policy and staff as well as museum and private collectors with Indigenous makers and their communities of origin. The belt, doll, and other items we saw unleashed a tide of observations and questions as we addressed these globalized objects (see figures 1.4 and 1.5). There was recurring discomfort as we confronted uncertainties about the making, symbolism, and function of things, assessed an object’s physical features, and speculated on the shifting meanings embedded in these things by makers, users, collections, and exhibitors. This discomfort was voiced in a number of instances, including by senior team members, as we acknowledged the uncertainty and discomfort that came with pushing interpretive boundaries. Objects tested us. Our recourse was to creatively push interpretive paradigms, but doing so inevitably involved periods of unease that we came to understand as diagnostic of important critical thinking or a new questioning of extant data. Although the items that we examined came with the museum information printed for us and often placed beside each object on the table (see figure 1.5), we experienced a very typical problem in that such specific information is seldom comprehensive. This is often the case for Indigenous and Indigenousinfluenced items, for which the names of makers and even the nations of origin were seldom recorded by collectors, who privileged an overriding category of “other”; but the problem also arises for items that one might assume are fully documented from creation to circulation. Uncovering the deep histories of these things often requires analytical leaps. Cynthia Cooper noted the ubiquity of Red River coats as children’s wear in mid-twentieth-century Canada. The garment’s construction harkened back to the capot, a marker of the colonial era that continued to be worn by Indigenous peoples and that assumed varied and contested meanings. There is no record of the thinking of Canadian manufacturers in the marketing of these wares or scholarship on the appeal of this fashion among white, mid-century Canadian girls. This was one of many cases where information and context demanded new thinking, as addressed in this collection. Toboggans and tobogganing coats, Rindisbacher’s depictions of the North, wampum and its visual representations, lopi sweaters, artistic renderings of Blackfoot peoples, Metis borderland crafts, dew claw bags and their continued uses and meaning, embroidered hide coats from the Canadian North, and Indigenous-made sanatoria art and craft were all topics that stimulated deep reflections following close collaborative object study and intensive speculation. In the absence of documentation, we turned, like many scholars, to broader genres of objects, doing comparative analysis

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and placing items in wider contexts of production, circulation, and consumption. We thought as well about the globalizing forces that moved people and things through large and small networks of exchange, carrying objects across many boundaries and giving them distinct meanings in different phases of their lives. In a sense, we combined the concept of object biographies with aspects of Alfred Gell’s theory of art agency, perceiving objects as indices of the human intentions that produced these compelling material legacies.27

Context and Genre The team’s multiple sets of research expertise came to the fore here, expanding on materials, construction, and other physical evidence, and on known provenance, to place the item within larger genres. Each member of the team contributed detailed knowledge acquired over many years about materials as well as historical documentation about the production, use, and circulation of the things we focused on during the project. Interpreting the significance of silk ribbons, sinew thread, shifts in the cut of men’s coats across the nineteenth century, and the symbols beaded, painted, or quilled on coats required diverse and detailed knowledges that cut across archival, museum, and other kinds of repositories to encompass oral histories, insights from Indigenous and other communities of origin, and wide scholarly networks that enabled us to place particular objects in front of us within broader universes of material goods and their patterns of circulation. Photographs, early prints, newspaper stories, chemical analyses of historic dyes, technical reports on conservation of similar objects in other collections, secondary literature, fur trade account books, ethnographies, details about the wider circulation, use, and production of objects, and evidence of the origins of objects in global exchange all came to bear on our understanding of what we were looking at in front of us. We noticed that our use of visual illustrations in research presentations to each other articulated this function of using wider data sets to understand a particular object rather than relying on the more common ways that visual representations are used in scholarly history, such as when an illustration of York Factory stands for all fur trade posts in a secondary school history. We used this wider set of information gleaned from diverse sources to illuminate the particular thing, as well as to enable that particular thing to inform our understanding of the wider category. The power of objects could revise our understanding of generalities.

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1.5 Considering the hide “banyan.” Left to right: Anne Whitelaw, Laura Peers, Beverly Lemire, Sarah Nesbitt, Laurie K. Bertram, Jonathan Lainey, and Julie-Ann Mercer (seated), Pitt Rivers Museum, May 2015.

This process of broadening the context flowed into conversations across disciplines and backgrounds among team members in the research space, with the objects on the table mediating questions. Anne Whitelaw’s training in art history led us to think critically about the material character of paintings and prints rather than focusing solely on their representational value. Cynthia Cooper’s technical knowledge of historical fabrics and their production, the dates of introduction of chemical dyes, and changes in the fashion of men’s coats over time shifted the historian’s thoughts about the dates of hide coats and the way that certain shoulder and collar patterns became traditional. Jonathan Lainey’s deep knowledge of wampum, including its meanings, historical production, and uses, demonstrated the agency of objects and their powerful claims of authority. Beverly Lemire’s perspectives as a historian

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of global consumption pushed us to think more broadly about the circulation of materials and finished objects: when looking at Wendat objects embroidered with moose hair, we noted just how many had been made over the nineteenth century and reflected on this large-scale, cottage-based market production.28 Laurie K. Bertram’s expertise on the cross-cultural North brought us to a new understanding of the different nature of travel at higher latitudes, allowing patterns of interaction distinct to Arctic and Subarctic regions. This perspective illuminated the way that technologies spread in new settings. We also realized that there was unevenness across our knowledge sets, as well as gaps. We drew on the deep technical knowledge of museum conservators at our host institutions for information about fibres, dyes, chemical analysis, and other evidence outside our collective knowing. Their grasp of the intrinsic features of objects in their collections was willingly shared, providing us with keys to better explain the life course of the things under our eyes. Moreover, we were fortunate to have the expertise of Judy Half, a team member whose deep experiential knowledge of many Indigenous objects added incomparably to our findings. Her experience of wearing and dancing in a jingle dress brought a level of knowledge about the dress that no one else possessed. Half also described what it feels like to dance in moccasins very similar to those we were studying, although she noted that her knowledge was embedded in her Cree community and that she could not speak for all First Nations. We shared different systems of knowing, valuing equally technical, historical, and experiential understandings of the items we examined.

Broad Contexts and Speculations We also used disciplinary focuses to our advantage. Sarah Carter gave a fascinating presentation in Edmonton on Clare Sheridan, an elite British woman whose recourse to Siksika territory in the mid-1930s and the sculptures of Blackfoot people she produced offer an equivocal portrait of transcultural relations across mid-twentieth-century imperial networks. Carter’s deep knowledge of the gendered and racialized West, including its spaces of personal and geographic conflict and the imperial and Indigenous networks intersecting these spaces, provided critical contextualization for the objectoriented work done by other team members. We quickly understood that having colleagues and the objects of research physically co-present in the research space forced us to explain our perspectives and knowledge to each

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other, which led to fresh (and more searching) questions of the objects and of the histories that we sought. We also encouraged each other to consider what we did not know about objects, identifying lacunae in our information – and there were many. Thanks to the horsewomen among us and to readers of our blog, we realized that the quilled pad saddle and crupper at the Pitt Rivers Museum were tied together incorrectly,29 but we had no idea when this had happened or why – and museum staff noted that the items might have been tied together after they arrived in Oxford simply to prevent their dissociation during moves of the historic collections. The surviving numbers of moccasins in museum collections opened questions about the full scale of North American Indigenous regional production and its transcultural significance, a question only partly addressed by extant secondary works. The stunning moccasins with moose hair embroidery at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the woman’s jacket and red slippers embroidered with moose hair at the McCord Museum, and the feather fans at the McCord opened questions about the roles of Indigenous peoples in making fashion objects for commercial consumption and the impact of their wares globally.30 This process of sharing was a social one, and we agreed that it would have been far less rich if we had not gathered together in person but instead had relied on technology to achieve joint meetings with objects on video, for instance. The physical presence of the objects and the joint social interactions of the team were central to our discovery process. Connections with the communities of origin of these objects also played an important role in our deliberations. However, some of the items that we examined were linked to multiple Indigenous nations, and our purpose was to explore broad dynamics across northern North America beyond the boundaries of particular nations. And although our collaborative project was not structured as an active partnership with specific communities, we were fortunate to have the participation of two Indigenous scholars whose lived experience in relation to some of the objects deepened and challenged our analyses, strengthening our collective thinking and ensuring that we paid attention to Indigenous realities and knowledges. Many other members of the team have longstanding ties with Indigenous communities, having worked with them for decades in order to collectively build knowledge that will have benefits beyond the realm of academia. These researchers came to the project with these networks already well established, and they continued to bring their knowledge as well as the questions that their research relationships engendered to the larger Object Lives table. Throughout all our deliberations,

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hermeneutic frameworks intersected in very productive ways. Archival research engaged with lived experience; narrative historical analysis tangled with Indigenous ways of knowing. No single approach was privileged, but rather all came together in a search to uncover the meanings surrounding the objects and what such a grappling would allow us to reveal. We found that our theoretical analysis was focused as tightly on objects as it was on the broader set of narratives in which we placed them, something quite different from the historian’s use of data, where particular sources are frequently subsumed within the analysis. We began this project recognizing that objects have agency that is often beyond our capacity to forecast.31 The agency of objects continues as a vital ingredient that informs our commitment to the web-based elements of this project. Methodologically, these elements affirm our pledge to share project knowledge in dialogue with fellow experts and learners, recognizing the multiple communities that can be served. In all instances, dialogue was a central part of this process, with questions being posed and suggestions offered or with new perspectives being elucidated. Acknowledging that interest and expertise take many forms, we advanced our understanding through dialogical exchange outside the team among interested publics. Most importantly, in our discussions, we found ourselves looping from the particular object and its history to the broader genre, to scholarly theory and analysis, and then back again, with questions and perspectives building on one another. This crucial dialogical element of the research process has led to elements of the present volume, including a transcribed dialogue between Judy Half and Beverly Lemire in chapter 10 and use of the first-person voice by several authors in narrating their research findings. Coming together from a number of different disciplinary formations, we engaged in a process that necessitated a methodological and theoretical openness; by keeping our focus resolutely on the objects, we allowed the articulation of disciplines and their respective analytical approaches to enrich our collective analysis. Interdisciplinarity is arguably at the core of material culture studies. In recent years, the “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences has resonated with researchers frustrated with the limitations of histories of ideas conceptualized as universal in scope and founded on written evidence alone – and often Eurocentric at that. The “material turn” favours the specificity and richness of historically and culturally located objects.32 The academic emphasis on everyday life also takes seriously the material

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products that have emerged from it.33 For many scholars, the “stuff ” of history has enabled very focused analyses, where the individual object is read as a signifier of broader networks of production and consumption, grounding for what might be described as the metanarratives of history in the particular stories and experiences of a culture or a community.

conclusions and ways forward The methodology that we devised offers one example of the many ways that knowledge can be combined and extended, allowing the agency of objects to direct research. Our team included those with diverse sets of knowledge and a commitment to a sustained research agenda that opened a new perspective on a complex, permeable, and entangled northern North America and facets of its global ties. Respect for Indigenous ways of knowing and research priorities were seminally important in this venture.34 Future researchers from universities, museums, and communities will prioritize other themes and raise other questions around other sets of objects and objectives. We offer this methodological outline as a tool for future endeavours, encouraging others to look creatively at the broad potential partnerships that they can construct and at the new histories that they can write. More richly inclusive histories are vital, as emphasized by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The authors of the commission’s “Calls to Action” note that education, as a tool of reconciliation, requires “not only schools and post-secondary institutions, but also dialogue forums and public history institutions such as museums and archives. Education must remedy the gaps in historical knowledge that perpetuate ignorance and racism.”35 We hope that our work contributes to the reconciliation process. We are reminded that research is not just about the past but also about the present, including how diverse purposes and desired outcomes determine people’s redefinitions of themselves and the objects made in varied contexts. The objects that wholly captured our attention were predominantly Indigenous-made or Indigenous-influenced, which speaks to the power of these communities to shape and inspire the material culture of this vast region over this long time frame. Settler states and imperial networks were compelled to engage with this material culture at every turn. The struggle to define and redefine these “things” is a critical part of a larger history within and beyond this land. The power of the object is evident in all our calculations and collective assessment of the items we encountered; they propelled our thinking.

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We developed a robust and dynamic methodology that brought objects and people together, and we found ways to release the knowledge within and beyond those objects. The future impact of our findings has yet to be fully gauged. However, identifying ways to move beyond our single project reflects the strengths of this endeavour, the openness of discussion, and the shared aims of the participants. Reflections on methodology consolidate the outcomes of this venture and point the way forward. Our larger conclusion from this highly productive partnership is that collective and collaborative ways of working with, questioning, and thinking speculatively about specific objects yield far richer findings not only about the artifacts under analysis but also about the processes of production, circulation, and reception that have shaped the objects. Object Lives began and ended by prioritizing the possibilities inherent in the biographical narratives of things. What this approach ultimately generated was a broader understanding of global networks of exchange, the centrality of Indigenous peoples in these networks, and the richness of material culture that only a truly cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary methodological framework centred on particular objects can produce. Objects mattered, and they informed our work throughout.

notes 1 For example, see Bronner, “‘Visible Proofs’”; Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten; Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together”; Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories”; Phillips, Trading Identities; Phillips, “Reading and Writing”; Peers, “‘Many Tender Ties,’”; Cooper, Paterson, and Wanhalla, eds, Lives of Colonial Objects; Ulrich, Age of Homespun; Coote, “Text-Book Textile”; Batchelor and Kaplan, eds, Women and Material Culture; Loren and Nassaney, Archaeology of Clothing; and Cavanaugh and Yonan, eds, Cultural Aesthetics. 2 For example, Drazin and Kuechler, eds, Social Life of Materials, includes analyses of predominantly present-day objects, with attention to sensory elements in multidisciplinary treatments. 3 See, for example, Glassie, Material Culture; Brennen, Qualitative Research Methods; and Gerritsen and Riello, eds, Writing Material Culture History. 4 Finn, “East India Company at Home.” See also Finn and Smith, eds, East India Company at Home. 5 Zahedieh and Laurenson “Matter of Slavery in Scotland.” 6 Beaton, “Great Lakes Research Alliance.” See also https://carleton.ca/grasac/about. The project is now based at the University of Toronto under Dr Cara Krmpotich and Dr Heidi Bohaker.

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7 de Stecher and Loyer, “Practising Collaborative Research.” 8 See, for example, Berry, “Recovered Identities”; Peers and Brown, Visiting with the Ancestors; Krmpotich and Peers, This Is Our Life; Lainey, “Le fonds Famille Picard”; and Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al., True Spirit. 9 Nightingale, “Why Observing Matters.” 10 Lemire, Cotton, 44–7. 11 Burnham, Cut My Cote; Mida and Kim, Dress Detective. 12 Classen, “Museum Manners.” 13 See, for example, https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/entity/m0dnr7? categoryId=medium. 14 John Tradescant the Younger was a noted English collector of botanical and ethnographic items, added to his famous cabinet of curiosities. The item we looked at is known as Powhatan’s Mantle. 15 Prown, “Mind in Matter,” 7. For early works in material culture studies employing classic methodologies, see Schlereth, Material Culture Studies; and Ames, Death in the Dining Room. 16 Bohaker, Corbiere, and Phillips, “Wampum Unites Us.” 17 On materiality and photographs, see Edwards, “Photographs and History.” 18 Geismar, Museum Object Lessons. 19 Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips, Sensible Objects. 20 Yonan, “Toward a Fusion,” 240. 21 Hicks and Beaudry, “Introduction,” 5. 22 Dudley, “Museum Materialities,” 7; Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips, Sensible Objects, 23–5. 23 See http://objectlives.com/discovery-workshop/2015/10/31/prm-dew-claw-bag. Phillips, “Re-Placing Objects,” 96, also notes the importance of multisensory engagements with historic Indigenous objects. 24 Appadurai, “Introduction”; Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography of Things”; Gosden and Marshall, “Cultural Biography of Objects”; Peers, “‘Many Tender Ties’”; Hoskins, “Agency, Biography and Objects.” 25 The concepts of entanglement that informed our studies are discussed further in this volume’s “Introduction.” See also Thomas, Entangled Objects; Bauer and Norton, “Introduction”; and Norton, “Subaltern Technologies.” 26 Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 18. 27 Gell, Art and Agency. 28 Phillips, Trading Identities. 29 Padded saddle, Plains, North America, Pit Rivers Museum, 1884.51.14, http://objectlives. com/discovery-workshop/2017/2/6/pad-saddles. 30 Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884.92.16.1; McCord Museum, M16946.1-2, M12679, M12678.

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31 Gell, Art and Agency. 32 Auslander, “Beyond Words.” 33 Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture; Farrell Racette, “‘I Want to Call.’” See also Amato, “Methodology.” 34 Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style; Wilson, Research Is Ceremony. 35 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, 234.

sidebar one Management and Methodology beverly le m ire , l aura peers, and anne whitelaw

Co-presence, conversations, and debates are core features of the methodology that informed this project, which involved a range of interactions that proceeded over time in a scheduled fashion. The management of these contacts was vital to the methodological success of the project, a point that must be considered explicitly. A defined management structure underpinned this project, one premised on respectful and inclusive exchange and on clearly assigned administrative tasks dispersed among the participants, including an administrative assistant and research assistants. Project management is too rarely given the weight of theoretical or methodological alignments, but robust management structures are necessary to realize goals. Clear project aims are the starting point, along with adequate staffing and defined duties. Also key is a system to manage routine communication, including emails, scheduled monthly virtual meetings, and annual workshops, all with agreed agendas moving toward goals.

The Object Lives project was based in Edmonton, where the principal investigator and several other team members were located, allowing for the creation of an administrative hub that could address the challenges of a multicity, multicontinent research project. A clear chain of responsibility was established at the outset, with selective decentralization of authority in Montreal and Oxford, where the project grant’s co-applicants and partner institutions were based. The workshops at these sites required local organization and initiatives. Methodology discussions do not typically pull back the curtain and reveal the gears and levers moving the production, but we think that it is useful to do so. Our project involved geographically and thematically dispersed responsibilities, with clear reporting and communication systems set within an administrative framework. Each team member contributed different things toward shared goals. Repeated engagements consolidated this sensibility and led to the formation of a team where respect for each member’s

knowledge and skills was constant, producing a final result that was much greater than the sum of its parts. Timely communication was essential throughout the project. Contacts took different forms, including regular debriefings with research assistants and our graduate student administrative assistant; communication with the group when setting agendas, such as arranging presentations from members; selective correspondence with individual members as issues arose; liaising with local organizers prior to and after the workshops; and small-group communications in the production of blogs for our website. The layered cycles of communication fed into the management and momentum of the project. This was the foundation from which we further advanced during our workshops, where face-to-face conversations flowed. Recording these exchanges, which was one of the tasks of our administrative assistant, allowed the possibility of later reflection and adjustment of our priorities as needed. It also captured some of the kinetic energy of our discoveries, including the sounds of the dew claw bag at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The project website – www.objectlives.com – served as a venue where research processes could be laid out, another means of capturing the course of collective, collaborative, and consultative research. Julie-Ann Mercer, our administrative assistant, proved an indispensable manager of day-to-day and month-to-month goals, while keeping in

mind the big picture. The systems set in place provided the critical structure that knit a disparate group, geographically dispersed, into a coherent whole. These systems helped to actualize the research, learning, and knowledge creation processes that drove this collaboration. Flaws emerged, as well as successes, as the process played out, and we reflected on these flaws as well. Both the achievements and the deficiencies of the project reveal its ambitions and the multidimensional facets of our methodology, with ramifications for future collaborative ventures of this type.

2 Crossing Worlds Hide Coats, Relationships, and Identity in Rupert’s Land and Britain l aura peers

Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, material culture played key roles in the expansion of trade networks, empires, colonial regimes, and the lives of ordinary people caught up in these processes. Balancing the enormous quantities of all kinds of objects sent from Britain for trade were large quantities of items produced in the colonial hinterlands and brought back to Britain. The acquisition of souvenirs and gifts for family and the incorporation of “exotic” items into the domestic spaces of British homes were powerful factors in constructing British – especially English – identities in relation to global ones and in erecting social boundaries between collectors and those who produced items collected.1 At the same time, local producers of material culture in colonial situations sought to negotiate shifting social, political, and economic opportunities and constraints afforded by the imposition of colonial politics and settler colonial culture. They were also inspired by European material culture and took advantage of Europeans in their own social and political spaces, and they expressed such processes materially. Material culture was the thing in between colonizers and colonized, and both groups shaped it, used it, and acquired it. Two extraordinary nineteenth-century moose hide coats, which are decorated with painted designs and porcupine quillwork and which combine various aspects of European and broader global fashion and Indigenous technology and cultural perspectives, form the focus of this chapter. They are part of a genre of decorated hide coats made for men by Indigenous – in which

2.1 Hide coat detail, epaulets. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1951.2.19.

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I include First Nations and Metis2 – women of the central Subarctic and parkland areas reaching from Hudson Bay across what is now northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, their distinct identity arising from relationships between Indigenous women and British and French fur traders during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both of these coats were collected by British men and brought back to England, where they eventually found their way to the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Of all the diverse material culture involved in colonialism, clothing has been a key symbol of identity, of political allegiance and resistance, and of ways of thought affected by new relationships and ideas. Described “as a surface where collective norms, values and codes are deposited,”3 as an index of difference,4 and as a conscious strategy within culturally and racially complex colonial situations,5 clothing was a key dynamic in the process of creating the British Empire and imposing colonial structures of rule, often a focus of missionary activity and comment, legislation, social pressure, and activities to “educate” local peoples in order to ensure that they complied with “civilized” dress. Britons imported cloth and ready-made clothing into colonial situations around the world as part of establishing trade and forms of political control. At the same time, local people encountering new kinds of materials and garments did not perceive them in the same manner as did Europeans but incorporated them into existing ways of thought, aesthetics, and expectations; and British settlers in imperial hinterlands faced not only the necessity of adopting local clothing adapted to climate and geography but also pressure to maintain “civilized” standards of dress. As Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn state, the core issue in critical analyses of hybridity is neither the “origins nor the sources of particular styles, cultural practices, iconographies, or materials” but “how the foreign and uncanny take on meaning through material objects and daily practices in colonial contexts.”6 However, origins and sources are an important aspect of how meanings are created for such objects. Quilled and painted hide coats, produced in the interstices of intimate and globalizing histories, allow us to think about “hybrid” objects, including their meanings in different cultural contexts and why they have travelled across cultural boundaries. Through these inquiries, we can look at the processes of colonialism on the ground and at British understandings of such items once they were transported to the “home country.” Such shifts across space, culture, and meanings were powerfully political within the context of empire. They remain so today, as the coats

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are reclaimed as Indigenous material heritage within the context of Indigenous resurgence in Canada. Although men ran the fur trade transportation and administrative networks of northern North America and the trading itself, they were dependent on Indigenous women’s work of netting snowshoes, sewing bark canoes, tanning hide, making moccasins, cleaning furs, and processing game, on their linguistic, geographical, and diplomatic skills, and on their local cultural knowledge, all of which were central to traders’ survival and their profits. That was true of all trading companies, including the North West Company and other earlier businesses whose employees took First Nations and Metis women as wives as well as the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), whose early (and failed) official policy called for an exclusively male labour force.7 This chapter focuses on hbc histories, as these are best known for the region in which the coats were made. Despite official policy, from the hbc’s earliest beginnings in 1670, traders made alliances with Indigenous families to obtain women’s labour, geographic knowledge, translation services, and the political goodwill of their families. By the late eighteenth century, Metis children born of these “country marriages” had begun to dominate senior officers’ choice of marriage partners, and Metis men played key roles in the fur trade. Some elder sons were taken back to Britain, Montreal, or Toronto to be educated, returning afterward to work in the company’s service. By the early nineteenth century, generations of people had grown up with Cree, Ojibwa, other First Nations, and Metis grandmothers and mothers, with British, French Canadian, and Metis fathers and grandfathers, and with a range of spiritual, cultural, and material practices inclusive of their entire heritage. Family networks incorporated people of diverse backgrounds, and although identities became differentiated and reified as “Metis,” “Cree,” “Ojibwa,” and other ethnonyms, for a large group of people involved in the hbc trade in the eastern Subarctic and the parkland region across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, identity might best be thought of as “Cree-Metis” or “Ojibwa-Metis.” Fur trade society produced a vibrant, hybrid material culture, including a genre of knee-length men’s coats made of moose and caribou hide. All incorporate some aspect of European-tailored men’s clothing, including set-in sleeves, stand and revers collars, and tailored backs and shoulder seam placements influenced by late-eighteenth-century fashion, but their materials and decoration reflect localized Indigenous aesthetics and styles. Some are simple T-shapes, whereas others incorporate shaped backs and flaring skirts.

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Although most were collected between approximately 1825 and 1875, their European cut generally dates to about 1790–1825, reflecting a tendency to adopt and maintain patterns dating to a key period of cultural contact.8 Some incorporate a non-Western design element, a vertical triangle inserted into the centre back skirt, which for Innu (Naskapi) in the eastern Subarctic represented the Lord of the Caribou Spirits and were made to be beautiful in order to honour the caribou persons during the hunt.9 Most are decorated with woven or embroidered porcupine quills. Most are also painted at the hem and sometimes along the front facing and across the spine and shoulder arcs, having designs that include horned supernatural beings, vines and leaves, and floral borders adapted from Asian influences on European china and textiles. Some have stitching holes at the collar and cuffs, and sometimes there are stray bits of fragile hide caught in these holes, evidence of now-missing fur trim. Of the dozens of extant long hide coats in museums, the two at the Pitt Rivers Museum considered in this chapter are extraordinary. One is lavishly decorated with porcupine quillwork (see figure 2.1), as well as painted designs, including a horned being (see figure 2.2, visible upside down in centre). The coat shows very little evidence of wear, and its colours remain vibrant. Unusually, it has a “sibling” at the British Museum, clearly made by the same hands.10 Both are cut somewhat like a European greatcoat but have a central vertical triangular panel in the centre back skirt to add fullness (see figure 2.3). Given the combination of vibrant painted designs and lavish woven and wrapped quillwork, they may have been made near the Red River Settlement by Cree-Metis people. Likely made between 1820 and 1860, this coat entered the Pitt Rivers Museum collection in 1951 as a transfer from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum after its auction from a private collection in 1925. Wellcome records suggest that it was probably collected by Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson, a Vermont fur merchant who moved to London in 1830, or by his brother William, who worked in the Montreal fur trade.11 Another coat, also in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection, is equally distinctive and also probably made between 1820 and 1840 (see figure 2.3). Based on its decoration, it could have been made anywhere between Hudson Bay and the Red River Settlement. The Pitt Rivers Museum acquired this coat from a dealer in 1906; nothing is known about its history. It has painted (actually stamped) decorations at the hem and on the back, one remaining applied woven quillwork shoulder decoration, and quill-wrapped fringes. Unlike many of these coats now in museum collections, it has been heavily worn. It has been lined with a wool twill fabric, similar to that used to line British

2.2 Opposite Hide coat, full back. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1951.2.19.

2.3 Left Banyan, full front. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1906.83.1.

2.4 Below Banyan detail, facing. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1906.83.1.

military coats in the early nineteenth century. The lining is now mostly gone, but the dirt below its hem on the inside of the coat shows its original length. A lively jacquard fabric, dating from a later era, has been applied over the collar and down the front facing, obscuring some of the painted designs (see figure 2.4). The facing is also sewn with much cruder stitches than the body of the coat, suggesting that it is a later addition. This coat’s vertical panels run from the collar to the lower hem, with a slight flare below the waist and an overlap at the front (see figures 2.3 and 2.5). Its design is related to British men’s coats of the 1820s and 1830s, but its overall relaxed form is that of the banyan, a garment brought from Japan by the

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2.5 Opposite Banyan, full back. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1906.83.1.

2.6 Left Man’s cotton chintz banyan lined with blockprinted cotton made in India on the Coromandel Coast, possibly tailored in Netherlands or England, c. 1750–75. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.215-1992.

Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century (see figure 2.6). Popularized in Britain and America in the eighteenth century, banyans evolved from a T-shaped kimono pattern to include aspects of Western men’s fashion such as fitted sleeves and stand collars. They became very popular, informal, mostly indoor dress, being warm and comfortable in chilly houses from Scotland to New England.12 This banyan is made of moose or caribou hide and decorated with paint and porcupine quills. For this coat to have been made in hide, someone had to import a cloth banyan to Hudson Bay to use as a pattern. Given their popularity, this occurrence is not surprising, and this cloth banyan would have joined items such as painted Indian calico, which was imported by the hbc to York Factory as early as 1679,13 underscoring the movement of people, objects, and ideas across the British Empire in the early nineteenth century.

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ac ts of making , ac ts of wear ing These garments trace complex cross-cultural movements of people and goods, as well as translations of form, production, and meaning, across continents and cultures. As Nicholas Thomas noted long ago, scholars need to do more than document such histories: we need to examine what hybrid objects do within cross-cultural contexts, including how they function as technologies that make social change real.14 In this view, hybrid objects are not simply markers of identity but things that create identity. That has been especially true within colonial situations where flows of power involving gender, intermarriage, alliance, trade, and racism mediated the adoption, adaptation, rejection, and borrowing related to the production of hybrid objects. As Hildi Hendrickson states, dress is a process “for constituting the social self, social organization, and shared notions of authority and value,” and it articulates “the most potent kinds of political and spiritual power.”15 Hide banyans and quilled coats arose out of that most powerful and transgressive element of colonial society: racial intermarriage. The subsequent fates of such garments after they were brought back to England also speak to the dynamics of race and power within the fur trade and to the broader anxieties about race found across imperial contexts. Taking Thomas’s idea further, we need to look at what things do across different stages of their life cycles by considering the following acts of engagement with objects: • acts of making objects, including gathering and processing raw materials • acts of using objects as they were intended to be used • acts of transfer, through which objects change hands or see their intended purposes frustrated (as when a coat becomes a souvenir) • acts of use after transfer, including using items for play or display, as well as reclassification, which entails the subsuming of objects within new systems of thought • acts of keeping but not using objects, including keeping things in attics or museum storerooms • acts of reclamation, including work with museum collections by communities of origin Using these two coats as a focused lens, I want to examine the shifting meaning and functions of hide coats in two key phases of their life cycle: their

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making and their use after collection both in fur trade society and in England. Things have different meanings and achieve different outcomes in disparate social and political contexts: the coats did and meant very different things in Rupert’s Land – the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast territory in northern North America – and in Britain.

Making Coats Making clothing within cross-cultural colonial situations involves negotiating different cultural backgrounds and expectations, as well as the relations of power in which these conditions exist. It is necessary to link object-based analysis of particular coats, surveys of the genre of hide coats, critical analyses of archival and visual documentation of the production, use, and collection of coats, and scholarly literature on fur trade social history in order to consider the shifting cross-cultural meanings of the coats and their social contexts of production. The manufacture of hide coats brought British men – fur trade officers who purchased and wore such coats and male tailors employed at the bayside posts – together with the Indigenous women who translated this garment into local materials using the culturally based knowledge and skills needed to sew hide. British men’s coats would first have been seen by Indigenous people worn either by fur trade officers or by Indigenous leaders who had received military-style “chiefs’ coats” as part of formal diplomatic exchanges and alliance rituals at the start of annual trading events.16 As early as 1684, the hbc sent to Rupert’s Land “sixteen presentation coats, accessorized with hats, belts and swords” and “trimmed with ornamental gilt braid in the military fashion.”17 The stock on hand at York Factory at the end of the trading year in 1689 included 164 “laced coats,” three “present coats with caps & swords,” and a number of plain, youths’, and children’s coats.18 The need for so many coats resulted in the hbc sending male tailors to the bayside posts: “In 1706, the London Committee informed Anthony Beale at Albany that instead of the coats he had ordered, they were sending ‘Cloth, with buttons & thread flannel for Edging & a Taylor to make them.’”19 Male tailors, largely accustomed to working with cloth, entered a world where garments were made by Indigenous women, who had a distinct skill set learned from female relatives and worked with hide according to a very different worldview. For peoples across the region in which these hide coats were produced, animals were understood as relatives to be treated respectfully.

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Algonquian-speaking groups and their Metis relatives preserved, across their intense entanglements with European cultures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a worldview in which animals, plants, and other linguistically animate things like canoes and snowshoes constituted powerful persons, a web of living beings that humans were part of rather than separate from.20 Such persons were also understood as powerful, with the ability to give or withhold themselves depending on the respect shown to them by other beings. In cultures dependent on caribou, moose, and other animals for food and hides, people expressed respect for these powerful relatives at every step, from setting out on the hunt to making items from hide. The labour and skill involved in preparing beautifully tanned hide is an important way of showing this respect, and women’s adult competence was based in part on their ability to produce hides.21 Hide garments showed respect and kinship in other ways. Beautifully made and decorated coats were created especially for the caribou hunt by some eastern Subarctic peoples to honour caribou relatives.22 Garments were often oriented to the animal’s body, with the former hair side facing out and the neck aligned with the wearer’s, placing the wearer in the position of the animal and spiritually reanimating the hide.23 Sherry Farrell Racette calls attention to the fact that the oldest known hide coats are made from the hide of a single animal, noting that their spine and shoulder areas are often decorated to emphasize the links between animal and wearer.24 Skill sets for making hide coats would have overlapped between Indigenous women and British male tailors. Although tailors worked mostly with cloth, they also worked with felted cloth and leather, so they would have been familiar with the butt seams used with such materials. Placing pattern pieces on the uneven thickness of hide would have been less familiar to tailors, whereas Indigenous seamstresses would have been challenged by tailored structures, including the nature of the sleeve construction, especially the point at which the upper shoulders meet the collar, which is unlike the boat-neck construction of early historic Indigenous garments.25 The decoration on these garments, however, is entirely Indigenous. The vibrant, lavish quillwork and painted horned beings on the sibling coats at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum are emphatically not European. Similarly, the quill-wrapped fringes at the hem of the banyan show a common finishing step in historic northern Plains and Subarctic Indigenous production, unparalleled in European construction. Historically, quillwork was done by Indigenous women. The banyan was made by an Indigenous woman who took a cloth banyan apart and made her own version out of hide, paint, and porcupine quills.

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October February

Myself employed at times in cutting out Indian cloathing (having no Taylor) and the women belonging to the factory making the same, Snowshoes, shoes for the men and various things requisite – myself cutting out Indian cloathing and the women making these etc. Myself cutting out and the Indian women making Indian cloathing, Shoes etc.26

That the women were making “Indian cloathing” and “Shoes” – moccasins – meant that work in hide and work in cloth were occurring side by side. As they learned to use cloth and tailored constructions, however, women were Indigenizing British materials and aesthetics, translating gold braid on quasi-military coats given to chiefs in fur trade alliance rituals into woven and wrapped quillwork, just as the hide used for the garment and the reflection of local meanings in its alterations, such as the vertical back panel, Indigenized European fashion.27 The making of these coats thus did two key things: it foregrounded relationships and exchanges of knowledge and skills between British men and Indigenous women, and it enacted key choices of Indigenous women as they navigated the new material and social opportunities available to them. The hide coats do not so much embody the adoption of new, foreign forms as they do the Indigenization of those forms to reflect local aesthetics and beliefs. This undertaking was about stabilizing a world in transition by harnessing new designs to older ways of thought in order to create a complex hybrid society. The process of transferring older meanings to new materials and forms, which imposed older decorative motifs and processes on new fashion, made things familiar even as they changed, and it strengthened kinship networks as they widened. These women were also looking carefully at British men’s clothing. Due to the tailored construction of hide coats, they are distinct from “slops,” or labourers’ garments, which were both imported to and made at bayside posts by male tailors for heavy work, and equally distinct from the square and rectangular blanket-cloth capotes, which became the uniform of lower-status

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labourers across the fur trade. Indigenous women producing hide coats were interested in officers’ coats and chiefs’ coats, picking up on markers of status. Equally, the production of hide coats for commissions by hbc officers and senior employees would have been a mark of status within fur trade communities, advertising the reputation of particular women as skilled seamstresses and artists. The making of hide coats thus became a way to bring together disparate sets of knowledge held by different heritages and cultures, as well as to create and sustain relationships across cultural boundaries and across generations. All of these processes would have contributed to the creation of a stable society from diverse cultures, a society that took advantage of new opportunities while aligning them with older ways of being. Such dynamics are evident in the pattern of “country marriages” between hbc men and Indigenous (including Metis) women. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when these two coats were made, many generations of intermarriage meant that Indigenous women did not require a British male tailor to demonstrate cutting and sewing tailored garments in order for them to produce the banyan. The coats would have been produced within networks of women involved in teaching tanning, sewing, cutting, and quilling skills in their communities. When Object Lives team member Judy Half, a knowledge keeper from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, saw these coats in Oxford, she said, “I think there would have been a number of women involved in making this coat and that they would have seen this style of coat and understood quite well how to make them.” Making coats strengthened kinship networks by bringing extended family members together in the ordinary tasks of hunting, tanning, cutting, figuring out new patterns, sewing, and decorating coats – tasks that in Janet Carsten’s theory constitute the repetitive, unmarked exchanges central to creating kinship.28 That such coats were made by Indigenous women for British men involved social, often intimate, relationships across cultural and racial boundaries. The transfer of finished coats made such relationships socially visible and in the context of fur trade society functioned as marked exchanges of kinship and alliance. These dynamics show Indigenous people not as victims of colonialism in its fur trade guise but as taking advantage of opportunities that the fur trade brought to them by creating what Farrell Racette calls “the métis space of new possibilities.”29 The “new possibilities” need to be stressed here. Nicholas Thomas has noted that in many historic situations involving cross-cultural

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contact, “novel things” were “assimilated to existing categories. This approach has implied that indigenous cultures in particular typically employ conservative strategies, in the sense that their recontextualizations of material culture aim to preserve a prior order, rather than produce a new one.” Thomas goes on to explore “the use of objects to create novel and distinctive values and social orders,”30 and what we see in the making of these coats is also a process of looking ahead and extending tradition into new pathways – “the métis space of new possibilities.” When these coats were made in the early nineteenth century, the web of kinship relations in which they were produced included the Orkney Islands, reached across Scotland and England, and encompassed much of North America. They were produced within families that were deeply rooted in places and traditions and long accustomed both to moving across geographical, cultural, and class-based boundaries and to drawing on diverse material and social resources, including those offered in various forms by British fur trade personnel. These cross-cultural relationships were key to bringing together the skills and perspectives necessary to making the hide coats. One further issue about the making of the coats should be noted. Their flamboyant, vibrant aesthetic means that not only was the wearer intended to be seen in these coats – the word “peacock” comes to mind – but the maker, as well, was flaunting her skill and highly visible. In contrast, the names of the Indigenous women who made these coats have been almost completely eliminated in colonial and museum records. Whereas we know the names of white, British, male collectors for most of the coats, the records hold the name of just one specific Indigenous woman maker for an extant coat: Sehwahtahow, who made a coat and other items for surgeon Alfred Robinson at York Factory in the 1780s.31 Given that there are several dozen extant hide coats from the region west of Hudson Bay, which included the Red River Settlement and Saskatchewan, a number of important women artists and seamstresses have almost entirely disappeared from the historical record. This erasure is part of a larger pattern of hiding the existence and importance of local women within colonial societies around the globe. As Durba Ghosh states, “[c]olonial societies were deeply anxious about maintaining racial boundaries and hierarchies of colonizing groups.”32 Erasing the names of Indigenous women in British colonies, she notes, enabled British men to deny racial impurity. Omitting the names of the makers of the coats allowed collectors to deny

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having relationships with Indigenous women. The collective forgetting shown in the failure to record makers’ names for Indigenous objects in museum collections is part of a social and political pattern of denial. If the creative hybridity and Indigenization involved in making these coats show patterns of coping with change and seizing opportunities offered by colonial processes, the failure to preserve makers’ names signals that the coats also did other things and that their movements and translations were integrated into the constructions of racism and colonial control. Aspects of wearing the coats, both within the physical sphere of fur trade society and in Britain after collectors returned home, highlight this more difficult aspect of fur trade history.

Wearing Coats: Rupert’s Land and Britain The period during which these two coats were made – around the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century – saw huge changes in fur trade society: the merger of companies in 1821; the arrival of Scottish and Swiss settlers at the Red River; the establishment of the Red River Settlement, with missions, governmental and legal structures, courts, and jails; and the arrival of white wives of senior fur trade officers in the 1830s. The period saw a hardening of social divisions based on race and class. As Leora Auslander notes, people use material culture to position themselves in social and political contexts fraught with ambiguity and conflict, and clothing played a key role in this process of change, defining members of fur trade society and their status in relations with one another.33 Ruth Phillips’s statement that dress “is a key act of self-fashioning, one that shapes relationships both to human and non-human others,” can help us to understand the meanings that hide coats had within fur trade society.34 Clothing had enormous social and political potency in colonial North America. Indigenous peoples clothed Europeans they adopted, and traders clothed Indigenous men they wished to bind to them by giving them “chiefs’ coats.” Missionaries and settlers constructed stereotypes about savagery based in part on Indigenous hide and fur clothing; at the Red River Settlement, one missionary encountering an Ojibwa man in 1844 wearing a warm rabbit-skin coat declared that he looked “more like a wild beast than a human being.”35 Judgments such as this one fed into the construction of racialized boundaries between peoples, becoming part of the “redressing” of Indigenous bodies that was central to colonial processes.36 As with making garments, wearing coats

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was an embodiment of “a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body,” but wearing coats enabled the performance of very different relationships in different contexts.37 Unlike most surviving hide coats, the banyan shows extensive wear. Dirt on the exterior surface and inside the coat below the lower edge of the lining and the later addition of a decorative fabric facing and covering for the collar indicate that it had several contexts of wear, both at the bayside and back in England. It has been worn indoors and habitually, as banyans typically were. One can imagine it being worn in the cold interior of a trading post for a long winter or two, surrounded by other men wearing similar hide coats: as early as 1743, James Isham wrote that hide coats had become the usual dress of Englishmen at the bayside posts.38 They were worn within a context of kinship and close collegiality both with the Cree and Metis families and colleagues who made them and with other fur trade personnel as a badge of shared professional identity; Peter Rindisbacher’s image of Indigenous people, fur trade personnel, and European settlers in Red River in 1821 shows a hide coat worn in this context (see figure 2.7). Like the cloth banyans worn by East India Company veterans for their portraits in England, the hide banyan and the quilled coats have more than a whiff of the exotic in their cut, materials, and decorative aesthetic.39 Their materials and bold visual and textural “middle ground” aesthetic, marked by the free borrowing of shape and decoration across cultural boundaries, visually distinguished hide coats from ordinary British men’s wear.40 Moving around the world as sailors, traders, explorers, and settlers, British men often adopted locally suited fabrics and garments, but wearing these flamboyant coats must at first have felt transgressive, perhaps somewhat ludic. Such coats were common in fur trade society, however, and when worn in that context created a strong visual and material language of occupational community. As Sophie White has noted for European men of colonial Louisiana, because they could take their coats off and return to European garments, their wearing of Native clothing during sojourns in-country was “a practice that allowed them temporarily to belong to the hinterlands, and to defuse anxieties about venturing into alien territory.”41 Wearing hide coats in Rupert’s Land enabled men to demonstrate a local identity that helped them to function within fur trade society. In Rupert’s Land, clothing was also central to the construction of racial and class-based identities. The governor and the most elite male officers of the hbc wore cloth frock coats and greatcoats imported from England; hide coats became a marker of middle-ranking hbc and Métis identity,

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2.7 Peter Rindisbacher, Winter Fishing on Ice of Assynoibain & Red River, watercolour, 1821. A man wearing a quilled hide coat is depicted in the group of figures in the left foreground. Library and Archives Canada, 1988-250-31.

whereas the blanket-cloth capot was a uniform for lower-class voyageurs and labourers.42 That men’s coats articulated status, power, class, and identity had much to do with what happened to them when they were taken (or sent) to Britain. The crates of “curiosities” shipped back to England by Governor Nicholas Garry in 1821 included two hide coats “with Porcupine Epaulets and trimmed with Otter skin.”43 Such coats arrived in a world governed by strict social codes that policed the boundaries of class, race, and status “at home” as much as in “the colonies.”44 Racial and cultural mixing was a central source of anxiety in colonial societies, and clothing was used as a key form of identity policing regarding this concern. On return to Britain, men were expected to don conventional attire again. To wear a hide coat publicly would have conveyed not only disrespect for society and its conventions but also that one had “gone Native.” These beautiful hide coats could not be worn in their new settings.

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This circumstance explains why many of the extant hide coats appear pristine today: commissioned as souvenirs of a young man’s adventure in the symbolic space of the wilderness, they could not be integrated into the symbolic domestic spaces of British society. The still-vivid colours of the quillwork suggest that some coats were packed away in trunks when they arrived in Britain and never came out of those trunks, being kept as material memories but not worn. The sibling coats at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum have seldom, if ever, been worn; the quillwork is not broken at the elbows where movement would have damaged it. Other coats were transferred to the safely confining spaces of museum collections, where they became representative specimens of Indigenous cultures – a classificatory process that distanced the coats from British men and their links with fur trade society. The shifting of such items away from the lived spaces of personal memory and into trunks, attics, and museums may be understood as part of a larger process of collective disavowal and amnesia regarding the roles of British men in processes of imperialism and colonialism.45 Reflecting family experiences abroad during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, domestic interiors, particularly masculine spaces such as men’s studies and libraries but also to a certain extent feminized spaces such as withdrawing rooms and parlours, functioned as safely confining spaces within which many exotic souvenirs were displayed. We have no evidence that hide coats were displayed within family cabinets of curiosity in these spaces. Smaller items were frequently kept in cabinets or displayed on tables as references to worldliness, the excitement of travel, and personal knowledge of other cultures and remote places. Such displays were opportunities to narrate experiences to guests and family members and to construct the self in this tension between exotic and domestic.46 Because of their size, hide coats were unlikely to have been displayed this way. There were only a few ways that these coats could actually be used in Britain, and these uses were symbolic rather than practical. One was their use for portraits, and the other was their use as fancy dress. Quilled hide coats were sometimes worn for portraits, as were cloth banyans, Indian clothing, and other “exotic” dress.47 William Cobbold Woodthorpe, who worked for the hbc in the 1820s, brought home a coat and was painted in it (see figures 2.8 and 2.9).48 As Tara Mayer observes, portraits in which British sitters wore non-European clothing were forms of selfpromotion, being performances for other British viewers of similar class and professional backgrounds that highlighted the adventures, physical

2.8 Opposite Quilled hide coat collected by William Cobbold Woodthorpe about 1830. Donated by Mrs Barry, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1934.151. 2.9 Above John Bolton Woodthorpe, William Cobbold Woodthorpe, oils on panel, c. 1815. William is wearing a quilled hide coat. Private collection. Image courtesy Finch and Co., London.

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survival, and worldliness of the sitters.49 Such portraits were intended and interpreted in different ways, including as memories of time among foreign peoples, as badges of identity that asserted the sitter’s competence in strange environments by showing him dressed in the exotic “uniform” of his profession, and as claims of British cultural and racial superiority, even in a relatively humble portrait such as Woodthorpe’s. All of these portraits gain visual power from their symbols of exoticism and difference, displayed within the ordinary space of the home. They remind us, as Sophie White notes, that “material culture did not simply reflect difference. It also helped to produce it.”50 The perception of difference structured British relationships with cultural others and fuelled colonialism in all its guises. In this way, the genre of the exotic costume portrait was linked to the second kind of use that such garments experienced after being transported to Britain: as fancy dress. The exuberant facing on the banyan, its overlay of carefully painted original decorations, and its crude stitching signal its reuse in this way (see figure 2.4). Generations of children grew up playing with grandfather’s “Red Indian” things. Many families had dress-up trunks that included exotic clothing brought back by relatives from far-flung parts of the British Empire. Used over generations, these items developed a timelessness that linked them to stereotypes of the exotic and embedded family adventures within this process of othering. The donor of the Woodthorpe coat, which is now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, remembered it as one of the “indian things in which we had all dressed up as children.”51 “Exotic” garments, including Indian clothing and presumably hide coats, were also worn at fancy dress balls and in plays. Beth Fowkes Tobin claims that “appropriation, exoticization, and decontextualization” were employed in strategies of asserting control over colonial subjects through the use of non-Western material culture in portraits and that parallel processes were at work in the cross-cultural translations of powerful objects into children’s playthings or fanciful costumes.52 Invoking a tamed and controlled version of the “other” by dressing up in “Red Indian” clothes is also part of the “range of practices in which racisms were produced,”53 as well as part of the way that “[i]mperial power was asserted, redeployed, and negotiated in what seem to be relatively benign, even mundane” practices in metropolitan centres.54 Like the collective forgetting of makers’ names, the replacement of the coats’ Indigenous meanings with stereotyped ones was part of the settler colonial desire to replace Indigenous peoples altogether.

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conclusion These two coats have had extraordinary trajectories involving global fashions hybridized in Asia, adapted in Britain, taken to North America through the involvement of multinational corporations, reinvented in hide and porcupine quills, entangled in Indigenous cosmology and aesthetics through cross-racial intermarriage, and reinterpreted again after transport to Britain in ways that distanced collectors from the taint of transgressive relationships by turning these relations into personal and national forms of power. Hide coats make materially manifest the technological and social complexities of colonialism and the global flows of objects, ideas, and people across the early modern period. As well as highlighting the creative stimulation of such flows and the use of new forms as a means of positioning peoples within shifts of power, the coats remind us of the intimate aspects of colonialism – both in Rupert’s Land and in Britain – through which racism and political distance developed.55 These garments, however, are powerful enough to escape such ideological and political journeys and reinterpretations and powerful enough to escape the attic trunks and museum storage and display spaces in which hide coats have been confined in Britain. As Ruth Phillips discusses, key shifts in curatorial research and museum praxis have led to “re-placing” items such as hide coats within ongoing cultural traditions and working with descendants of makers and their communities to understand them from Indigenous perspectives, including both what the items meant to people in the past and what they mean to people in the present.56 During the sessions of the Object Lives research team at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars came together to understand the material forms of the coats and to think about their meanings across time and about their relevance today. In doing so, we began to see that these focuses are deeply linked: careful research on historic material forms is important for the reclamation of such forms by Indigenous communities in the present. Detailed photographs of the construction and decorative elements of the coats, research on their provenance, and our comparative research on other hide coats can provide a basis for their renewal by specific communities. We thought of the coats primarily as forms of Indigenous material culture and heritage; their postcollection meanings and forms of consumption in Britain were discussed but not highlighted during these discussions. The coats slipped out of their imposed meanings within British

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intellectual histories and back into their identities as Indigenous heritage. If historical processes of hybridity were political within broader contexts of colonialism, so are studies of hybridity today, including the realization that such reclamations of material forms repudiate assigned colonial meanings and privilege Indigenous ones.57 Nancy Wachowich has observed that “the making of skin garments generates social relationships between family members and with people’s cultural past, present and future.”58 As part of our research, we created, tested, and refined a sewing pattern for the banyan that has now been sent to clothing historians for further research and to Indigenous seamstresses – including Sherry Farrell Racette, whose seminal work on hide coats we build upon in this chapter. It is our hope that at the right time and in the right ways, the making of hide coats might be revived within Indigenous communities. Such work might support conversations in the present about histories of intermarriage, about complex histories and identities, about women’s skills and industry, and about the role of heritage in the present and future, creating more openings into “the métis space of new opportunities.”

acknowledgments This chapter builds on long-term research by Dr Sherry Farrell Racette of the University of Regina; I thank Dr Farrell Racette for sharing many insights on hide coats over the years. It also builds on collaborative work by the team of the Object Lives project, whose combined insights into cross-cultural objects and earlier drafts of the chapter have been intellectually stimulating. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the conference “Colonial Objects and Social Identity in the 17th–Early 20th Century: An Interdisciplinary Seminar,” National Museum of Denmark, 20–23 September 2016.

notes 1 Peers, “Material Culture”; Jasanoff, Edge of Empire; Finn, “Colonial Gifts”; Hall and Rose, “Introduction.” 2 I use the term “Metis” to designate persons of varied European and Indigenous heritage, whereas the term “Métis” refers to members of the Métis Nation originating in the Red River area. 3 Seremetakis, Senses Still, 133, discussing Weiner and Schneider, Cloth and Human Experience. 4 Hendrickson, “Introduction,” 14. 5 Phillips, “Dress and Address,” 135.

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6 Dean and Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents,” 6. 7 Brown, Strangers in Blood, 52, citing Rich, ed., Copy Book of Letters, 40–1. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, also explores fur trade marriage patterns and their changes across time. 8 Cynthia Cooper, curator, Costume and Textiles, McCord Museum, personal communication with author, May 2017. 9 Burnham, To Please the Caribou, 13. 10 See the record for the hide coat at the British Museum, Am1954,05.965, http://www. britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=52 6467&partId=1&searchText=coat+north+america&page=1. 11 See the record for the hide coat at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1951.2.19, http://objects.prm. ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID5185.html; and Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 128. Martin Schultz, Sarah Carter, and I have researched the Lampson brothers as possible collectors. 12 Thunder, “Object in Focus.” 13 York Factory, Grand Journal, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, A 15/1, A 15/2. 14 Thomas, “Case of the Misplaced Ponchos,” 6. See also Küchler and Were, “Introduction,” xix. 15 Hendrickson, “Introduction,” 2–3. 16 For a description of the use of coats in these rituals, see Penney, “Captains Coats,” 86. 17 Rich, ed., Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 292–3, cited in Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 68. 18 See York Factory accounts, 1689–90, fol. 2, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, B.239/d/2. 19 Williams, Hudson’s Bay Miscellany, 67, cited in Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 68. 20 For a review of the ethnographic and linguistic evidence for animacy and personhood, as well as concepts of human-animal relations, see Matthews, Naamiwan’s Drum, chs 3 and 5. 21 Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 286–8; Thompson, Women’s Work, 38. 22 Burnham, To Please the Caribou, 3. 23 Baillargeon, “Hide Tanning,” 143. 24 Farrell Racette, “Connecting Sources.” 25 Farrell Racette explains that “cutting against the grain produces garments that twist or stretch. Ideally the garments should be cut along the length of the hide” (ibid.). For traditional neck and shoulder construction on Indigenous garments, see the exquisite miniature clothing on a pair of Cree dolls at the Cuming Museum, C02338. See also Oberholtzer, “All Dolled Up.” I am grateful to the late Cath Oberholtzer for drawing my attention to the significance of these dolls. 26 Fort Churchill post journal, 1804–05, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, B.42/a/130, cited in Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 220.

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27 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 68. 28 I draw on Cara Krmpotich’s use of Janet Carsten’s work on memory-making processes as central to identity. See Krmpotich, “Remembering and Repatriation,” 172, citing Carsten, “‘Knowing Where,’” 696. 29 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 86. 30 Thomas, “Case of the Misplaced Ponchos,” 5. 31 Farrell Racette, “My Grandmothers,” 72; Farrell Racette, “Connecting Sources.” The items are at the Hancock Museum, University of Newcastle-on-Tyne. 32 Ghosh, “Decoding the Nameless,” 302. 33 Auslander et al., “ahr Conversation,” 1372. 34 Phillips, “Dress and Address,” 135. 35 Reverend John Smithurst Journal, 1 August 1843 to 1 March 1844, Red River Settlement, 19 February 1844, Church Mission Society, reel A78. 36 DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 82–124. 37 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 3. 38 Cited in Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 69. 39 Mayer, “Cultural Cross-Dressing.” 40 White, Middle Ground. 41 White, Wild Frenchmen, 19. On British men adopting local garments, see also Lemire, “Question of Trousers.” 42 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 69. Farrell Racette’s compilation of evidence for clothing worn by voyageurs and other labouring men in the fur trade demonstrates this group identity function of clothing for capotes. I take my argument for hide coats being worn by a higher-status group from collectors’ names. 43 Garry, Diary of Nicholas Garry, 137, cited in Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 69. 44 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 13–14. Ann Laura Stoler explores this concept of racial anxiety and membership policing for colonial situations. 45 For instance, see Edwards, “Addressing Colonial Narratives.” Locking objects away and selective silence are also discussed in memory studies literature; see Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, “Unpacking the Unspoken”; and Kidron, “Toward an Ethnography of Silence.” 46 Smith, “Empire and the Country House,” note 57, citing Stewart, On Longing, regarding souvenirs. Mayer, “Cultural Cross-Dressing,” 286, notes that “[s]ouvenirs of Eastern travels and experiences were … esteemed for their ability to lend status to their possessor.” 47 Peter Rindisbacher, Winter Fishing on Ice of Assynoibain & Red River, Library and Archives Canada, 1988-250-31; Peter Rindisbacher, An Eskimo Family, Drawn from Nature in December, Library and Archives Canada, 1988-250-12. In addition to the Woodthorpe portrait, there are paintings of men wearing hide coats in Rindisbacher’s work; and a later portrait

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of Giacomo Beltrami done by Gian Antonio Micheli in about 1931 accurately depicts a quilled hide coat; see Minnesota Historical Society, av1983.149.24. 48 Donor letter regarding Woodthorpe coat, 1934, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1934.151, cited in Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 289n23. 49 Mayer, “Cultural Cross-Dressing,” 297. 50 White, Wild Frenchmen, 2. 51 Donor letter regarding Woodthorpe coat, 1934, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1934.151, cited in Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 289n23. 52 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 82. 53 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 13. 54 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 2. 55 See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 6. 56 Phillips, “Re-Placing Objects.” 57 Dean and Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents,” 24. 58 Wachowich, “Stitching Lives,” 128.

3 “A Typical Canadian Outfit” The Red River Coat cynthia cooper

As soon as the cold weather set in, my mother got out my Red River coat for me to try on. These coats were the winter costume of Quebec children. They were made of navy blue melton with red flannel lining, red trimmed epaulets, a narrow red stripe down the side seams and a navy blue Capuchin hood, lined with red. With the coat we wore red woollen leggings, red mitts, and a red sash and toque, which lent the costume a dashing habitant air.1

In this passage from Girl in a Red River Coat, author Mary Peate invokes a well-loved garment to emblematize her childhood experience. Entangling her own social identity as a child in depression-era Montreal with an aestheticizing reference to a rustic ethnic identity from Canada’s past, she speaks to nebulous historical and geographical associations that consistently accompany vivid recollections of those who wore these coats. Such memories are often also tactile, bringing to mind the wide cuffs of the mitts worn pulled up over the sleeves; the chunks of icy snow clinging to the wool knit accessories, which eventually matted with wear; and the weight and smell of that wool when wet.2 Many also recall its ubiquity in school cloakrooms. In Peate’s words, “because this outfit was worn by almost every kid in the school, we were always getting our toques, sashes and mitts mixed up with someone else’s.”3 By all accounts, memories of the Red River coat are very potent.

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3.1 William Notman and Son, Missie Tatlow, Montreal, 1891. McCord Museum, II-96705.1.

Although the Red River coat was once a quasi uniform of childhood not just in Quebec but also in other locations across Canada, today we know far more about it through memories than extant examples. The McCord Museum’s Costume and Textiles collection contains only five such coats, dating from the 1950s through the 1970s, all very well worn except for the one of most recent date. If the coats are underrepresented in museum collections in locations where they were once common, that is because they were quite simply worn out. The lack of surviving garments, counterbalanced by a

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prevalence of extant Red River dolls and doll clothes, points to their formerly common status in wardrobes. Mary Peate situated the Red River coat fashion in her childhood of the 1930s, a few decades earlier than the extant coats, but the outfit in fact has a much longer history, bearing this name for over a full century beginning in the 1860s. Such longevity for a fashion garment is exceptional, and even more extraordinary is its fossilization of an earlier prototype current in North America since the seventeenth century. The coat of course warrants investigation not only for its endurance as an iconic childhood fashion specific to Canada but also for its ongoing self-conscious linkages both to a culture of the past and to a particular Canadian identity. To date, no scholarship has looked at the noteworthy variation on the theme of transcultural borrowing found in the Red River coat; in fact, its history has been no more than summarily traced.4 This chapter looks at the complex process in which the coat evolved from its earlier form, the capot, into a child’s garment and came to be named after the Red River area, along with the broad implications of its naming, marketing, and wearing. It brings the history of a garment that was once defined as being particularly Canadian and formerly Indigenous into closer conversation with wide-ranging frameworks, particularly those of the critical turn in the study of heritage. Heritage has most recently come to be defined as an “act of remembering that works to create ways to understand and engage with the present,”5 a definition that acknowledges its nature as a process undertaken through experiences and performances of remembering in which collective memories are aligned with authorized discourses. Heritage evolves to serve the changing needs of the present, which often relate to nation building and to creating a sense of national belonging. Recent critical conceptions of national identity and belonging find these constructs embedded in everyday practices, where dress cultures of course play a part.6 I situate this coat as a worn form of heritage, one rehearsed on the bodies of children. Although not guided by any overtly political or sanctioned agendas, the heritage and identities performed by the Red River coat were far from innocuous or benign. Rather, they illustrate the capacity of retail, advertising, and consumption practices and the use of everyday material objects to legitimize memory and meaning in Canada’s ongoing erasure of the historically inconvenient in favour of the creation of symbols that celebrate core myths of its past and its distinct identity.

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the cap ot, cap ote, or capeaux The Red River coat’s ancestor, the capot, capote, or occasionally capeaux, was initially a type of greatcoat or outerwear garment with a hood, as evidenced in the etymology of its name, the Latin “caput,” signifying “head.” Early French dictionary entries for the term also confirm the hood as its distinguishing feature.7 The coat under discussion should not be confused with a hide garment sometimes referred to by the Red River name, although its pedigree would certainly imply greater right to the designation.8 The capot was worn in Europe from the late sixteenth century onward, probably first by French sailors. Records suggest that from the early seventeenth century, it was quickly borrowed by French settlers in North America as a practical solution to climatic conditions for which they had little appropriate clothing and was then traded with Indigenous peoples. The very early trade in capots and the blanketing textiles from which they were made led to their gradually acquired associations with Indigeneity and hybrid status.9 Valued for its warmth and suitability to the rigours of the climate, the capot spread over the course of the century from Acadia through the Saint Lawrence Valley, the Great Lakes, Louisiana, Hudson Bay, and in fact to all corners of the continent.10 By the eighteenth century, if not earlier, it had become common military and labouring men’s wear and was particularly favoured by rural men and lower-level fur trade personnel, especially voyageurs (see figure 3.2).11 Capots made from blankets have a long history. In fact, capots de couvertes were recorded in a Montreal store inventory of 1693. Descriptions of these coats make particular reference to the way that the blanket stripes were placed parallel to the hemline.12 By the first half of the nineteenth century, white blankets with a blue stripe, which had the advantage of offering camouflage in a snowy environment, constituted the most popular capot fabric.13 Although by that time these coats were known throughout North America, the greatest volume of manufactured capots appears to have been shipped to the trading territories of the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies.14 The rapidly developing clothing industry in Britain made it cheaper for the company to import ready-made garments than to continue to employ tailors on site.15 The colour range of trade capots at certain times may have had to do with the respective costs of fabric types, indicative of a status hierarchy of different types of outerwear. For instance, one study of the North West Company’s records for Grand Portage shows that in 1797 a blue broadcloth capot

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3.2 Habillemens des coureurs de bois canadiens, no. 2, c. 1730. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

cost merchants almost double the price of a white molton blanket capot; and among goods distributed by a fur trade company to its employees, highquality and some medium-status outfits included blue capots, whereas those of lesser status were more likely to include grey.16 Blue and grey capots of stroud, melton, and blanketing appeared in large quantities in shop inventories to the very end of the nineteenth century.17 Two distinct approaches to fitting the garment coexisted. In 1807 Christian Schultz described how these approaches were divided along ethnic lines. “A pair of mockasons [sic] and a blanket seems equally common to both [French and Indigenous], except that the former will cut his into the shape of a coat, whereas the latter always prefers his loose.”18 In fact, both of these variations, rooted in broader cultural approaches to garment construction, had long traditions. As of the mid-seventeenth century, capots in New France were cut along the lines of the justaucorps, incorporating European garment styling and techniques of cutting and fitting.19 A source from 1677 described

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Aboriginal people tearing their blanketing yardage into coating lengths and adding holes for the arms.20 The integral use of striped blankets in T-shaped garments cut only to create pieces for sleeves and hoods is noted in a few rare extant examples, as well as in images of those worn by Blackfoot people in western Canada from the mid-nineteenth century onward.21 Aside from the cut of the tailored capot, other features that were retained in the children’s Red River coat had equally long histories. Welting – the insertion of a narrow strip of fabric within the seams – is documented as early as 1668 in the capots that served as uniforms for students at the Petit séminaire du Québec.22 This treatment ostensibly added an additional layer to reinforce and strengthen a seam that might otherwise tear through the fabric. Often it consisted of a single layer of fabric, sometimes pinked; later the strip may instead have been folded on itself, sometimes encasing a narrow cord, in which case it may be referred to as piping.23 Whether seamed and fitted or left loose in the back, capots were always worn with their fronts overlapped and belted at the waistline with a sash, perhaps a ceinture fléchée. Other aspects of their closures followed general changes in fashion. A single button on the right shoulder and corresponding buttonhole on the left flap have been noted on some of the earliest illustrations of the garment,24 although seventeenth-century trade capots may have been without buttons, relying entirely on the sash for closure.25 A doublebreasted button closure was likely not the most common treatment until the early nineteenth century.26 Shoulder decorations were known on capots by the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Sometimes called epaulets, they were technically “shoulder wings” that covered the sleeve head. A decorative feature in men’s doublets in the seventeenth century, wings became a feature of the military uniforms of British grenadiers and of the light regiments first formed for active service in North America during the Seven Years War.27 Cross-cultural exchanges of dress are well documented in this theatre, where British soldiers fought both alongside and against Indigenous people.28 On military garments, wings were a focus for embellishment, often featuring applied lace. A staple of military sartorial vocabulary, lace appealed to Indigenous wearers, as evidenced in its documented presence on capots, “match coats,” and other trade coats in the eighteenth century. Wings may well have been an extension of this borrowing of decorative elements from the visual language of military dress, and by the nineteenth century, they had found their way onto all extant iterations of the capot, some of which feature blanketing fabric slashed into fringe,

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others embroidery and tufted hair fringe, and still others superimposed layers of fabric in contrasting colours with pinked edges (see figures S2.1 to S2.4 and 4.1 to 4.2).

re d r iver a nd the ca p ot The capot was by no means unique to the Red River area, yet the naming of the children’s coat begs an investigation of the particular associations that it developed there. At the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in an area corresponding roughly to present-day Winnipeg that had long been home to peoples of Indigenous and mixed ancestry, Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, established a contingent of Scottish settlers in 1812. The settlement served the fur trade interests first of the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) and by 1821 of the newly merged hbc and North West Companies (see map 2).29 The settlement’s population of fur trade employees and retirees was ethnically diverse and complex. Red River Métis people encompassed a spectrum of identities, drawn from a variety of Indigenous backgrounds and European cultures, including Scottish, English, and French, as well as from the Protestant and Catholic faiths. Although Métis identity formation was ongoing throughout the history of the settlement, as Laura Peers describes in the previous chapter, Métis people were increasingly subject to racialized discrimination from elite white men in Red River as new ideas about European capitalist society, race, and progress were introduced. This discrimination led to the gravitation by some – largely children of elite anglophone fur trade officers and Indigenous women – toward an acculturated European ideal. Such acculturation was not uniform, however, with a vibrant, distinct, and confident new Métis culture emerging in Red River in which Indigenous heritage was embraced and Cree became a lingua franca.30 Métis culture emerged in “interactive zones.” Dress was notable for a distinct style created by combining Indigenous craft traditions and European materials and goods, like capots, available through the trading post stores.31 Next to shirts, capots were the item most frequently purchased from hbc posts. Although available to settlers of all origins, blue capots were most favoured by Catholic, predominantly French, Métis.32 The garment’s distinctive ethnic associations became increasingly entrenched over the early and mid-nineteenth century; narratives by contemporaries describing actors in the fur trade leave little doubt that the blue capot was widely understood as a marker of a Métis trader identity that reflected a rising conception of the

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Métis voyageur as a stereotyped folk hero of the fur trade, a courageous yet wild, half-civilized “other” who was not only an exemplar of “bush masculinity” rooted in his physical endurance and strength but also a lover of gaudy finery and thus renowned for a colourful visual image (see figure 3.3).33 William Keating described the dress of twenty men of mixed European and Indigenous extraction, whom he referred to as “Bois-brulés,” returning to Pembina, North Dakota, from a bison-hunting expedition in 1824: “Their dress is singular, but not deficient in beauty; it is a mixture of the European and Indian habits. All of them have a blue capote with a hood, which they use only in bad weather; the capote is secured round their waist by a military sash. They wear a shirt of calico or painted muslin, moccassins [sic] and leather leggings fastened round the leg by garters ornamented with beads, &c. The Bois-brulés often dispense with a hat; when they have one, it is generally variegated in the Indian manner, with feathers, gilt lace, and other tawdry ornaments.”34 An 1859 entry in the journal of James Carnegie, 9th Earl of Southesk, on his travels from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to the Red River area mentioned a fellow traveller “dressed in Red River style – a blue cloth capot.” Later in the same account, he stated, “They have one almost inevitable type of dress … capots of dark blue … [T]he only relief to this monotony is given by a scarlet, crimson, or variegated scarf round the waist.”35 The similarities with observations made in 1860 are striking: “Their coats are of the Canadian pattern, with large

3.3 George Seton, Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land, 1857, watercolour. Library and Archives Canada, C-001075.

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brass buttons, and a hood hanging between the shoulders … [A] gay sash is always worn round the waist, the bright tassels hanging down the left hip.”36 Two mid-nineteenth-century photographic images of Métis men, whose identities are known, show very similar dark capots with brass buttons.37 That the blue capot functioned as a racializing garment is implied in the remarks of fur trader Alexander Ross, who equated its use by Scots in the area with cross-cultural dressing: “They often imitate the French … The blue capote and red belt, so peculiar to those of French origin in this quarter, have become favourite articles of dress among the rising generation.”38 The coat’s wide availability in the area was a response to a market created by particular circumstances of geography and climate, bolstered by Britain’s manufacturing capacity in the formative years of the Industrial Revolution. Although the garment offered relatively little choice in style, quality, or colour, it served to transform the territories where it was sold by acquiring status as a cultural identifier that suggested Indigenous agency, a symbolic status conferred by a particular pride in the wearing.39 By the second half of the nineteenth century, this very baggage of a uniform associated with rough occupations was undoubtedly pivotal to its developing a following in more gentrified contexts. As the emerging organized winter sports of snowshoeing and tobogganing subsumed “bush masculinity” into “gentry masculinities,”40 the blanket capot was adopted first as the most appropriate form of dress and eventually as a prescribed uniform for these activities.41 The cultural baggage of these sports has been well investigated within settler performances of taming the land and an emerging Canadian identity.42 As Beverly Lemire demonstrates in chapter 4 of this volume, they also addressed broader discourses of race and empire. With nation-building narratives predicated on the insistent repetition of a link between national identity and a specific climate, geography, and character, along with specific sports,43 unique winter dress became embedded within the foundational myth of the new nation. Domesticated and embraced by settler communities as the dress of a folk culture following contemporary European currents of romantic nationalism, the blanket coat, as it came to be known, provided a means by which the winter competencies of Nor’westers and Indigenous people could be claimed for a broader swath of the settler population. Women feminized the outerwear genre to cover their long skirts, and children donned smaller versions of the adult attire. In the rich visual culture of Canadian winter sports, blanket-clad settler Canadians performed the fitness for winter associated with Anglo-Saxon dominance.44 As a new self-consciousness

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3.4 William Notman, Young Canada, Montreal, 1867. McCord Museum, I-24434.

emerged about Canada’s self-presentation beyond its borders, the blanketcoated figure, particularly women and children as longstanding bearers of national symbols, took on a status akin to an allegory (see figure 3.4).45 Meanwhile, in the Red River territory, where the coat still functioned as a racializing and normalizing marker of ethnicity and occupation, the capot’s agencies became political as Métis identity became politicized. In 1869 and 1870 Canadians east of the new province of Manitoba learned of the Red River Resistance through first-hand accounts in the popular press. The rise of the Canadian illustrated press coincided roughly with the Confederation project, giving it a particular potency. As the press assumed its powers of representing Canada’s constituent peoples, it was instrumental in constructing ideological frameworks and identities for the new nation. Its visual culture, romanticized and disturbing, thus contributed to shaping settler reaction to the events in the Red River Settlement.46 In the public imagination, it became a place where Métis peoples resisted the westward expansion of Canada. This

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threat had to be dispersed to favour the growth of the Dominion, whose annexation of the North West immediately linked Canada to expanding territories and markets while ultimately aiding the progress of the British Empire.47 Over the next few years, the capot figured in images in the mainstream Canadian press that constructed and demonized a Métis archetype. Whereas an 1870 depiction of the controversial execution of Thomas Scott published in the Canadian Illustrated News did not use the visual device of the hooded coat to distinguish Métis people in the group, an illustration of the same event created in or before 1874 did.48 Caricatures of Louis Riel dealing with his election and appearance in Ottawa in 1873 and 1874 depict him in the familiar dark hooded coat with epaulets and sash, evidence that the garment had become a visual marker of both ethnic origins and political ideology (see figure 3.5). A portrait photograph of Louis Riel’s brothers Charles and Joseph also shows how dress became a more self-conscious symbol of the Métis culture and cause as it coalesced (see figure 3.6). In a portrait dated to circa 1871, both appear in trousers, shirts, and neckties, standard attire in such an image, but also in garments that were more markers of ethnicity than fashion: capots, ceintures fléchées, and moccasins. Their choice of garb suggests a staged expression of Métis pride at a pivotal moment in its history. If the capot’s symbolic associations were by this time fixed in the popular imagination, there is little doubt that as a functional garment it was rapidly disappearing, along with the fur and bison robe trades. Yet the residual symbolic significance bears witness to the material extension of “the enduring power of visual reifications to inhabit [our] consciousness … long after the historical contexts of their original production have faded from memory.”49 In the context of dispossession of their traditional territories in present-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, and North Dakota, for the Blackfoot and Blackfeet Nations, the capot’s social significance as a ceremonial garment would increase even as its role as a trade garment went into decline. Its familiar form would continue as a symbol of passive resistance to colonial assimilation throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.50 In settler contexts, the blanket coat would last as long, disappearing only with the demise of organized snowshoeing and tobogganing.51 Conversely, miniaturized and named a “Red River coat,” and worn by children throughout Canada for another full century, the capot would become a seemingly benign mechanism for the selective remembering and forgetting of the North West. Fostering a casual erasure of Métis history, it would be recast as a wearable legitimization of Canadian colonial identity.

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3.5 John Wilson Bengough, “The Science of Cheek, or Riel’s Next Move,” Grip, 11 April 1874. McCord Museum, M994X.5.273.101.

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3.6 Ryder Larsen, Charles and Joseph Riel, c. 1871. Library and Archives Canada, pa-139075.

a coat for the canadian child By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, miniature versions of the adult blanket coats associated with snowshoeing and tobogganing were well known as children’s outerwear (see figure 3.1). Innumerable sources, visual and textual, provide glimpses of the popularity of the blue variety of the capot that would become known as the Red River coat, occasionally also worn by adults. Lady Dufferin described her children’s winter outfits on 17 November 1872: “You should see them all five in blanket coats, which are made of thick blue cloth, with red epaulets and sashes, and pointed hoods lined and piped in red. The coats are very long and straight, and the little figures in them look both funny and picturesque.”52 Her amusement captures the irony of the miniaturized adult dress form.

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If the red-trimmed blue coat was itself widespread for children, the name “Red River coat” was initially not. The earliest instance of a garment described by that name appeared in an 1862 advertisement in a Toronto newspaper.53 That there are relatively few mentions of the coat in ads for men’s outfitters in Toronto in the 1860s and 1870s raises a number of questions. Were these coats ever only for boys, as first specifically advertised in 1872?54 Were they imported coats of the type typically sent to the Red River area that had been redirected to an alternate location for sale? Or had the name “Red River” come to reference a style, with the expected understanding of its Toronto audience? Even if the rationale for the coat’s naming in the 1870s remained unchanged from the previous decade, given the recent turn in the socio-political geography of Canada, the allusion to formerly contested colonial terrain draws attention to the claiming of the Red River area for the new Dominion in commercial spheres. By 1898, when illustrations of the coat began to accompany descriptions in the T. Eaton Company’s mail order catalogue, they made clear the nexus of name and form, as well as target market. Initially, the coats shown in the illustrations were for boys only, with the first ad for girls’ Red River coats appearing in 1906. “We never had them till this season, now everybody wants them,” Eaton’s stated, describing four different styles in three fabrics.55 By the late 1910s, girls’ coats would come to dominate the advertising, after which coats were identified as for boys only very infrequently, although they continued to be made with closures on the expected side into the early 1950s (see figure 3.7).56 The coats were soon offered in both small and larger children’s size ranges, sometimes denoted by length or chest measurement in inches or by age for children anywhere from two to fourteen years. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Eaton’s, like the Robert Simpson Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Henry Morgan and Company, along with several other significant but smaller department stores and mail order businesses, would make the coat widely available, both in their catalogues and in their copious advertising in daily papers. Toronto-based Simpson’s ran the same ad for a boy’s Red River coat in Saint John and Winnipeg in 1905.57 Montrealbased Goodwin’s wanted “every home in Canada” to know it was prepared to ship the girl’s version featured in its fall-winter 1911 catalogue for free.58 Ads for Woodward’s in Vancouver and Prowse Brothers in Charlottetown around the same time show that it was carried in stores at either end of the country as well.59 In line with their self-accorded mission of democratizing their

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3.7 Louis Jaques, Playsuit with a History, 12 January 1952. Library and Archives Canada, Weekend Magazine Collection, e005477011.

consumer goods, the large department stores frequently alluded to the coat’s popularity and kept the cost of a Red River coat to the lower-middle end of the price range of similar offerings. By the early 1910s, when other smaller retailers in Canadian cities also advertised the coat, they offered it at a similar price, aware that department stores with their large market share were continuing to expand their reach across the country.60 Only as of the 1960s, when the coat was occasionally promoted at Holt Renfrew and a few other stores, might it have been among costlier alternatives. Over the seven decades when advertising illustrated Red River coats, they were never allowed to look unfashionable even as key features were fossilized and retained. Manufacturers continued to update cut, silhouette, length, and

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lining materials; children were drawn in the graphic style of the moment with up-to-date hairstyles. Advertisers nevertheless chose words to inscribe the coat within a narrative of continuity and tradition. Its constancy of form begged justification, achieved through cursory descriptions of colours and materials, weight and warmth, and an occasional superlative, which all served to build on residual memories of their source. Navy blue was typically the only advertised colour, with a few exceptions primarily in the 1910s.61 Materials were almost always named as blanket cloth and occasionally frieze or chinchilla but also as Mackinaw cloth in the first decade of the century and as melton cloth by the mid-1930s. The fabric was often described as being of good quality and heavy weight and was identified as all-wool, with the occasional mention that it was imported, or English. Perhaps the coat’s most remarked-upon feature was its hood, almost always detachable, and sometimes exoticized when named a capot, capuchon, or capuchin, as inspired by its French designations. The warm lining in both the hood and the coat was usually flannel and invariably red. Red piping was significantly almost always included in descriptions of the garment. Ads that were specific sometimes mentioned it in side, shoulder, or sleeve seams. That it may have been occasionally omitted in cheaper versions is evidenced in a Simpson’s ad from 1929 for two different qualities of coats in which piping is a feature only of the better quality.62 And that it added to the authenticity of the form is supported by Morgan’s statement in 1940 that its coats were “fully piped too as all Capuchon coats should be.”63 Sometimes a blue trim option was also offered, but this variety appears to have been far less popular. From the earliest descriptions, coats advertised for boys often mentioned epaulets or featured them illustrated, whereas girls’ coats did not until the 1920s, perhaps in part explainable by the fashionable fullness at the sleeve head visible in illustrations of the coat into the second decade of the twentieth century. Epaulets on the two identical extant coats from the 1950s are made from a layer of navy fabric superimposed over a layer of red, both with pinked edges, recalling the “wings” on extant white nineteenth-century blanket coats worn by adult snowshoers.64 These vestiges of military embellishment continue to appear in advertising illustrations throughout the 1950s but not into the 1960s; the three later extant coats bear out their absence. Matching accessories, which so many remember for the confusion they caused at recess, were essential to create the desired effect. Some coats came with their own red knit sashes to tie around the waist, sometimes with

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tasselled ends. Later ads often mentioned that sashes and matching toques and mittens could be purchased separately. By 1928, when coats had become quite a bit shorter, scarlet knit overalls or footed leggings were among those accessories listed as for sale. Extant examples have drawstring waists.65 By the early 1940s and through the last ads in the mid-1960s, some coats were being sold with matching slacks, which often included braces, in navy wool with red piping in the side seams. A few ads that began in 1904 and continued through the early 1950s described their coats as “regulation,” referencing the coat’s close relationship to a uniform in both its various past uses and its military look, particularly its piping and brass buttons. They also implied that perceptions of correctness of form or authenticity were becoming confused, suggesting that certain manufacturers were aiming to capture market share by harking back to earlier prototypes that could be described as more authentic. References to “regulation” qualities emphasized varying features, in one case length and in another the hood. Several other ads simply referred to “regulation” cut or style. Although “Red River” was the most common designation throughout the coat’s history, it was not in fact the universal term until the 1940s. Eaton’s catalogues of the 1890s touted coats in the “Red River style” for customers across Canada, and ads in Winnipeg papers began to employ the term around 1908, but several Montreal and Ottawa stores often named them simply blanket coats or overcoats throughout that decade.66 Certain stores used their own nomenclature. Through to the end of the 1930s, Montreal-based Morgan’s often designated the garments as “Capuchon coats” or “Capuchin coats,” although one headline betrayed the confusion: “They Call Them Capuchon – Red River or Snow Coats.”67 Ottawa stores also used these French names but had switched over to the designation Red River by the end of the 1920s, sometimes mentioning a “capuchin hood” in the description. The preference for a French term reinforced the evocation of the coat’s “otherness,” but the advertisements in Montreal and Toronto that heightened its French Canadian mythology for anglophone communities throughout the 1930s and 1940s were redolent of the pervasive infantilization of French Canada.68 In 1934 Simpson’s in Montreal stated that the coat made children look like “leetle habitants,” invoking the rustic characters and dialect verse of William Henry Drummond’s poetry for those who recognized it and the accent of the French population that fairly surrounded Simpson’s urban anglophone clientele (see figure 3.8).69 Toronto’s Northway’s store in 1945 called it “French Canadian habitant fashion.”70

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Although anecdotal evidence suggests that the coat was not as popular among the French-speaking population, advertising in Montreal’s French newspapers was plentiful. Ads for “manteaux Red River” began to appear in the 1930s. The Dupuis department store, catering to a francophone market, had offered it throughout the 1930s as a “manteau à capuchon” but as of 1947 began to call it a “manteau montagnard,” roughly translated as a “mountaineer’s coat,” sidestepping the potential sensitivity of patronizing associations with habitant antecedents. To understand how advertising gradually aligned the coat with values of colonialism and eventually a Canadian identity that conflated the master narrative of the past with consumerism and childhood tradition, it is also useful to look at intangible qualities ascribed to it over time. Strategically chosen persuasive words in no way imply endorsement of purchasers, yet they do constitute building blocks of inscription of meaning on the product. By the beginning of the twentieth century, advertising by Eaton’s and Simpson’s occasionally, but significantly, made claims to the coat’s quintessentially Canadian character, with statements like “the characteristic Canadian coat for children.”71 Insisting on the coat’s exclusivity within the country tied it into broader commercial strategies. Large stores promoted consumption through overarching claims to be fostering progress and national development, thus aligning their messages with British imperial values and English Canadians’ national pride, and they encouraged consumers to see themselves as members of a broader national community served by the same establishments.72 Linkages to the nation’s past were also evoked early on. The historicizing adjective “quaint,” first appearing in an 1897 advertisement,73 acknowledged in a single word that the place and politics that inspired this garment were so antiquated as to be slightly endearing, rendering the coat as a diminutive quasi caricature. A 1902 Simpson’s ad published in Toronto described it as “a genuine Canadian garment any patriotic young Canadian will be proud to wear,” appealing to fervent loyalties in the Queen City.74 Such rhetoric, borrowed from the lexicon of imperialism, aligned the coat with an identity more reminiscent of the Young Canada photographic image in figure 3.4 than with an appropriation of a “quaint” but resistant Métis archetype. It reinscribed the coat as the garb of patriotic Canadians, an allusion that continued to crop up in advertising throughout the rest of the coat’s existence. Advertisers also belaboured the essentializing tropes of Canada’s climate and the hardiness of its youth, sometimes illustrating a child with a toboggan, referencing the settler ethos of dominating the landscape.75 An Eaton’s ad in Toronto in 1932

“A Typical Canadian Outfit” 3.8 “Capuchon Sets for Sturdy Canadian Youngsters,” Simpson’s ad, Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1934. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

claimed that the coat was “[a] vivid bit of Canadiana … [v]ery picturesque in snowy weather,” and a Simpson’s ad in Montreal in 1934 promoted the coat as being “For Sturdy Canadian Youngsters” (see figure 3.8).76 These ads naturalized depictions of Canadian childhood in winter and, perhaps most significantly, promoted national belonging through a consumer product. In Winnipeg, where the old Red River lifestyle had continued to blend with new developments until the turn of the century,77 advertising was more deliberate in referring to the coat’s previous vocations. In historicizing the recent Indigenous past, it pointed to the whiteness of modernity.78 “They dress the little chap with all the picturesqueness of the Canadian voyage[u]r and keep him warm as toast,” Eaton’s stated in 1913.79 Perhaps the most selfconscious yet romantic and imaginative distancing from the coat’s fairly recent political associations was a 1916 advertisement for the same store with the caption “Relic of a Picturesque Period” (see figure 3.9).80 In 1923 the hbc store in Winnipeg described the coat as “typically Western,”81 and in 1947 it trumpeted that the coat had been “a favorite with school girls since Red River days!”82 Fuelling a short burst of popularity after the Second World War, by which time imperial enthusiasm had fizzled, advertisers were quick to broaden the networks of association to encompass new ways that the outfit related to nation.83 The coats were now positioned as authentic to their earlier fashionable iterations as much as to their original forms. “Like folklore the dependable reputation of these coats has been passed on from Mother to daughter,” stated Montreal’s Ogilvy’s store.84 Other qualifiers, such as a “yearin year-out favourite,” “perennially important,” and “traditionally popular and traditionally warm and smart,” suggested that the style offered a certain stability for childhood in a rapidly evolving postwar marketplace.85 Red River

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coats had become iconic of the symbolic object world of a young Canadian at least as much as, if not more than, they stood for a storied past. In 1952, with the coat waning significantly in popularity, a newspaper supplement article, “Playsuit with a History,” showed a self-reflexive recognition of the coat as worthy of historical inquiry (see figure 3.7). Attempting to trace the lineage of the outfit, the author described it as an “authentic Canadian costume” that was “worn with moose-hide moccasins during most of the 19th century by whites and Indians” as well as “early settlers in Quebec, Manitoba and the Northwest.”86 The attribution alludes to the historical myth of peaceful partnership in founding Canada and suggests how the coat encapsulated this vision as a garment born of the fur trade, one that acknowledged the place of the Red River Settlement in uniting the East and the West, French and English colonialists, and Indigenous and settler peoples. A manufacturer who made the coat until the 1960s attributed its disappearance to the embracing of modern technology; few children wanted to wear wool coats when they could have ski jackets and snowmobile suits of more waterproof and windproof synthetic fabrics.87 By 1966 an ad calling the coat “Canadiana for young collectors” implied that it had become a rarefied and nostalgic revival of a consumer product of traditional childhood (see figure 3.10).88 Although advertising for the coat had essentially ceased by this point, one of the extant coats at the McCord Museum dates from the late 1970s, and a former buyer for the Hudson’s Bay Company recalls carrying them into the early 1980s for those grandmothers who felt that their granddaughter’s childhood would not be complete without one, enacting a shared history of national belonging through consumption.89

consumer intent If large Canadian retail establishments were the force that most actively created and deployed meanings around the historicity and tradition of the coat through their advertising, how might their ads actually have been received? Who were their audiences – children as young as the age of two who wore the coats, mothers who acted as family purchasing agents,90 or somehow a still broader swath of the population? Did an ever-increasing and globalizing culture of consumption, modernization, and commoditization of childhood or a desire to embrace Canadian symbols as a bulwark against American cultural domination have an impact on the reception of their messages over time?

“A Typical Canadian Outfit”

3.9 Above “Relic of a Picturesque Period: The Red River Coat,” Eaton’s ad, Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 7 November 1916. University of Manitoba Libraries Digital Collections. I-96705.1.

3.10 Right “Canadiana for Young Collectors: Girls’ Traditional Red River Coats,” Holt Renfrew ad, Montreal Gazette, 20 July 1966. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

These questions direct us to examine consumer intent, which is complex to evaluate. If consumers’ motives are “a jostle of conscious reasons and unconscious forces,” intentionality is that much more difficult to pin down in the case of fashion.91 Clothing acquires meaning quite distinct from the intentions of its producers when it is acquired and worn, the social meaning of fashion being confined to who wears it at the moment, not why.92 Consumption theory cautions against confusion between the meanings of objects and the meanings of acts of consumption, particularly where clothing is concerned.93 Generally speaking, if such distinctions are important with fashion, they are that much more relevant in the case of children wearing fashion. Work on the sailor suit in children’s fashion brings out interesting parallels to the Red River coat but points to the extent that looking at consumer intent

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fails to shed light on the endurance of everyday children’s attire inspired by imperial projects. Sailor dress, a form derived from that of a rough seaborne martial occupation that sustained empire in colonial contests over different terrain, was also miniaturized and kept fashionable through the ongoing reinvention and reinterpretation of its typical features over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, these transformations and its adoption for smaller children and girls have been interpreted as a progressive distancing of the garment from its popular associations with British naval power.94 This interpretation foregrounds how the perceived practicality of children’s clothing forms might naturalize a sartorial vocabulary while deflecting consciousness away from the way that they serve as historical reminders. Undeniably, acts of remembering were inherent in the making, advertising, selling, and wearing of both types of garments. The fossilized style features of Red River coats and sailor suits alike inscribed visual reminders of core myths of a glorified past on the bodies of children in a form both diminutive and infantilized. The Red River coat had a pedigree of sartorial timelessness and unbroken lineage, its affordances predicated on its reminders of both fitness for a rough lifestyle in a challenging climate and Indigenous ingenuity. Furthermore, its naming was a form of representation, indissociable from a Métis community that only a decade before the coat became widespread had been brought under control by a settler colonial power in the Red River Resistance of 1885. If heritage relies on gestures of the collective reshaping and rewriting of history to serve dominant ideologies, the retention of a miniature version of the coat surely was a prime example of this phenomenon – materialized. Its insidiousness lies in a naturalizing ethos, whereby integrating the Red River area into a colonial identity project could occur at the levels of department store advertising, consuming and wearing, and eventually remembering childhood. Such seemingly inconsequential embodied habits and reminders, as well as forms and practices embedded in everyday life, contribute to “banal nationalism,” whose very unreflexive nature makes it a powerful force in shaping national identities.95 With authorized discourses of nationhood and empire providing overarching frameworks for intentional forgetting, a sanitized and simplified sartorial vocabulary gave a practical winter garment agency to do the “work” of heritage. Its former symbolism of belonging to a marginalized ethnic and political cause was silenced and overlaid with the symbolism of belonging to nation as well as to Canadian childhood and a community of Canadian consumers.

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conclusion When Mary Peate’s Red River coat no longer fit, she and her mother returned from a shopping expedition to Eaton’s with another identical one, purchased in mutual agreement.96 Their act of co-consumption is typical of the way that children historically participated in and were integral to the attribution of meaning in the world of goods rather than being at the whim of adult choices.97 When Peate found her mother’s query about whether she wanted something different “an odd question,” she revealed the depth of her assumptions about the coat’s appropriateness to her everyday life experience.98 Like Peate and her mother, generations of Canadian parents and children favoured the form time and again, whether or not they knew quite why. In so doing, they encouraged mass retail, its factories and suppliers, and the rhetoric of its advertisers. Department stores, which promoted their role as agents of the nation’s modernization, perpetuated the coat’s alignment with popular unifying discourses about a particular Canadian history, tradition, and character. Where it has been demonstrated that children’s bodies served as sites through which meanings that served the social order were mediated, negotiated, and inculcated,99 even if children wearing the coat were hardly complicit, they carried the informal social knowledge of the coat as “imperial livery” to a broad audience.100 Derived from a historical unofficial quasi uniform, one that the Métis created apparently by choice from goods made available to them by colonizers, the Red River coat was reappropriated by settler Canadians, making it a chosen uniform of Canadian childhood – particularly, but not exclusively, girlhood. The Red River coat served to remember the fur trade society of the North West, but it did so by erasing discordant Métis and rewriting their French and Indigenous character as constitutive of Canadian colonial identity. The smart navy coat with its red piping and sash and its pointed hood worked to eventually conflate a settler nation-building narrative of belonging to Canada with narratives about the progress offered by consumption and with the sentimentality of traditions of childhood. For a full century, as matted red mittens formed snowballs while tassels bobbed from strings on red tuques, children embodied and performed the heritage of the Canadian colonial master narrative.

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notes 1 Peate, Girl in a Red River Coat, 88–9. 2 Seldon-Macfarlane, “Child’s Winter in Canada”; Garbutt, “Longjohns and Leotards”; Routh, In Style, 81; Carson, “On the Street.” 3 Peate, Girl in a Red River Coat, 88–9. 4 Beaudoin-Ross, “Influence of Fashion,” 92–5. 5 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 44. 6 Edensor, National Identity, vii, 109; Billig, “Banal Nationalism.” 7 Back, “Canadian Capot,” 4; Back, “Le Capot Canadien,” 104. Not all greatcoats referred to as capots had hoods; they are sometimes described as having collars instead. 8 The hide garment that was also referred to as a Red River coat may be seen in “Sketch of Red River man” at the website Canada’s First Peoples, http://firstpeoplesofcanada.com/ fp_metis/fp_metis5.html. I disagree with the assertion that the blanket coat and this hide coat bear a close resemblance, as stated in Poulter, Becoming Native, 33, 35. 9 For an account of the way that the capot related to the phenomenon of cross-cultural dressing in French North America, see White, Wild Frenchmen, 213–21. 10 Back, “Canadian Capot,” 4. 11 DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 218–19; Blackstock, “Nineteenth Century Fur Trade.” 12 Back, “Le Capot Canadien,” 124–5; Forrest and Oakes, “Blanket Coat.” Points, or lines woven into a blanket to indicate its size and thus its exchange value, were visible on the capots made from these blankets, constituting a way that fur trade practices were worn directly on the bodies of those who were part of its culture. 13 Smith Bagan, “Blanket Coats of the Blackfoot,” 54; Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 82. 14 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 82. 15 Blackstock, “Nineteenth Century Fur Trade,” 192. 16 Silverstein, “Clothed Encounters,” 229. 17 Blackstock, “Nineteenth Century Fur Trade,” 195. 18 Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage, vol. 2, 56. 19 Back, “Canadian Capot,” 5–6. 20 Cited in Smith Bagan, “Blanket Coats of the Blackfoot,” 48. 21 Burnham, Cut My Cote, 20–1; Smith Bagan, “Blanket Coats of the Blackfoot”; McCord Museum, M5435. 22 Back, “Des Petits Messieurs.” 23 Mark Hutter, tailor, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in discussion with author, May 2017. 24 Back, “Canadian Capot,” 6. 25 Becker, “Match Coats and the Military,” 160.

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26 Back, “Le Capot Canadien,” 117–18. 27 Barnes, History of the Regiments, 73–6; Barnes, Military Uniforms, 21–7. 28 Abler, Hinterland Warriors. 29 Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers, 62–82. 30 Ibid. 31 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 68, 72. 32 McKinnon, “Dress in Red River Settlement,” 39–41. The same evidence revealed that the white capot was purchased only by the Protestant Métis clientele. Grey capots were divided between the Catholic and European Protestant clienteles. 33 Wamsley, “Public Importance of Men,” 76–8; McKinnon, “Dress in Red River Settlement,” 39–41; Blackstock, “Nineteenth Century Fur Trade,” 190. 34 Keating, Narrative of an Expedition, vol. 2, 44. 35 Carnegie, Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains, 9, 348. 36 Manton, “Red River and Beyond,” 588. 37 Humphrey Lloyd Hime, “Wigwam” a Saulteaux Métis, 1858, Library and Archives Canada, acc. 1936-273 npc, C-016447; Humphrey Lloyd Hime, Portrait of John Richards (Little Bearskin) McKay, a Métis, Sitting on a Bench in Front of a Building, in the Vicinity of the Red River, Manitoba, 1858, Library and Archives Canada, acc. 1936-273 npc, C-020250. 38 Ross, Red River Settlement, 208. 39 For a discussion of other colonial models where uniforms transformed far-flung outposts somewhat differently, see Craik, “Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” 136. 40 Wamsley, “Public Importance of Men,” 27. 41 Poulter, Becoming Native, 43–5. 42 Ibid., 23; Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian.’” 43 Poulter, Becoming Native, 59, 270. 44 Lemire, “Colonization of Winter.” 45 Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian,’” 19, 28. 46 Dick, “Nationalism and Visual Media.” 47 Sullivan, “Canadian Illustrated News”; Dick, “Nationalism and Visual Media”; Carter, “Aboriginal People of Canada.” 48 Hooded coats are not present in the image entitled “The Tragedy at Fort Garry,” featured on the cover of Canadian Illustrated News, 23 April 1870. They are however prevalent in the image of the same event by James Weston (c. 1815–96), The Execution of Scott, 1870, Library and Archives Canada, e002414863. The image was published as a frontispiece in Elliott and Brokovski, Preliminary Investigation. 49 Dick, “Nationalism and Visual Media,” 2. 50 Smith Bagan, “Blanket Coats of the Blackfoot,” 93, 98. 51 Poulter, “Snowshoeing and Lacrosse,” 315.

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52 Blackwood, My Canadian Journal, 46. For a photo showing the very garments she described, which correspond to the coat form being discussed, see W.J. Topley, The Countess of Dufferin, with Members of Her Family, Library and Archives Canada, pa-186002. 53 The Globe (Toronto), 1 November 1862. Analysis is drawn from a database of some 550 newspaper advertisements and mail order catalogue entries for these coats, many illustrated. This tool was compiled from the results of an extensive search using a number of variations on the coat name in large databases of digitized historical newspapers and some newspapers on microfilm. The papers searched were principally from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Winnipeg, along with a few from all other Canadian provinces. In addition, American and European newspapers were also searched and yielded extremely few results. 54 The Globe (Toronto), 18 October 1872. 55 Toronto Daily Star, 30 November 1906. 56 A rare memory of one of these coats worn by a boy is that of Montreal writer and singer Leonard Cohen, who recalled being left outside to play wearing one, implying the late 1930s as a time frame. See Dick, “Leonard Cohen,” which includes a photo of Cohen dressed in his coat. 57 St. John Daily Sun, 14 October 1905; Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 4 November 1905. 58 Goodwin’s Limited, Fall-Winter Catalogue, 23. 59 Vancouver Daily World, 9 October 1912; Charlottetown Guardian, 22 October 1912. 60 Belisle, Retail Nation. 61 Other colours mentioned were most often red or brown and occasionally green or black. In all cases, a characteristic contrasting trim was still present. 62 Toronto Daily Star, 26 October 1929. 63 Montreal Gazette, 8 July 1940. 64 McCord Museum, M2000.49.1, M2000.49.2. 65 McCord Museum, M974.1.1, M2000.49.3, M2000.49.4. 66 Other names that were applied to the same coat style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include “Hudson Bay coat” (see sidebar 3), “toboggan coat,” and “capot coat.” 67 Montreal Daily Star, 20 November 1931. 68 Francis, National Dreams, 88–110. 69 Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1934. 70 Toronto Daily Star, 1 August 1945. 71 Toronto Daily Star, 21 December 1907. 72 Belisle, Retail Nation, 45–81. 73 Toronto Evening Star, 21 December 1897. 74 Toronto Daily Star, 21 October 1902. 75 Lemire, “Colonization of Winter.”

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76 Toronto Daily Star, 13 December 1932; Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1934. 77 Korneski, Race, Nation, and Reform, 26. 78 Belisle, Retail Nation, 66–7. 79 Winnipeg Tribune, 25 January 1913. 80 Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 7 November 1916. 81 Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 2 November 1923. 82 Winnipeg Tribune, 1 September 1947. 83 Francis, National Dreams, 86. 84 Montreal Daily Star, 9 November 1949. 85 Toronto Daily Star, 15 September 1947; Ottawa Citizen, 12 October 1945; Toronto Daily Star, 2 September 1949; Edensor, National Identity, 116. 86 Gougeon, “Playsuit with a History.” 87 Norman Zavalkoff, son of Abe Zavalkoff, who was president of Dominion Gaiter, conversation with author, April 2016. 88 Montreal Gazette, 20 July 1966. 89 Elizabeth Sifton, retired buyer for Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company, in discussion with author, December 2017. The coat’s enduring resonance at this time is also evidenced in Margaret Laurence’s children’s story The Olden Days Coat, where it is described but not named. 90 Cook, “Mother as Consumer.” 91 DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 18. 92 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 17. 93 Campbell, “Meaning of Objects.” 94 Rose, “What Was Uniform?”; Rose, “Meanings of the Late Victorian.” 95 Billig, “Banal Nationalism”; Edensor, National Identity, vi. 96 Peate, Girl in a Red River Coat, 88–9. 97 Cook, “Missing Child.” 98 Peate, Girl in a Red River Coat, 89. 99 Gleason, “Embodied Negotiations.” 100 See Beverly Lemire’s explanation of the term “imperial livery” in chapter 4 of this volume.

sidebar t wo The Huron-Wendat Capot cynthia coop er

Blankets and blanket coats are culturally hybrid garments; made from European textiles, they came to be viewed as typically Indigenous dress because of their widespread trade in North America. A rare and relatively early blue wool capot ensemble at the Pitt Rivers Museum stands out for being hybrid not merely in its associations but also in its material amalgamation of two clothing traditions (see figure S2.1). The coat is cut along the lines expected of tailored European men’s outerwear, with a pointed hood, seams that encase red piping, and edges that are bound with red twill. Its distinguishing feature is its trim of floral embroidery in moose hair on dark hide, recognizable in style as Huron-Wendat. The shoulder wings, or epaulets, are edged in a fringe of several colours of dyed moose hair retained in a series of long tufts by metal cones. Similar tufts hanging from strands strung with a few glass beads are distributed more sparsely along the edges of the pocket welts, around the outer edge of the hood, and along its centre seam. Embroidered

trim is also found on the matching leggings, known as mitasses, and cap. Although it is a man’s outfit, its unique handwork, bearing witness to several participants, foregrounds women’s agency and collaboration in the garment. The coat was most likely first acquired by Wilbraham Spencer Tollemache,1 who was garrisoned in Quebec City with the Coldstream Guards in 1838 as part of the British response to the Rebellion of 1837.2 The reciprocal influence of Indigenous and military dress at this particular place and time offers some clues to a context for both its acquisition and its appearance. Published watercolours by one or more of Tollemache’s military compatriots show indisputable evidence of the garrison’s mutually beneficial trade relationship with their Huron-Wendat neighbours in nearby Lorette.3 Soldiers wear moccasins, undoubtedly furnished from the British government’s order for 1,300 pairs in 1837.4 Likewise, military adaptations of the striped white blanket coat with a high collar, cuffs, and shoulder wings in a contrasting colour are depicted

S2.1 Left Wool blanket coat with Huron-Wendat embroidery, 1838. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1986.21.1.1–4. S2.2 Below James Hope-Wallace, A Quebec Volunteer, watercolour, 1838. Library and Archives Canada, 1970-188-1499.

on members of the Quebec light infantry. An additional watercolour, possibly by the same artist, shows a Quebec volunteer in a blanket coat with red edging and a cap shaped similarly to the one at the Pitt Rivers Museum (see figure S2.2). A definite correlation is apparent between the placement of the embroidered hide trim on the Pitt Rivers coat and the contrasting fabric on the military garments. The embroidered pocket welts on the capot speak to the typical presence of embellishment there on earlier uniform coats.

S2.3 James Hope-Wallace, Winter Costume of the Lorette Indians, watercolour, 1838. Library and Archives Canada, 1970-188-1495.

Lorette was known not only for its prolific output of moccasins and snowshoes but also for producing a wide variety of “Indian goods,” which might well be acquired as souvenirs of a sojourn in Canada or for more practical purposes. Capots similar to that held at the Pitt Rivers Museum were both worn and made for sale by the Huron-Wendat (see figure S2.3), described by a visitor in 1861: “The ordinary dress of the men, in winter, is a blue blanket-coat, made with a capuchon, or hood, which latter is generally trimmed with bright-colored ribbon and ornamented with beads. Epaulettes, fash-

ioned out of pieces of red and blue cloth, somewhat after the pattern of a penwiper, impart a distinguished appearance to the shoulders of these garments … [T]he Indian blanket-coats, are to be had at the furriers’ shops in Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that style of costume appropriate for their wear.”5 If the British military presence in Canada had offered a ready market for Huron-Wendat production in the late 1830s, the subsequent growth in popular-

ity of Indigenous winter sports created another. Similar moose hair embroidery is visible on at least thirteen distinct coats in portraits of both men and women on snowshoes or toboggans dating from 1864 to 1876 in the McCord Museum’s Notman Photographic Archives (see figure S2.4).6 In March 1873 Lady Dufferin noted two tourists coming to skate “in wonderful costumes … bright blue blanket-coats, with embroidered shoulder-pieces.”7 By the late 1860s, however, most blanket coats in photographs had fabric epaulets with pinked “pen-wiper” edges like those in figure S2.3, also found on the many extant white blanket coats worn for snowshoeing held at the McCord Museum.8 Similar embroidered trim on a few other extant coats and ensembles raises many questions about the Huron-Wendat commercial production of blanket coats.9 All are earlier prototypes of both the blanket coat outfit worn for snowshoeing and tobogganing discussed in chapter 4 and the children’s Red River coat discussed in chapter 3.

S2.4 William Notman, Ives, Warren and Walpool’s Tobogganing Group, Montreal, 1868. McCord Museum, I-35091.1.

groups marks them as studio props; the others are each found in a single image. 7 Blackwood, My Canadian Journal, 71. 8 Pinked epaulets are present on twelve of fourteen extant men’s coats at the McCord Museum. 9 See, for example, National Trust, England,

notes

Snowshill Wade Costume Collection,

1 de Stecher, “Of Chiefs and Kings,” 109.

1349287, and National Museum of

2 Ross-of-Bladensburg, History of the

Denmark, Copenhagen, Hc146a, both

Coldstream Guards. 3 Quebec Volunteers.

published in Harrison and Glenbow Museum, Spirit Sings, 70; Maine State

4 de Stecher, “Of Chiefs and Kings,” 110.

Museum, Augusta, 2012.56.1, published in

5 “A Nook of the North,” Atlantic Monthly,

Maine State Museum, Beyond Boundaries;

March 1861, 348. 6 The recurrence of two of these coats in portraits of thirty different individuals and

and Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, 71.1909.19.162.1-3 D.

sidebar three The Red River Coat and Its Commercial Promotion cynthia coop er

The term “Red River coat” did not become current until the dawn of the twentieth century, although blue hooded coats with red trim had been well known for several decades. It seems very likely that the child’s coat emerged out of the expertise of the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) and its systems of production in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In advertisements run in Toronto in the 1870s, a number of simultaneous references to Red River coats and Hudson Bay coats sold by the same outfitter hint at a likely connection. Although hooded coats purchased from the company in Rupert’s Land were known by the latter name, the description of one in a Toronto ad confirmed that it was indeed the same article, described as being of a hard-wearing indigo-dyed blanket cloth and made expressly by an agent of the hbc.1 A shadow of a doubt remains, but it appears that the Red River designation may have initially indicated a similar coat in a version that was smaller or of lighter weight. The Hudson Bay name continued to be used occasionally alongside the Red River

name in advertisements for children’s coats into the 1920s, including an advertisement for the Winnipeg hbc store in 1914 that described a girl’s Red River coat as exemplifying “the regulation Hudson’s Bay Red River Capot style.”2 In keeping with the coat’s tradition of British manufacture, its woollen fabric continued to be imported from England, but by the early twentieth century, Canadian manufacturers were supplying stores with these coats. The vertically integrated Eaton’s and Simpson’s establishments indicated that they were each making coats in their own factories by 1907 and 1913 respectively,3 and in 1911 an Ottawa store advertised coats especially manufactured for it.4 It is difficult to know how many manufacturers were making versions of the Red River coat at any given point in its history. The extant coats at the McCord Museum provide names of two different Montreal-based children’s coat manufacturers active in the 1950s and 1960s, Markette and Little Nugget (see figure S3.1), and an oral history adds the Montreal company Dominion Gaiter.5 The extant

S3.1 Left Red River coat ensembles. Left: Little Nugget, 1970. Right: Markette, 1940–50. McCord Museum, M2012.76.1–5 (coat and accessories), M2000.49.1 (coat), M2000.49.6 (tuque), M2000.49.7 (sash).

S3.2 Below Greeting card with illustration of Red River coat ensembles, 1930s. McCord Museum, M2011.34.1.X.

coat from the 1970s bears the label Young Canadian Clothiers Ltd.6 Montreal-based Knit-to-Fit and Regent Knit were occasionally named as makers of the leggings and other accessories. In a 1952 interview, a manufacturer who had been in the business for sixty years situated the outfit’s origins as a generation prior to when he started. Indeed, this time frame puts the coat’s beginnings in the early 1860s, corresponding to the date of the earliest advertising found for the coat.7 In the scant promotion outside Canada, Red River coats were always identified as Canadian products. In the 1930s and again in the late 1950s, two American fashion magazines showed the coats and described them as Canadian imports.8 Advertisements in Montreal papers from the 1930s suggest that American visitors purchased the coats as well as dolls dressed in full Red River attire as souvenirs, an indication of the coat’s recognition as a national symbol and instance of folk culture (see figure S3.2), still present in the mid-1970s when Eaton’s in Brandon, Manitoba, advertised the coat alongside Inuit carvings in its Canadiana gift shop.9

notes 1 The Globe (Toronto), 26 November 1872; Havelock, “Trout Tails from the Nepigon,” 4–5; Stewart, Life in Rupert’s Land; United States War Department, Reports of Explorations and Surveys, 12, 66.

2 Manitoba Morning Free Press, 1 January 1914. The meaning of the Hudson’s Bay designation evolved, and by 1922 the company was proudly flogging coats made from its widely recognized striped, or point, blankets in updated fashionable styles, primarily for the adult market. Hudson’s Bay Company, “Hudson’s Bay Point Blanket”; Forrest and Oakes, “Blanket Coat,” 125; Mackay, “Blanket Coverage.” 3 Toronto Daily Star, 21 December 1907 and 17 September 1913. 4 Ottawa Journal, 20 October 1911. 5 Norman Zavalkoff, son of Abe Zavalkoff, who was president of Dominion Gaiter, conversation with author, April 2016. 6 McCord Museum, M2014.111.35.1–2. 7 Gougeon, “Playsuit with a History.” 8 Harper’s Bazaar, December 1933, 124; Vogue, 15 September 1959, 187. 9 Montreal Gazette, 17 July 1937; Toronto Daily Star, 24 August 1948; Brandon Sun, 24 June 1975.

4 Colonizing Winter Tobogganing, Toboggan Suits, and Imperial Agendas in the Northlands, c. 1800–1900 be verly l em ire

Garments can reveal deep history. A single tobogganing suit ascribed to latenineteenth-century London opens a history of a new-style winter sport that spread from eastern Canada across the snow-covered lands of North America, Europe, and the British Empire. The sport and its uniform repurposed Indigenous technology and enacted a new winter whiteness. This history illuminates late-nineteenth-century imperial agendas and the colonization of winter. The region that became Canada was the birthplace of this phenomenon; but this is not simply a Canadian story. Rather, an eastern Canadian colonial fad became a globalized cultural model for broad political claims. Tobogganing redefined winter, and blanket coats emerged as its imperial livery. As items, toboggans and toboggan suits can be termed subaltern technologies – which, Marcy Norton argues, “foreground subaltern agency and ‘new materialism’” that allow “a sharper view of the intertwined processes of imperial and colonial dependence and denigration of subaltern groups” and highlight “processes common to seemingly disparate cultural phenomenon.”1 Attention to subaltern (Indigenous) technologies reveals the porosity of European and Eurocolonial societies and the dependence of elite Europeans on Indigenous material culture like the toboggan that spread from its originating communities through colonial and metropolitan polities and cultures. The trajectory of this technology, including its entanglement in imperial and colonial agendas, is the focus of this chapter. The term “entangled” was effectively devised by Nicholas Thomas respecting Pacific peoples,

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material culture, and colonialism in his exploration of what objects do in discrete cross-cultural colonial environments.2 Entanglement has since been used as an effective concept for capturing complex colonial events and for foregrounding active material culture, the Indigenous communities that fashioned it, and the contested realignment of materials for other purposes.3 I focus on a distinctive winter sport developed in nineteenth-century colonial northlands, particularly its role within what James Belich terms the “Anglo-world.”4 This expanse included English-speaking spheres that incorporated other ethnic settler communities: Welsh, Irish, Scots, French, German, and others of northern Europe. I position my study within porous “webbed or networked” imperial structures that “imagine the empire as a set of shifting, uneven, and often unstable inter-regional and global connections.”5 Scholars note the power of transnational linkages that shared language, legal structures, capital markets, and migrant populations, tied together by what Emma Rothschild terms the “connections of things.”6 Anglo-world regions experienced explosive migration over the 1800s, along with economic development, the strength of which reshaped cultural paradigms.7 Belich notes the power of such transnational entities, observing that “[t]ransfers of things, thoughts, and people, lubricated by language and culture, were easier within them than from without. Changes flowed more easily within the system, and were received more readily. These sub-global ‘worlds’ were important change agents, and both national and global histories ignore them at their peril.”8 The puzzle of an 1880s tobogganing blanket coat from London, England, begins this journey (see figure 4.1). Its fibres subsume a “bundle of relationships” that have long historical roots and a vibrant living history.9

sp ort in colonial northl ands The 1800s were distinctive for mass migration, most particularly from Europe to settler regions like North America, with waves of immigrants spreading across the continent. The Anglo-world flourished over this century through seizure of Indigenous lands and resources, plus the surging scale of industry and commerce, with many familial and cultural ties linking its disparate parts.10 Sports were exported from the British metropole, another way that 4.1 Opposite Tobogganing suit with Park Tobogganing Club badge, full front, 1880s. Possibly made from a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket. Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council, England/Bridgeman Images, fmb3084529.

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expatriate communities expressed their allegiance. Sporting pursuits taught core values and offered entertainment for colonists worldwide in order “to express and enhance the solidarity of colonial society.”11 Masculinity was measured by encounters on sporting fields. Less typical, but equally potent, was the appropriation of Indigenous technologies to create new sports, another ingredient of settler culture. On some occasions, these invented sports spread widely, becoming leitmotifs of empire – as was the case for tobogganing.12 More than two centuries of colonization passed in North America before the genesis of this new-style Canadian winter sport. This invention occurred as elites in Lower and Upper Canada strove to redefine themselves in ways that would unify myriad migrant communities and sanctify colonial claims. Gillian Poulter explores this history and the means by which this winter pastime came to define the elite settler communities in Montreal and vicinity.13 It was an outgrowth of the challenges that European colonists confronted as they adjusted to snow and cold.14 The oral tradition of the Wabanaki, an Algonquian people in northeastern North America, celebrated winter snows as a “season of abundance for skilled members of family hunting bands.”15 This Indigenous capacity was quickly recognized by Europeans like the seventeenth-century French Jesuits, newly arrived in New France, who soon learned that aside from the riches of winter hunting, that season was “[n]o less favourable … for working-people, [as] the snow [made] … all roads smooth and the frost covering Rivers and Lakes with ice, so that one can go anywhere with safety.”16 Still, settlers grappled with snowy seasons and laboured to master Indigenous technologies that enabled winter’s potential. A winter apprenticeship ensued, pursued over generations with each tranche of newcomers. Appropriation of Indigenous technologies was a key ingredient of the new settler culture and its “worlds” in the process of creation. Norton observes that “early modernity was marked by elite, male Europeans’ dependence upon subaltern [Indigenous] technologies and their ‘disavowal’ of this dependence.”17 Colonial reliance on Indigenous snow technologies was critical to settlers’ survival, a reliance that they later masked in new rituals. Settlers’ routine engagement with Indigenous peoples allowed them to learn technological facets of this material culture, including a rich array of seasonal sports premised on strength, agility, daring, and fair play. Joseph B. Oxendine, of the Lumbee Nation, observes that “[i]n most of the traditional Indian societies, games of skill or dexterity were rarely played by adults for mere amusement … Rather, they were played for some purpose that was a matter of importance to the community.”18 Winter wisdom was a matter of survival,

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including evaluating snow and ice at elevation or on flatland. Colonists prided themselves on their facility with Indigenous winter tools, aiming to match or beat their local allies. Routine sporting competitions ensued that matched Indigenous athletes and colonial athleticism.19 Colonial manhood was soon defined by these capacities and by the contests that resulted.20 In the late 1700s and into the 1800s, newspapers in North America and Britain celebrated winter triumphs with increased frequency. One adventure was noted in the winter of 1767 when “several Gentleman” snowshoed over mountains and lakes from Quebec City to Lake George, Vermont, in twelve days, a feat deemed newsworthy in London. Thereafter, royalty, noblemen, military officers, and senior colonial administrators were applauded for manly winter exploits as proof of their right to command.21 In 1813 Lieutenant-Colonel John Harvey “walked in snow shoes, in the depth of last winter, through the wilds lying between the Canadas and New Brunswick,” “so eager was this officer to arrive at his [new] post.”22 He did not travel alone.23 Journeys like this one involved numerous Indigenous allies to guide and manage the toboggans that carried supplies as the contingent traversed hills and forests. The men who steered the toboggans demonstrated mastery of their craft and (perhaps) enjoyed the downhill runs. The pleasures of physical prowess also came with organized winter games, of which the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, and other First Nations had many. One was snow boat, which involved navigating a small, carved craft shunted down an icy trough, with speed and distance as the goal.24 Winter involved trials of many sorts – with occasional play. Few experiences reached the crescendo of speed, risk, and mastery afforded by a vertiginous plunge down a snowy slope on toboggan or snowshoes. In figure 4.2 an anonymous artist interprets the flair of one Indigenous hunter in about 1840 – which may remind present-day viewers of snowboarding. Indigenous facility on snow remained, as it does today, a permanent part of the northern North American winter even as appropriation followed.25 The Montreal Snow Shoe Club, formed in 1840, created the first organized male sports club of its kind, expunging histories of previous Eurosettler dependence on Indigenous allies by turning a tool of winter into a medium of colonial culture, with an implicit militarism at its core. Socially prominent men established the organization by transforming snowshoeing into an ordered recreation.26 As Poulter notes, “it seemed wholly appropriate to Canadian colonists that a new identity might be constructed based on the Indigenous activities of the new land.”27 Competitive races became formalized,

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4.2 Right Indian Hunter Descending a Precipice on Snow Shoes, watercolour, c. 1840. Library and Archives Canada, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, R9266-444.

4.3 Opposite Cornelius Krieghoff, Glissade en Toboggan (Québec), watercolour, 1863. Library and Archives Canada, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, R9266.

and organizers had gradually excluded direct competition between settler elites and Indigenous athletes by the 1880s.28 Winter sports were whitened, reflecting the racialized hierarchy being set in place, although the prowess of Indigenous athletes could not be gainsaid. Indeed, clubmen acknowledged the singular power of men like Keraronwe, whose victories in 1868 races were recorded in club anthologies. He was described as “a perfect wonder … and though of slight build the muscles of his limbs must have been of steel to stand the magnificent gait he struck that day. There seemed to be ‘no tire’ in him.”29 Such encomiums were exceptional, for as Belich observes, “racialism was a crucial element of the cultural filament that bound the Anglo-world to its American and Greater British flanks.”30 Fraternal societies reinforced the colonizing principles, and the blanket coat came to celebrate a contrived colonial tradition that could be shared by old and new settlers alike.31 Winter sports clubs proliferated throughout Lower and Upper Canada, recasting winter recreation for men whose skill proved their right to rule.32 Organized tobogganing followed.

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Sliding was commonplace in the snowy season; organized sliding was something new. In Cornelius Krieghoff ’s 1863 watercolour Glissade en Toboggan (Québec), a well-dressed club member and his female guest hurtle down a hillside (see figure 4.3). His blanket coat uniform is diagnostic of club membership, from the epaulets on his shoulders to the red sash around his waist. Organized sliding evolved in tandem with snowshoeing and then far surpassed it as popular recreation.33 An earlier sketch from 1853 memorialized another intrepid slider dressed in club regalia enjoying the thrill of speed over snow.34 Toboggan clubs multiplied over the mid-1800s, and their regulations denote the importance of material insignia. The blanket coat uniform highlighted a living colonial lineage that consciously mimicked the dress still worn by Indigenous men and women.35 In the 1870s Governor General Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Lady Dufferin sponsored tobogganing at their Rideau Hall residence and wore this distinctive dress, with exploits widely reported in the English-language media.36 The Lansdowne Toboggan Club was formed in 1884, with its patron, Governor General Henry PettyFitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, bringing prestige with his patronage.37 Regulations stipulated uniforms on all outings.38 In some instances,

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the sash was specified, described in one set of bylaws as a “ceinture indienne” (Indian sash). The Quebec City club that mandated this sash named itself Le Huron, appropriating the name of the proximate First Nation, the HuronWendat of Wendake.39 This usurpation was among the early arrogations of Indigenous names for sporting purposes, matched by a club in Troy, New York, that denominated itself Iroquois.40 Naming has remained a contested matter from this era to the present. Lakota scholar James Fenelon astutely notes that Indigenous “leaders are absolutely correct in seeing these issues as emanating from genocidal imagery and language used to destroy Indigenous Nations and Native peoples.”41 Present-day challenges raised against sports teams using racist caricatures of Indigenous peoples or equivalent names are finally yielding results, such as the State of Maine banning the use of racialized Indigenous “mascots” by sporting teams.42 Legal and political victories came after generations of activism by Indigenous peoples. As much as their names, the material culture of these organizations demands close attention. Clothing and bodily adornment, which transmit signs of status, ethnicity, gender, and intent in their form and fibre, are what Terence Turner calls the “social skin.” As Turner observes, “[t]he adornment and public presentation of the body, however inconsequential or even frivolous a business it may appear to individuals, is for cultures a serious matter: de la vie sérieuse.”43 Uniforms carried particular significance, and their increased use in nineteenth-century Western societies defined status with exceptional precision through materials, colours, and symbols, from pauper to prisoner and soldier to sportsman. Their multiplication aligned with a more intensive cataloguing of people, now employed to imperial ends. These particular uniforms had a purpose that literally enveloped its wearers in the settler project. Putting on this uniform, adjusting the sash, and setting the headwear, which figured as ritual “investiture,” comprised a process that was “the means by which a person was given a form, a shape, a social function, a ‘depth.’”44 Deep investiture fortified sporting colonial communities. Thus the serious resolve of the accoutred tobogganers in Montreal was demonstrated in their dress as well as their pastime (see figure 4.4). The history of the capot, or blanket coat, can be traced to seventeenthcentury French colonists, a simple dress adopted by proximate Indigenous communities in that century. Cynthia Cooper explores the complexity of this history, along with the coat’s colonial iterations, in chapter 3 of this volume. I summarize its shifting cultural purpose in material form.45 This garment became the normal winter garb for most nonelite French colonial settlers

4.4 William Notman and Son, Tobogganing on Mount Royal Park Slide, Montreal, qc, 1885. McCord Museum, 77678.

in the eighteenth century.46 Sophie White observes that by the mid-1700s, “the capot had become the quintessential synthesis of European and indigenous sartorial cultures in cross-cultural dressing in New France and Louisiana.”47 However, these coats were notably absent in inventories of eighteenth-century officer and elite wardrobes, being worn instead by rural folk, Indigenous people, and the urban working poor. Similarly, in the English colonial context, a settler was said to have “assumed the blanket-coat and axe” in his rural labours.48 In contrast, in the 1760s and 1770s, more than two-thirds of Montreal male probate inventories showed a preference for fine woollens in tailored, buttoned, hoodless jackets rather than the utilitarian alternative.49 “As much as style, fabric distinguished city and country, men engaged in physical labor … from men of commerce, government officials, military officers, landowners, and professionals, and their families.”50 Within several generations, however, the heirs of Montreal’s eighteenth-century elites had revised their relationship with the blanket coat, crafting a new cultural symbol.

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Cross-cultural dressing ensued, with the blanket coat adopted by those invested in winter sports clubs, from governors general and their wives to British military officers, senior members of government, professionals, and merchants. Rather than a T-shaped wrap garment, this coat was tailored, but it was still constructed of felted woollen cloth in distinctive colours and stripes. In some respects, the espousal of this coat by elite and middle-ranked men fit within the politicized construction of nationalist costumes worn in pursuit of partisan agendas in nineteenth-century polities.51 The fabric itself celebrated a colonial lineage, as it held “legendary status” in colonial fur trade society.52 Even as Indigenous communities continued their use, blanket coats were used for sport, with this routine investiture holding deep political intentions. Sports served to define colonial orders. At the same time, race and racial hierarchies were hotly debated throughout this century in all parts of the imperial world. Some prominent European thinkers proposed that it was “medieval northern European paganism that fuelled the fire of nineteenthcentury greatness.”53 This imagined Anglo-Saxon (or white) lineage now travelled globally through the egis of imperial expansion, with British and American statesmen and polemicists celebrating a fictive past to justify the legal dispossession of inconvenient Indigenous communities.54 In 1845 one American journalist enthusiastically described “the irresistible army of AngloSaxon emigration” sweeping North America.55 Claims respecting the existence an Anglo-Saxon “race” were widely shared among scholars at a time when, as Nell Irvin Painter notes, “[r]acism permeated scholarship.”56 Concepts of whiteness emerged from theory and practice, and Robert Grant Haliburton contributed his mite. Haliburton, a Canadian-born lawyer, amateur ethnologist, and proponent of British imperialism along racialist lines, was an influential figure in Canadian society. His 1869 volume The Men of the North and Their Place in History summarized views widely discussed in the Anglo-world. Haliburton frequently lectured on this topic in Canada and abroad, travelling widely in pursuit of evidence for his theories. He remained a corresponding member of the Canadian Institute when he resettled in Britain, where he was an active fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.57 Haliburton emphasized the superior pedigree of a mythic European lineage that was argued to run from the Germanic hordes of the Roman era to Norse adventurers to medieval Saxon soldiery to nineteenth-century colonists. He championed the hybrid settler “race” of northern Europeans governing northern North America, seeing in them a manifest white supremacy.58 Haliburton recited the virtues

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of “men of the North”: “We are the sons and the heirs of those who have built up a new civilization … As long as the north wind blows, and the snow and the sleet drive over our forests and fields … we must be a hardy, a healthy, a virtuous, a daring, and if we are worthy of our ancestors, a dominant race.”59 Proof of winter fitness confirmed these claims, and the exponents of Haliburton’s theories included those who embraced winter sport.60 Jodi Byrd of the Chickasaw Nation reminds us that “settler colonialism is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain with the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony.”61 The Ottawa-based Taché Hill Sliding Club demonstrates this point. Established in 1886, the club had as one of its patrons Sir Adolphe-Philippe Caron, minister of militia and defence during the Red River Resistance of 1885 on the western Prairies. Sir Frederick Middleton was another of the honorary members, a career British military officer who survived the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and eventually secured a position as general officer in charge of the Canadian militia in 1883 thanks to his friendship with Caron. Shortly after his arrival, he led troops to quash Métis protests and resistance to Canadian nationalist policies, with a bloody outcome. Middleton was granted the honour of club membership following his return.62 The Taché Hill Sliding Club reflected the priorities of similar societies, with regulated colours and symbols: “[t]uque light blue with band of cardinal red, blanket coat cardinal red with light blue piping, capuchin [hood] lined with light blue, blanket trousers with light blue stripes, stockings and sash light blue.”63 Colonists employed myriad emblems as rhetorical shorthand for collective political interests.64 Sport emphasized colonial mastery over (Indigenous) lands where winter presided for months of the year. Land was the unacknowledged focus of this exercise, and settler dominance was embedded in events that ranged from the “tramps” organized by snowshoe clubs to outings at vertiginous toboggan runs. Walter Hixson observes that “[c]ulturally imagined and legally enshrined conceptions of space and place fuelled settler colonialism.”65 What could be more powerful than enacting colonial winter? These clubs sprang up throughout the western Prairies as settlers arrived in growing numbers after the Red River Resistance was quashed, Canada having secured the Red River Settlement in 1870. A Canadian expeditionary force confirmed Ottawa’s intent to control this region and overturn long-established Métis territorial standing. Settlers worked to replicate the political and social hierarchies of central Canada, which included establishing local branches of

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Montreal sporting clubs in Winnipeg, Brandon, Souris, and Portage la Prairie, all “reported in flourishing condition” by 1884.66 Winnipeg’s growth “emerged as part of the nationalist project of settler colonialism,” with clubs serving as a confirmation of “civilized life.”67As tensions with Métis boiled up during the Red River Resistance of 1885, the use of blanket coats by clubmen took on a heightened political tone. The collective aspirations of the Knights of the Tuque were exemplified in the elaborate public ceremonies that this club devised, including a torch-lit march of 100 blanket-coated members through the darkened streets of Winnipeg to greet their returning club leader.68 Thrills on the toboggan run were matched by quasi-military performances on the flats that promoted settler objectives. This prototype of Canadian winter sport was rapidly embraced throughout the snowy lands of the Anglo-world.

disseminat ing an imper ial w inter past ime Montreal was the epicentres of a cultural form broadcast throughout the United States and Britain after the 1860s.69 At the same time, events were systematized and capitalized as leaders of the Montreal Snow Shoe Club organized winter carnivals in the 1880s. A frenzy of interest surrounded Montreal’s winter festivals, with tobogganing proclaimed an unparalleled thrill, especially on chutes iced for speed. Boston Globe readers were tantalized by a sport that induced “one of the most profound and unspeakable sensations of life.” Another reporter described the “galvanic shock” of a toboggan ride.70 Blanket coats costumed political players.71 And, indeed, the racial theorizing of this pursuit was repeatedly emphasized, with an American writing in 1885, “It was not until some forty years ago that, a leisure class having developed, the Anglo-Saxon element, with their Norseman blood and natural love of out-of-door sports, seized upon the Indian snow-shoe and toboggan … to utilize for sport [in] the deep snows of the long Canadian winters.”72 Proponents emphasized the altered Indigenous technology and its new purpose.73 And, as the craze took hold, Americans sought Canadians’ blessings for their emulative efforts – a Canadian (and Montreal) presence lending authenticity to US ventures. Members of about thirty Canadian clubs travelled to New York in the winter of 1887 to endorse the local winter carnival, with a band of 200 men marching down Fifth Avenue in their distinctive blanket coats “in a bewildering variety of brilliant colours.”74 Boston was another port of call where Montreal clubmen met and celebrated with their Boston counterparts, the

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Montrealers “attired in uniform.”75 Americans embraced this sport for all its possibilities. A Vermont writer applauded “[t]he system of winter sports which the people of Montreal … [have brought] to the world.”76 Toboggan clubs, toboggan slides, and winter festivals sprang up across the United States in Saratoga, Burlington, Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, among many locales. Winter sliding was promoted to all ethnic groups settling in the United States, with newspaper coverage in various languages.77 This phenomenon ranged throughout the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions, which were linked by older fur trade networks that coupled New York and Montreal with Chicago, Winnipeg, Saint Paul, and beyond. Western regions were now awash with settlers seeking to consolidate their claims by embedding their communities while marginalizing Indigenous populations. Tobogganing served as a cultural glue across disparate locales. In the 1880s the American Midwest experienced intensive settlement, with an acute need to consolidate colonial culture. Minnesota was granted statehood by the federal government in 1858, and the flow of incomers accelerated after the Civil War of 1861–65. In the wake of railway development, settlers contended with Indigenous peoples for land, with sometimes bloody contests.78 Major armed resistance by the local Dakota erupted in 1862 in Minnesota, with a savage outcome for captured Indigenous combatants, and further bloody and bitter conflicts occurred in the Montana Territory from the 1860s to the 1880s.79 Routine low-level tensions simmered between settler military personnel and Indigenous peoples.80 Containment of Indigenous populations was a pressing issue for both Canadian and American states, and the Canadian winter model offered a pleasurable confirmation of the rightful place of incomers. This winter craze – a cultural claim to territory – swept villages, towns, and cities throughout Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, and Oregon. Thrills followed as clubs and winter sporting events took root, including a local branch of a Montreal club in Saint Paul, acknowledged “as a branch of the St. George’s club of Canada, which has branches in almost every Canadian city.”81 American newspapers featured homegrown and distant winter festivals as sporting ambitions surged. The Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce launched its own winter carnival with the assistance of Montrealers, including the builder of the Montreal ice palace; the first Saint Paul Winter Carnival was held in 1884 (see figure 4.5).82 The ice palace was another obeisance to a neo-British heritage, with romanticized Victorian medievalism fit for the season. Robust displays of settler manliness followed.83

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The melange of chivalric exercises included opening ceremonies with ranked marching clubmen in blanket coats from thirty local and visiting organizations, including some with Indigenous names – the Little Crow Toboggan Club and the Nushka Toboggan Club – as well as more generically named groups like the Saint Paul Saloonkeepers’ Toboggan Club.84 Uniformed bands staged a ritual storming of the palace, an ironic performance given the proximate bloodshed in real colonial contests. That 1,000 Canadian club members visited the 1886 festivities confirms the importance of this occasion, which culminated with 4,000 “uniformed members of toboggan, snow shoe and skating clubs in line with torches … with citizens and visitors from all the principal points in the United States, Canada and the British Northwest.” Military veterans were celebrated, one year comprising contingents that seized the ice palace from its defenders before 30,000 spectators. Militarism permeated these programs. Indigenous participants were sequestered adjacent to the festival grounds.85 In Miles City, Montana, reports confirmed that “[t]he town has gone wild over the toboggan amusement and all other recreations are for the nonce abandoned.”86 This small eastern Montana settlement began life as a new-built fortress in 1876 following the US Army’s defeat at Little Bighorn, and ten years later its civic leaders mused about an ice palace of their own. This speculative reflection caught the attention of newspaper editors across the nation, a reassuring theme for American readers in a place with a notorious history of Indigenous-settler hostilities.87 Michael J. Boyle captained Saint Paul’s Nushka Toboggan Club. His diaries attest to the countless hours he invested in club affairs, noting in the winter of 1887 that the toboggan slide was “not so steep as that of last year but it is a daisy in every particular. I made 8 or 9 trips … Tobogganing in Winter! My ideal athletic sport … Temperatures -17 while tobogganing this evening but none of us felt cold.”88 Members created meaning through large and small affairs, incorporating cultural symbols like the green ribbons worn on the 17 March. Boyle observed that Saint Patrick’s Day evening was spent “in a snow shoe tramp” and recorded how “the green mingled harmoniously with the red of our uniforms.”89 We should take tramping and sliding seriously, including the symbolism of their spatial enactments. Military patrols, an ongoing routine among the military in the North American West, were another means of fixing or extending territorial claims. Among the other rituals denoting territorial claims was the long-held Church of England custom of beating the bounds, which entailed parishioners pacing a parish’s borders to mark its limits. The Nushka Toboggan Club followed a similar practice, traversing

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4.5 H. Brosius, Winter Carnival 1887, St. Paul Ice Palace, lithograph by the H.M. Smyth Print Co. Library of Congress, Washington, dc, lc-dig-pga-08362.

snowscapes where disputes with Indigenous peoples simmered. The red blanket coats of its members presented an emphatic vision of territorial control, and Boyle enthused about the fifty “red robed Nushkas filing across the prairies and wandering through the woods [which] made a beautiful sight.”90 Active settlers reinforced territorial title. Thus club members became stalwarts of midwestern settlement, with 1,500 lining the streets of Saint Paul in “brilliant colored costumes” as an honour guard during the visit of President Grover Cleveland and his wife, Frances, in 1887.91 Blanket coats symbolized colonial sport and colonial intent. Yet some ambiguity remained that concerned contemporaries, for this garment still held its Indigenous connotations. One newspaper acknowledged this fact, noting that although “[i]t was now fashionable for young ladies to be photographed in toboggan costumes,” one beau had broken off his engagement when presented with a photo of his sweetheart in this garb, disgusted with the

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Indigenous look of his would-be bride.92 In another report, the “Indian-Like Uniforms,” or blanket coats, worn by toboggan club members in La Crosse, Wisconsin, triggered a dangerous misadventure with a large dog trained to attack “Indians”; this tale of consequential cross-cultural dressing was reprinted to amuse American and British readers.93 Nonetheless, the claims on this garment by colonial society largely overrode extant Indigenous meanings in the wider Anglo-world. The commercialization of this garment and accoutrements augmented this appropriation.94 Tobogganing season was marked by newspapers advertising blanket coats, tuques, sashes, and moccasins for sale.95 Despite constraints, Indigenous communities contributed to this supply chain. In 1859 the Wendat outside Quebec City manufactured 20,000 pairs of mukluks and moccasins, 1,000 pairs of snowshoes, and 300 toboggans, plus embroidered wares, a testament to their skill in trades that continued throughout the century.96 As Cynthia Cooper shows in chapter 3 of this volume, the Wendat’s history as military suppliers enabled them to sell their blanket coats to sporting clubs. Other Indigenous peoples may also have followed this economic path. Generally, however, Euro-Americans profited most from this craze. Albert Goodwill Spalding invested in a pastime that aligned with his sporting, business, and racial priorities.97 This US baseball entrepreneur commissioned a promotional history of tobogganing that glorified the Montreal winter, its hearty citizens, and the sports that they loved. He intended this winter business pursuit to be a counterpoint to summer baseball profits.98 Serialized in American newspapers, this volume offered a template for organizing local clubs and listed suppliers for toboggans and “Toboggan Uniforms.” A.G. Spalding & Bros of Chicago and New York offered blanket coats and pants, sashes, and moccasins.99 Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia advertised “Ladies Toboggan Suits … made to order in 24 hours.”100 In Silverton, Colorado, the newly founded toboggan club ordered uniforms from Saratoga, New York, site of an early US toboggan club. Several years later, the boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, hosted its own winter carnival, with a “medieval castle” made of ice and the assembled clubmen wearing “the regular toboggan costume.” Organizers also secured the contractor who had built palaces in Montreal and Saint Paul; no expense was spared to ensure the authentic look of this event.101 Retailers across the US snowbelt embraced sliding, and tobacco companies printed collectable cards showcasing these winter pursuits (see figure 4.6).102 The ubiquity of this attire confirms the power of this fashion, commemorated by photographers who portrayed

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4.6 Toboggan, World’s Dudes series (N31), Allen & Ginter’s Cigarettes, 1888. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 63.350.202.31.17.

real or staged heroics.103 These businesses served a colonial agenda whereby settlers became indigenes.104 A photograph of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival’s princesses in 1916 captures this intent: the princesses pose before an empty tepee, one holds a toboggan, and all wear female variants of the blanket coat, demonstrating their settler claims (see figure 4.7). Tobogganing became an institutionalized feature of winter life, being formalized in myriad regional settlings like Pokagon State Park, Indiana, and other regional parks carved from Indigenous lands.

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Tobogganing fit the aims of what James Belich terms the “settler revolution,” as it appealed to new generations of incomers and was a defining feature of colonial northlands. Moreover, the rhetorical power of this pastime extended well beyond North America,105 being moved along imperial pathways by groups like the British military, a cohort whose commitment to muscular imperialism was unquestionable. In 1877 the London periodical The Graphic published sketches of regimental tobogganers in Halifax as part of its depiction of “Military Winter Life in Nova Scotia.”106 The Graphic later printed another soldier’s rendering of tobogganing valour among British soldiers in Afghanistan. Bystanders watched a dozen men of various regiments careen down a snow-packed hill near Kabul on toboggans; winter lands in many world regions preoccupied imperial powers (see figure 4.8).107 These were not the first British soldiers to employ this device in new terrain, for a generation earlier British soldiers had proposed using toboggans in Sebastopol during a wartime Crimean winter.108 Half a world away from its origins, the toboggan exemplified the power of subaltern technology, which was entangled with myriad purposes. Catherine Hall asserts that “[e]mpire … was indeed constitutive of English masculinities.”109 Little surprise, then, that tobogganing entered the lexicon of manly enterprise in the heart of empire, despite the uncertainty of snowy seasons. Britons received instruction in tobogganing and knew of its Indigenous American origins and settler arrogation, a lineage that was not hidden but celebrated.110 In 1876 a writer for a British boy’s magazine offered a tutorial on the matter: “You cannot find that name [toboggan] in the dictionary – for it is the name given to it by the Indians of northern Canada. They load these toboggans with furs, and often travel hundreds of miles over the snow to the trading-posts.” The author next glossed the toboggan’s appropriation, noting that “[a] great many toboggans are also made for the Canadian gentlemen and ladies who live in Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa, and it is quite a fashionable thing to use these queer-looking sleds.”111 He urged boys to join this pursuit, and another writer noted the manliness required, emphasizing “a clear eye and firm nerves.”112 Toboggans particularized imperial masculinity on vehicles that flew across the British Isles, from Northern Ireland to Scotland to Southern England.113 The captain of the Holywood Tobogganing Club related his exploits in 1890, describing the 450-yard track that could be covered in a dizzying “forty to fifty seconds” with good snow. He also noted the “heavy [coloured] blanket” coats suited for this purpose.114 Did British tobogganers see themselves as imperial indigenes? So it appears. Toboggans

4.7 Brown’s Photo Craft Company, Carnival Princesses with Toboggan in Front of Tepee, St. Paul Winter Carnival, 1916. Minnesota Historical Society, Louis W. Hill Papers, 4454.

and their accoutrements also memorialized Indigenous peoples, recalled explicitly or implicitly through their use. Importantly, an Indigenous presence in Britain was more than rhetorical, and Indigenous American athleticism was more than historical. These athletes toured Britain, testing their skills against local sportsmen. Among them were Hutgohsodoneh (called Deerfoot), a Haudenosaunee (Seneca) athlete who in the 1860s ran 130 footraces over eighty-seven weeks, with many wins to his

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4.8 Joseph Nash, Afghanistan – Tobogganing at Cabul, engraving, 1880. The Graphic (London, uk), 15 May 1880. Private collection. Bridgeman Images.

credit. At thirty-three years of age, he ran ten-mile and six-mile courses in front of thousands, demonstrating talent that “drew attention to the possible shortcomings of English bodies.” Other athletes followed, and as Coll Thrush shows, a continuous flow of celebrated and anonymous Indigenous travellers moved through the heart of empire.115 In the summer of 1867, London’s Crystal Palace cricket grounds hosted exhibition games of lacrosse, with a snowshoe race on grass. The teams were comprised of “18 Red Indians who had the honour of appearing before the Prince of Wales during his Royal Highness’s visit to Canada.”116 In the summer of 1883, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) athletes competed against Euro-Canadian lacrosse players in matches throughout Britain that drew thousands, with snowshoe races added. These events followed a previous tour in 1876, where fierce competition was on show, during which newspapers had shrilly editorialized on the ethnicity of the competitors.117 Despite robust evidence to the contrary, claims of Indigenous inferiority and imminent demise persisted. One British expatriate

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described his experiences in Quebec in such terms: “[Tobogganing] used to be a great sport among the Indians. The poor Indians! Their game is about played out in Canada and now as well in the States.”118 A mid-twentiethcentury historian of elite British sliding in Switzerland revived a version of this canard, describing Indigenous toboggans as “utilitarian, [with] … no romance or glamour about it. The white man, realizing the fundamental practicality of the Indian toboggan, began to make improvements and innovations.”119 Britons, like their settler cousins, attempted a sporting mastery of winter, where surpassing Indigenous athletes was key. The athleticism of Indigenous men was one of many ways that they asserted their presence, whether in person or from afar. Indeed, the wool blanket coat and wooden toboggan stood as material metonyms of their presence, even if this association was not fully acknowledged at the time. The uniform allied with this colonial sport helped to propel this imperial winter fad, including across the British Isles. The surviving blanket coat uniform that launched my research confirms the power of this trend at a critical period in the “settler revolution” (see figure 4.1). Family provenance substantiates the use of this blanket coat in 1880s London.120 But puzzles remain. In conversations with me, Cynthia Cooper has noted its similarities to Montreal club uniforms, with some being identical in construction. The Park Tobogganing Club suit, made of standard felted blanket cloth, consists of a white ground with red and blue stripes, a classic of its kind.121 The club badge is set above the heart. The double-breasted jacket is hooded in the traditional manner, with the stripes framing the head and with epaulets abutting each shoulder. The garment includes bright red welting down the back seams to strengthen them and to add a distinctive touch, as in many garments of this sort, and the epaulets are like many Montreal variants.122 There is nothing to distinguish this coat from the thousands worn in northern colonial regions; its presence in late Victorian Britain marks a sporting movement with a powerful trajectory. This suit may have been made in London, or perhaps a Montreal club uniform was carried to snow-covered London hillsides. Networks were numerous, part of the creation of everyday imperialism. So, whether shipped to the United Kingdom or made locally, its context is clear. And the spread of the Montreal sporting model is noteworthy. The toboggan craze marked a wholly new engagement with a colonized winter as tobogganers tested their mettle against the Indigenous progenitors of sliding.

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conclusion In 1894 a British newspaper proudly announced, “‘Tobogganing’ is the latest form of sport that our countrymen have annexed in order to show those who have long practised it how it ought to be carried on.”123 Blanket coat uniforms marked this “annexation,” celebrated even at musical events. For instance, when a chorus of hand-bell performers toured the British Isles, they performed the tune “Canadian Sleigh Bells” led by a conductor dressed in a “Blanket Costume of the ‘Old Toque Bleue’ Snow Shoe and Toboggan Club of Montreal.”124 Audiences recognized and delighted in his garb. Similarly, British sliders revelled in their newfound winter sport and added it to the myriad invocations of empire that defined their culture, making it “part of the given world that had made them who they were.”125 Tobogganing revised their understanding of winter, and it may have confirmed their thinking about appropriated Indigenous material culture and imperial power. This fad was celebrated in many forms: ceramic figurines, printed pottery, and even scenes of settler play on English Christmas cards.126 In the colonial antipodes, tobogganing was reinscribed in other Indigenous territories where snowy mountainsides were also used for many imperial purposes. In New South Wales, Australia, Mount Kosciuszko (Jagungal or Table-Top Mountain) offered plenty of opportunities to wield toboggans (see figure 4.9).127 Snow fashions differed in this locale by the early 1900s, but tobogganing extended its sway, as in other settler regions. The Park Tobogganing Club uniform symbolizes the deep engagement with “colonial” winter across the Anglo-world. Imperial livery takes many forms, including that arising from colonial projects. The roots of the winter craze that popularized this uniform have all but vanished from popular memory, and few conceive that twenty-first-century sliding emerged from such a complex colonial past. Fewer still realize the central place of Indigenous North Americans in this global history. Sliding on snow involves more than simple physics. Sliding is implicated in profound historical processes interwoven with colonial and imperial networks over the long nineteenth century, with a persistent, generative, Indigenous technology at its core. The rage for tobogganing was not prompted simply by a yen for thrills – although thrills came in abundance. Its colonial aim was to consolidate rule in what became Canada and the United States. The precepts of this sport proved invaluable wherever settler control was attempted in snowy latitudes or where the symbolism of this colonial winter sport had value. Thus new forms of bodily

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4.9 Postcard of tobogganing at Hotel Kosciuszko, New South Wales, Australia, c. 1900–20. National Museum of Australia, Josef Lebovic Gallery Collection no. 1, 1986.0117.5996.

performance became ingredients of empire; blanket suits and toboggans marked this political passage, with winter acquiring new meanings in the process. The decades-old revival of formal Indigenous winter games offers an important riposte to long-held colonial claims about the erasure of Indigenous peoples.

notes 1 Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 18. 2 Thomas, Entangled Objects, 8–9; Thomas, “Case of the Misplaced Ponchos.” 3 For example, see Bauer and Norton, “Introduction”; Gould, “Entangled Histories”; and Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire. 4 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 49–65. 5 Ballantyne, “Changing Shape,” 451. See also, Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 194–5. 6 Weaver, Great Land Rush; Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race; Potter and Saha, “Global History”; Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires, 197. 7 Belich, Replenishing the Earth.

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8 Ibid., 49. 9 Eric Wolf coined the term “bundles of relationships,” which I slightly amend here. Quoted in Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 1. 10 Belich, Replenishing the Earth. For another perspective, see Weaver, Great Land Rush. 11 Holt, Sport and the British, 208. 12 The term “Anglo-Saxon” was invented and prized in this period as a fictionalized racial concept used to justify land seizure from Indigenous peoples. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 62–3, 67. 13 Poulter, Becoming Native, 4–6. 14 Wickman, “‘Winters Embittered with Hardships.’” 15 Ibid., 65. 16 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, vol. 48, 179. 17 Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 20. 18 Oxendine, American Indian Sports Heritage, 5. 19 Provost, “Amiot (Amyot), Jean.” 20 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 59, 102–3; Vibert, “Real Men Hunt Buffalo.” 21 St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post (London, uk), 18–21 April 1767; Oxford Journal, 25 April 1767; The Sun (London, uk), 8 May 1794; Morning Chronicle (London, uk), 28 March 1814. 22 Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh, Scotland), 29 July 1813. 23 Morning Post (London, uk), 15 February 1817. 24 Oxendine, American Indian Sports Heritage, 131; Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan, 160; Macfarlan and Macfarlan, Handbook of American Indian Games, 173–4. On other winter sports, see Graig, Sports and Games, 206–8. 25 Poulter, Becoming Native, 27–8. British periodicals continued to publish stories that described the skill of Indigenous hunters, including with snowshoes and toboggan. These narratives reinforced the Indigeneity of these technologies even as these tools were deployed in other contexts. “An Indian Trapper.” Glasgow Herald, 17 July 1848; “Killing a Moose-Deer,” Morning Post (London, uk), 13 January 1849. 26 Poulter, Becoming Native, 151–4. 27 Ibid., 153. 28 Ibid., 27–8. 29 Becket, Montreal Snow Shoe Club, 140–1, 150, 151; Morrow, “Knights of the Snowshoe,” 23–4; Coleman, “Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing.” 30 Belich, “Response,” 119. 31 Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds, Invention of Tradition, 4–11. 32 The role of “northern” men within the British Empire is addressed in Haliburton, Men of the North, 2, 5, 8–9. See also Allen, Invention of the White Race.

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33 Morrow, “Knights of the Snowshoe,” 38. 34 Anonymous, Glisssade en toboggan à Montréal, 1853, Library and Archives Canada, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, mikan no. 2898500. 35 Poulter, Becoming Native, 33. See also a photograph of Wendat leader François Gros Louis, an image intended to be iconic of the Indigenous man. McCord Museum, I-20033. 36 “Canada – The Viceregal ‘Tobogganing’ Party,” The Graphic (London, uk), 5 October 1878 and 1 February 1879. 37 Poulter, Becoming Native, 181–2. The badge from this club can be found at the McCord Museum, M930.50.1.512. 38 Règlement et constitution du Club “Le Canadien,” 10; Constitution and By-Laws of the Tuque Bleue Toboggan Club, 9; Constitution and By-Laws of the Taché Hill Sliding Club, 5–6; Constitution and By-Laws of the Sherbrooke Toboggan Club, 3, 10. 39 Règlement et constitution du Club de raquettes “Le Huron,” 4. 40 “Visitors from the North,” New York Times, 7 January 1887, 2. See also Bruyneel, “Race, Colonialism, and the Politics.” 41 Fenelon, Redskins?, xviii. 42 Poulter, Becoming Native, 159–60; Allen, “Maine Becomes First.” 43 Turner, “Social Skin,” 486. 44 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 2. 45 This mode was common throughout the North American French Empire. White, Wild Frenchmen, 217–19. 46 Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian,’” 17–18. 47 White, Wild Frenchmen, 217. 48 “Colonel Talbot,” Penny Satirist (London, uk), 11 January 1840, 1. 49 DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 218–19. 50 Ibid., 218; White, Wild Frenchmen, 218–20. 51 Trevor-Roper, “Invention of Tradition”; Tuckett, “National Dress”; Saliklis, “Lithuanian Folk Costume”; Root, Couture and Consensus; Bertram, “Fashioning Conflict.” 52 Willmott, “From Stroud to Strouds,” 196. 53 Painter, History of White People, 101. 54 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 6, 40–1, 190; Painter, History of White People, 111–13, 158–62. 55 Painter, History of White People, 235. 56 Ibid. 57 Transactions of the Canadian Institute (Toronto), 1 September 1893. 58 On Canada’s role in the British Empire, see Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire. 59 Haliburton, Men of the North, 10. 60 Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian,’” 43.

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61 Byrd, Transit of Empire, xviii. 62 Bernier and Dumont-Bayliss, “Caron, Sir Adolphe-Philippe”; Lapointe, “Wright, Alonzo”; Morton, “Middleton, Sir Frederick Dobson.” 63 Constitution and By-Laws of the Taché Hill Sliding Club, 5. For another example of a blanket coat uniform, one used by the Sherbrooke Snow Shoe Club, founded in the late 1800s, see http://100objects.qahn.org/content/jacket-sherbrooke-snow-shoe-club-c-1880s-1890s. 64 On the example of cricket, see Stoddart and Standiford, eds, Imperial Game. 65 Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 6. 66 “St. George’s S.S. Club,” Winnipeg Free Press, 29 November 1884, 4. 67 Korneski, Race, Nation, and Reform, 15. 68 “Knights of the Tuque,” Winnipeg Free Press, 20 February 1884. 69 For example, see Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 15 January 1869; and The Graphic (London, uk), 12 May 1877 and 1 February 1879. 70 “Montreal’s Festival,” Boston Globe, 23 January 1884, 12; “Montreal Girls,” Vermont Watchman (Montpelier), 27 February 1884, 6. 71 Boston Daily Advertiser, 3 January 1885, 4; “A Toboggan Ball in Saratoga,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 16 February 1885, 7; “Local Matters,” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (me), 11 December 1885. On the arrival of tobogganing in Silverton, Colorado, see “The Social World,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 22 February 1885, 12; for discussion of building a toboggan slide, see Vermont Watchman (Montpelier), 4 March 1885; and on the opening of a 1,000-foot “tobogganing slide” in Orange, New Jersey, see “News by Telegraph,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), 14 January 1886, 3; “Wisconsin News,” Milwaukee Daily Journal, 12 October 1885; and Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian,’” 19–21. 72 Woodworth, “Snow-Shoe and Toboggan,” 339–40. 73 Poulter, Becoming Native, 10–11. 74 “Visitors from the North,” New York Times, 7 January 1887, 2. 75 “Snow-Shoe Men, Down from Montreal,” Boston Globe, 22 January 1887, 4. 76 “The System of Winter Sports,” Vermont Watchman (Montpelier), 13 February 1884, 4. 77 Courrier des Etats-Unis (New York), 21 December 1884; Highland Union (il) (German language), 12 March 1886; Irish American Weekly (New York), 24 April 1886; New Jersey Deutsche Zeitung (Newark), 21 December 1886; Jewish Messenger (New York), 28 January 1887. 78 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 321–37. 79 The body of Dakota chief Little Crow, killed in 1862, was publicly desecrated, dismembered, and long displayed by the Minnesota Historical Society, demonstrating the centrality of land seizure from Native Americans as a defining feature of settler culture.

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Anderson, Little Crow. Representations of this suppression are also fraught. See Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums, xi-xv. 80 Pollock, “Staying in Place,” chs 3 and 4. 81 “The St. George’s Club,” St. Paul Daily Globe (mn), 25 January 1889; “What Winnipeg Is Like,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 March 1883, 5; “A Toboggan Club,” Bismarck Daily Tribune (nd), 25 November 1883; “Tobogganing in Wisconsin,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 25 February 1885, 8; “The Toboggan,” Perrysburg Journal (oh), 26 February 1886; “Tobogganing,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), 28 November 1886, 5; “A Toboggan Club,” Bozeman Weekly Chronicle (mt), 15 December 1886; “Fashionlets,” Atchison Daily Globe (ks), 18 December 1886; “The Milwaukee Toboggan Slide,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 December 1886; “The Fascinating Toboggan,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern (wi), 24 December 1886, 4; “The Toboggan Slide,” Madison Wisconsin State Journal, 24 December 1886, 4; Albert Lea Freeborn County Standard (mn), 10 February 1886, 7; “The Toboggan Carnival,” Omaha Daily Bee, 22 January 1887, 8; “From Great Falls,” Helena Weekly Herald (mt), 12 January 1888, 2; “Here’s Your Toboggan,” Monroe Daily Independent (wi), 13 February 1891. 82 Poulter, Becoming Native, 205. 83 Albert Lea Freeborn County Standard (mn), 10 February 1886, 7. On the Victorian preoccupation with medievalism, chivalry, and manliness, see Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 19–22; and Stevenson and Bribling, eds, Chivalry and the Medieval Past. 84 Albert Lea Freeborn County Standard (mn), 10 February 1886, 7. 85 “A Gorgeous Spectacle,” Wichita Daily Eagle (ks), 2 February 1886; “The Crystal Palace Captured by the Victorious Grand Army,” St. Paul Daily Globe (mn), 13 February 1886; “The Indian Camp,” St. Paul Daily Globe (mn), 25 January 1888; “A Glass Eye,” St. Paul Daily Globe (mn), 10 February 1886. 86 “Local Items,” Daily Yellowstone Journal (Miles City, mt), 31 December 1886. 87 “Our Ice Palace: What Is Thought of It by the Rest of the World,” Daily Yellowstone Journal (Miles City, mt) 28 February 1886. 88 “Diary,” vol. 12, 7 January 1887, Minnesota Historical Society, Michael J. Boyle Papers, P1435. 89 Ibid., 17 March 1888. 90 Ibid., 22 February 1888. 91 “Cleveland at St. Paul,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat (mo), 11 October 1887; “Ready for Grover,” St. Paul Sunday Globe (mn), 9 October 1887. 92 Photographic Times and American Photographer (New York), 4 February 1887, 64. 93 “Their Indian-Like Uniforms,” Detroit Free Press, reprinted in Leigh Chronicle and Weekly District Advertiser (Manchester, uk), 15 July 1888, 137. 94 Cynthia Cooper’s exploration of the commercialization of the Red River coat in chapter 3 is another facet of this history.

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95 Winnipeg Free Press, 14 January 1884; Boston Daily Globe, 16 December 1885, 4, and 12 January 1886, 4; North American (Philadelphia), 3 February 1886; “Dress Goods,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), 25 November 1886, 2; “James Walker & Co.,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), 15 December 1886; Atchison Daily Globe (ks), 18 December 1886; Bismarck Daily Tribune (nd), 19 December 1886; Yankton Press and Daily Dakotan (sd), 23 December 1887; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern (wi), 26 January 1887; Hillsdale Standard (mi), 1 February 1887, 3; St. Paul Daily News (mn), 17 December 1889, 2, and 22 November 1892, 2; Palmer, Toboggan. 96 “The Last of the Huron,” Middlebury Register (vt), 16 February 1859; Sayre, “SelfPortraiture and Commodification,” 19–20; Gettler, “Economic Activity,” 144–81. 97 Zeiler, “Basepaths to Empire.” 98 Palmer, Toboggan, 20. 99 Ibid., 54–69. 100 North American (Philadelphia), 11 January 1887. 101 “Condensed Colorado,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat (mo), 11 October 1887; “The Leadville Crystal Carnival and Exposition,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 1 January 1896; “Denver Day at the Crystal Palace,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 5 January 1896; Harvey, “Leadville Ice Palace,” 95. 102 Examples at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York include: Toboggan, World’s Dudes series (N31), Allen & Ginter’s Cigarettes, 1888, 63.350.202.31.17; Tobogganing, Pretty Athletes series (N169), Wm. S. Kimball & Co., 1889, 63.350.216.196.6; Tobogganing, Actors and Actresses series (N145–7), Duke Cigarettes, Duke Sons & Co., 1880s, 63.350.208.145.7.185; Tobogganing, Games and Sports series (N165), Old Judge Cigarettes, Goodwin & Company, 1889, 63.350.214.165.48; and Toboggan, Novelties series (N228), Kinney Bros Tobacco Company, 1889, Brudick 218, N228.139. 103 William Notman was the pre-eminent Montreal photographer of staged winter sports scenes, now stored at the McCord Museum in Montreal. Stack, “‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian,’” 24–30. See also a photo of the toboggan slide at Taylors Falls, c. 1888, in Kammen, “On Doing Local History,” 3. Group and individual portraits were also produced by local photographers like Truman Ward Ingersoll for the Saint Paul Winter Carnival in 1886. See, for example, Truman Ward Ingersoll, Carnival Group, St. Paul Winter Carnival, 1886, Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10718491. 104 Poulter, Becoming Native. 105 Examples include “The Canadian Type of Beauty,” Manawatu Standard (Palmerston, nz), 6 September 1884, supplement; “The Pleasure of the Toboggan,” Otago Witness (nz), 6 March 1886; David Macrae, “Men and Manners in America,” The Pioneer (Allahabad, India), 28 August 1868, 3; Daily Chronicle (Georgetown, Guyana), 22 January 1887, 9; Star (Christchurch, nz), 4 August 1887, 3; and Hawkes Bay Herald (nz), 5 September 1888. 106 “Military Winter Life in Nova Scotia,” The Graphic (London, uk), 12 May 1877.

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107 Published in Major R.G. Woodthorpe, R.E., “Tobogganing in Cabul,” The Graphic (London, uk), 15 May 1880. 108 “Heights before Sebastopol,” Morning Post (London, uk), 24 January 1855, 5. 109 Hall, “Going A-Trolloping,” 180. 110 Visitors to Canada recounted toboggan exploits routinely. The Graphic (London, uk), 5 October 1878; The Times (London, uk), 24 January 1879, 3; Young Folks Paper (London, uk), 5 February 1887, 84. For reports on tobogganing in the United Kingdom, see “Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester,” The Graphic (London, uk), 7 May 1887, 494; and “Colonial and Indian Exhibition,” Illustrated London News (uk), 11 September 1886, 290. 111 Mather, “Toboggans and Their Use,” 222–3. 112 “Winter Sports & Pastimes,” The Boy’s Own Paper (London, uk), 5 February 1881, 309. 113 “Holywood Tobogganing Club,” Belfast News-Letter (Northern Ireland), 20 January 1890; “Probus School Races,” Royal Cornwall Gazette (Truro, uk), 15 February 1900, 5; “Tobogganing,” John O’Groat Journal (Wick, Scotland), 28 May 1889, 2; “Tobogganing,” Kent and Sussex Courier (uk), 10 February 1888, 7; “Tobogganing on the Slopes of Castle Hill, Dover, 1888,” The Graphic (London, uk); Young Folks Paper (London, uk), 5 February 1887, 84; Harper’s Young People 6 (1885). 114 “Holywood Tobogganing Club,” Belfast News-Letter (Northern Ireland), 20 January 1890. 115 Thrush, Indigenous London, 182, 178–84; Poulter, Becoming Native, 157; “Deerfoot in Cambridge: Grand Pedestrian Display on Fenner’s Ground,” Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal (uk), 7 December 1861, 8; “Death of Deerfoot,” The Graphic (London, uk), 8 February 1896, 18. 116 The Standard (London, uk), 6 August 1867, 1; Morning Post (London, uk), 8 August 1867, 1. 117 Sheffield Daily Telegraph (uk), 5 January 1883, 4; Dundee Courier and Argus (Scotland), 21 May 1883; Sheffield Daily Telegraph (uk), 11 June 1883, 4; Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury (uk), 23 June 1883, 3; York Herald (uk), 16 July 1883, 12. 118 David Macrae, “Men and Manners in America,” The Pioneer (Allahabad, India), 28 August 1868, 3. 119 Seth-Smith, Cresta Run, 15. 120 Author’s personal communication with a family member respecting the blanket coat in figure 4.1. 121 This suit was also identical to the uniform worn by the Saint George’s Snow Shoe Club of Saint Paul, Minnesota. St. Paul Daily Globe (mn), 25 January 1888. 122 Examples at the McCord Museum in Montreal include: blanket coat, 1880–1890, wool, cotton, felt, and ribbon, gift of Mrs Elizabeth Scrimger Fraser, M2000.18.1; snowshoe costume, 1870–1900, wool blanket cloth and felt, gift of Mrs John Cameron, M20807.3; and snowshoe costume, c. 1903–04, wool blanket cloth and wool knit sash, gift of Mr David Campbell, M2005.53.1.2.

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123 Leeds Mercury (uk), 21 November 1894. 124 D.S. Miller, conductor of the Royal Bell-Ringers, travelled to various communities to perform and wore the tobogganing suit as a touch of authenticity. Sussex Agricultural Express (Lewes, uk), 15 August 1891, 9; Aberdeen Press and Journal (Scotland), 7 October 1891, 2; 6; Sligo Champion (Ireland), 15 January 1898, 1. 125 Hall and Rose, “Introduction,” 3. 126 For prints of tobogganers transferred onto ceramics, dated to about the 1880s, see Gotlieb, “Canadian Colonialism.” See also The Graphic (London, uk), 3 March 3, 1888, 210, and 7 May 1887, 494; Illustrated London News (uk), 3 January 1891, 3, and 5 January 1907, 29; and Lichfield Mercury (uk), 23 January 1891, 4. 127 “Snow Excursions: Exploring Koscuisko for Toboggan Slides,” Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), 12 July 1907; “On the Snow at Kosciusko,” Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), 18 September 1907, 10.

sidebar four Gifts of Empire beverly l em ire

In June 1878, Dunbar James Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk, wed Cecily Louisa Grey-Egerton near her family’s estate in Cheshire, England. The assembled celebrants represented the formal and informal administration of the British Empire. Selkirk, who was sixty-nine at his marriage, had inherited vast imperial wealth arising from northern North America. He was entwined at his birth in the machinations of empire, with family investments in the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Caribbean sugar trade. Following his father’s death in 1820 and while he was still a minor, Selkirk’s trustees were similarly tied to wide-ranging imperial roles, including as slave owners.1 Dynastic occasions like this wedding reveal “the inner life of empires,”2 including the myriad functions of material culture aimed at bolstering imperial order. The nuptials were an occasion for gift giving, a subject of such weight that most of the full page in a local newspaper covering the wedding was devoted to the presents received.3 Some items might be anticipated, like the “[h]andsome gold

bracelet with diamond buckle.” However, an imperial ethos defined most of the offerings, which ranged widely across geographies and cultures, including a “Coromandel wood dressing box with gilt fittings” from the bride’s father and a “[t]iger claw broach mounted in gold” from a member of a family of Indian administrators. Close reading of this inventory reveals the imperial cosmopolitanism of this age, with some items evoking a London goldsmith’s shop and many others suggesting the long list of dealers in imperial rarities, arts, and exotics. Margot Finn explores the power of “colonial gifts” in consolidating imperial networks, a critical support to formal commercial and political administrations that sustained the intimacies rooted in imperial events. As Finn notes, “the gift relation proved an essential instrument of colonial identity formation.”4 Identities are revealed and reinforced through careful giving, buttressing personal connections or precepts of empire. Aside from luxurious trinkets, several embroidered furnishings were gifted to the couple,

items less costly but equally eloquent. Needlework suggests a different intent or level of intimacy between giver and recipients. Some things hint that giver and maker were one and the same, or at least that the giver had a hand in the making, as with the “[c]rewel embroidery” given by Miss Isabella Hope; crewel embroidery was a marked skill of genteel Victorian womanhood.5 As well, the choice of textile reveals the aesthetic of the donor, who was attentive to the artistry found across a range of ethnic and gendered backgrounds. Examples of a diverse imperial aesthetic can be found in other gifts like the “[l]arge Delhi tablecloth, beautifully embroidered with floss silk” and a “[s]carlet cloth [i.e., fine woollen] Canadian table cloth, worked and embroidered with moose hair.”6 The last object deserves particular attention, as the medium of moose hair was less known within the global catalogue of goods.7 Moose hair embroidery was a renowned art among the Wendat, based outside Quebec City, the fibre denoting their deep connection to the land and its resources, as well as the adaptable skills of Indigenous Americans sustained over generations – discussed as well in sidebar 2.8 Wendat artists benefited from proximity to Quebec City, the first stop for transatlantic vessels, and their village was widely advertised in local and international publications.9 Some years before the wedding, an overseas visitor to Wendake recounted, “The [embroidered]

tablecloths are extremely handsome, and are probably well-known in England.”10 Figure S4.1 illustrates an example of this fashionable furnishing, very likely Wendat-made. William Beckett, a banker and member of Parliament, along with his wife, gifted the scarlet version at this gala affair.11 Their choice celebrated Selkirk’s imperial connections to Canada and was perhaps ordered from the source. Yet, despite the smaller scale of production among Indigenous artists when compared to those in Asia, there was no need for buyers to traverse the Atlantic to acquire these works. Moose hair embroidery along with other commercialized Native American arts circulated within the capacious imperial marketplace that was Victorian Britain.12 These items became fashions that accentuated the persistence of Native American peoples in the face of egregious colonial policy. The goods flowing through the heart of empire were sometimes ambiguous in their meanings. Some might see them as a toll on subject peoples. Others acknowledge the ways that imperial webs allowed unexpected opportunities beyond the intent of authorities.13 Perhaps unwittingly, the gift of moose hair embroidery referenced the many exchanges between Wendat leaders and eminent visitors to Wendake, critical to diplomacy. Anne de Stecher notes how such embroidery “embodied Wendat cultural traditions and brought meanings, significance and value to the diplomatic ceremonies of which it

S4.1 Table cover of black wool baize embroidered with dyed moose hair, c. 1870–1900. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.28-1958.

was a part, and also to the Europeans … who held the work in such high esteem.”14 At the Selkirk nuptials, embroidery was transmitted in a kind of imperial montage as part of a ceremonial process that echoed occasions an ocean away. Despite the distance from Wendake, this artistry served as proxy diplomacy in Cheshire. Indigenous spirituality acknowledges the living spirit in nonhuman things, includ-

ing in Indigenous-made arts. The scarlet tablecloth, embellished with moose hair stitchery, embodied an Indigenous presence, with the object acting as an intermediary for the Wendat themselves on many levels.15 This chain of relationships transported a colonial community to the wedding feast, where its artistry was an emphatic spirit force in the halls of empire.

notes 1 Bumsted, Lord Selkirk, 186; “Dunbar James Douglas”; Andrew Colvile, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Biographical Sheets, https://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/ biographical/c/colvile_andrew.pdf;

trial Exhibition,” Evening Telegraph (Dundee, Scotland), 23 August 1886; “Music Hall Benevolent Fund Bazaar,” The Era (uk), 1 July 1893. 13 Ballantyne, “Changing Shape,” 451; Phillips, Trading Identities, 260–1.

“Andrew Colvile”; Smith, “Halkett

14 de Stecher, “Souvenir Art,” 43.

(Wedderburn)”; Bumsted, “Sir James

15 On object agency, see Gosden, “What

Montgomery”; Campey, Silver Chief, 141. 2 Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires. 3 Cheshire Observer, 6 July 1878. 4 Finn, “Colonial Gifts,” 205. 5 Owen, Illuminated Book of Needlework. 6 Cheshire Observer, 6 July 1878. 7 Wendat embroidered fashions, including embroidered pumps made of scarlet, are held at the McCord Museum in Montreal and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. See Phillips, Trading Identities, 239–40. 8 Ibid., 38, 106–9. 9 Cherrier’s Quebec City Directory; Holt, Renfrew & Co., Ten Days in Quebec. 10 “Nine Months in America,” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (uk), 25 February 1870; “A Narrative of a Short Residence in Lower Canada,” New Monthly Magazine, April 1868, 476. 11 Wilson, “Beckett, William.” 12 Phillips, Trading Identities, 107–9; “The Great Exhibition,” John Bull, 30 August 1851, 554; “Indian Work at the Great Exhibition” Leeds Times (uk), 30 August 1851; “North American Indians Sufferers by the Great Exhibition,” Colonial Intelligencer, or Aborigines’ Friend (London, uk), 1 October 1851, 2; “Mains and Strathmartine Indus-

Do Objects Want?”

5 Peter Rindisbacher and the Imagined North Circulations, Realities, and Representations j ulie-ann m e rcer

Within the McCord Museum’s print collection is a hand-coloured lithograph titled The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (see figure 5.1). It depicts a diplomatic meeting between an Indigenous group and the Red River Settlement’s governor outside of Fort Douglas. Fire and smoke billow from the Indigenous men’s fired rifles, announcing the group’s arrival, and the governor greets the group by shaking hands with one of the Indigenous men on the right side of the image. In 1825 British lithographer H. Jones drew and printed the scene on a lithographic stone in William Day’s print shop in London, England. From there, the print moved between places and people until it was acquired by the McCord Museum in Montreal, Quebec, from an unknown vendor in 1977. The lithograph is marked with signs of wear that record this history. On the upper right-hand corner of the sheet is a hole with tears and creases; on the lower right are yellow splotches and stains; and the edges of the sheet, now cut and missing, were likely pasted at one time to secure the image in a past owner’s album. The evidence of handling indicates that this object interacted with viewers in a tactile way for almost 200 years. The lithograph was based on an almost identical watercolour by Peter Rindisbacher. Rindisbacher is a lesser-known nineteenth-century artist who offers an extraordinary perspective on the colonization process in northern North America. This chapter compares the lithograph to Rindisbacher’s

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5.1 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. McCord Museum, M977.51.

watercolours to understand the scene’s narrative, which is rooted in Rindisbacher’s interpretations and experience of the Red River Settlement. Although prints are typically considered less valuable than mediums such as paintings, they are a complex material form of visual communication.1 Lithography, which was still a relatively new invention in the early nineteenth century, was innovative because it produced a “non-verbal, non-literary medium” that was accessible to a large audience.2 The ability to inexpensively and easily reproduce lithographs made the prints more common than Rindisbacher’s paintings.3 Prints played a significant and integral role in colonial art since they were able to reach a wider set of viewers than any of Rindisbacher’s watercolours. Although Rindisbacher’s art has received a certain amount of scholarly attention, the role of lithographs based on his work in circulating

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images of Indigenous people and constructing standard settler colonial narratives among a wide audience is little understood. Framing this study is Beth Fowkes Tobin’s discussion of overlooked art and colonial power relations. Tobin claims that “reconstructing the social, cultural, and political contexts” that define image narratives “will make visible to us today the relations of power that structure” the artworks.4 By applying this lens to Jones’s lithograph and Rindisbacher’s watercolours, I show how Jones and Rindisbacher mediate their interpretations for particular buyers, choosing to focus on certain characteristics and figures while omitting others to conform to colonial ideology. The narrative priorities communicated by the images contributed to a complex colonial network through the circulation and repetition of the imagery. Jennifer L. Roberts explains that the “eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the widespread popularity of ‘circulation narratives’ or ‘it-narratives,’ which were tales narrated from the perspective of inanimate objects (for example, shillings and pincushions) moved from place to place and exchanged between disparate individuals.”5 This print contributed to colonial “circulation narratives” produced during the nineteenth century not only through its movements between places and its exchanges between people but also through its circulation in nineteenth-century print culture. The McCord Museum’s print is one lithograph in an edition, or set, of identical images printed on the same lithography stone. The reproducibility of printed scenes enabled artists to create a number of the same images and sell them in different formats, including as individual prints or together in print portfolios, travel books, and albums. The McCord Museum’s lithograph was acquired as an individual print, but it was originally printed as one of six hand-coloured lithographs in the Views in Hudson’s Bay, a thematic print series that depicts Indigenous and settler culture in the Red River Settlement, now known as Winnipeg, Manitoba, which was linked by social and economic ties to much of the parkland and prairies across what is now Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota (see map 2). The lithographs in Views in Hudson’s Bay are not numbered or arranged in a particular order, but the series includes the following pages: (1) title page (2) The Governor of Red River, Hudson’s Bay, Voyaging in a Light Canoe

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(3) A Gentleman Travelling in a Dog Cariole in Hudson’s Bay with an Indian Guide (4) A Souteaux Indian Travelling with His Family in Winter Near Lake Winnipeg (5) The Governor of Red River Driving His Family on the River in a Horse Cariole (6) The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (7) The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825 Together, the prints communicate aspects of everyday life in the Red River Settlement through Jones’s visual reinterpretation of Indigenous and settler people. They act as colonial agents by constructing a peaceful narrative about northern North America that legitimizes the colonizer’s claim over Indigenous land.6 In their study of the display of colonial photographs in museums, Elizabeth Edwards and Matt Mead argue that we need to “move the viewer beyond the content of the image” by making images “work hard” and “work critically.”7 Otherwise, images “are expected to authorize and authenticate, and to function not as critical or reflective spaces, but as unmediated windows on the world.”8 Drawing from Edwards and Mead’s discussions on making images work critically, this chapter focuses on the scene depicted in The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers in relation to the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series and to Rindisbacher’s watercolours. It traces the different formats in which the scene was circulated and how these modes of presentation affected its narrative and audience. This investigation demonstrates how active, yet inanimate, print objects contributed to the flow of colonial art and how the circulated narratives shaped understandings of North American Indigenous and settler cultures while contributing to globalized imperial networks.

from watercolours to litho g r aphs: colonial va r i at ions H. Jones’s inspiration for the Views in Hudson’s Bay lithographs came from a series of watercolours painted by Peter Rindisbacher, a Swiss artist who relocated to the Red River Settlement with his parents and siblings in 1821, when he was fifteen years old. In 1811 the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc)

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had granted land to Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, a major investor in this corporation.9 Selkirk intended to create a settlement for Scottish Highlanders who were persecuted and had been dispossessed of their homeland. His scheme would give them an opportunity to make a new way of life in a new land, and he later extended it to include a group of Swiss settlers.10 The area was already home to several Indigenous groups, including the Assiniboine in the area southwest of Lake Winnipeg, the Cree to the north of Lake Winnipeg, and the Ojibwe to the west of Lake Superior, and there were seasonally resident Cree and Ojibwe populations in the settlement itself.11 The region was also a key part of the fur trade network, which resulted in a large population of Métis communities from unions between Indigenous and European people. Fort Douglas, the location depicted in The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers, was one of the major hbc posts in the Red River area and was home to the governor of the Red River Settlement. The post was established in 1813 as part of the corporation’s attempt to dominate the fur trade by controlling supply lines.12 It was close to Fort Gibraltar, a post run by the hbc’s rival, the North West Company. By 1821 the hbc and the North West Company had merged into one enterprise.13 Combining the two rival fur-trading companies resolved trapping tensions between the employees, but it also eliminated more than half of the jobs.14 In addition to the unemployment conditions, the settlement struggled to sustain itself. The fur trade was in decline, and those who attempted farming were plagued with harsh winters and invasive pests. This decline placed an economic burden on the hbc, as the inhabitants of the settlement, including Indigenous and settler communities, became significantly more dependent on the company. Despite the dire realities in the Red River Settlement, Selkirk hoped to create a prosperous farming community and advertised in Europe with the ambition to increase the settlement’s population and prosperity by attracting additional European immigrants.15 Rindisbacher and his family were one of 200 Swiss families to immigrate to the settlement.16 Selkirk promised each Swiss family “a house and one hundred acres of land.”17 When the Swiss families arrived at the settlement, they were surprised that no housing or supplies had been arranged.18 The families were also without the majority of their belongings since the hbc was not equipped to transport their baggage from York Factory, the first hbc post that they stayed at after disembarking from their voyage.19 In a letter from Rindisbacher’s father to a friend, he claimed that the hbc had “cheated” him, and he begged his friend for help.20 “Justice

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and police are bad here, so that the right of the fist is [almost] valid … The raw, cold-blooded Englishman, whose trade spirit borders almost on inhumanity, worries about nothing except that which [favours] his trade with the wild people, of whom we see individuals each day.”21 The Swiss were expected to remain in the settlement, despite the difficult conditions, in order to comply with their portion of the hbc contract. The contract required the Swiss to farm and produce supplies that would contribute to settler colonization.22 In 1822 fourteen Swiss settlers wrote to the hbc to complain about the deplorable conditions, claiming that the settlers were “treated like slaves.”23 Despite repeated negotiations, the Swiss families were forced to abide by their contract with the hbc and stay in the settlement until a devastating flood destroyed Fort Douglas in 1826.24 While living in Red River, Rindisbacher worked as a clerk for the hbc and sold a number of watercolours to local hbc officers.25 Anne Morand differentiates Rindisbacher from other nineteenth-century settler artists, such as the American artist George Catlin, by claiming that Rindisbacher was a product of colonization and lived on the frontier, whereas Catlin and other nineteenth-century sojourners purposefully visited the frontier on a temporary basis in order to record Indigenous life.26 Rindisbacher’s viewpoint of the settlement was complex since he was not part of the dominant colonial power that colonized the area, but he was also not outside the colonial system. Despite the Swiss families’ difficulties with the hbc, they did not immigrate to the Red River Settlement to assimilate into existing fur trade societies. They immigrated to form their own separate community within a colonial framework that sought to displace Indigenous communities. Although Rindisbacher had a unique perspective of the Red River Settlement, his work reflects the popular tastes of European and Euro–North American buyers. Rindisbacher’s first substantial commission was a series of watercolours painted for Andrew Bulger, the governor of the Red River Settlement from 1821 to 1823, which depicted scenes from Bulger’s life in the settlement.27 This was likely a major commission, not only for its size, as Rindisbacher allegedly painted a total of six watercolours for Bulger, but also because it increased Rindisbacher’s standing with other potential buyers in the hbc network. When Robert Parker Pelly replaced Bulger as governor in 1823, he became interested in the watercolours that Rindisbacher had painted for Bulger and commissioned the artist to produce variations of the same scenes. Patricia Mainardi explains that when artists make a copy of their own work, we classify the copy by its resemblance to the original artwork.28 If the

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copy is identical to the original, it is considered a repetition. If the copy differs from the original in content but the theme stays the same, it is a variation. Rindisbacher’s watercolours appealed to both governors since the image variations constructed aspects of colonial ideology that were upheld by hbc officers’ placement and duties in the colony. When Pelly left the Red River Settlement in 1825 and returned to England, he took his watercolours with him and had them lithographed by Jones, creating the Views in Hudson’s Bay.29 Thereafter, the Hudson’s Bay Company received a “series of images” from Pelly in 1829 that depicted the customs and “tribes of Indians” in the hbc region.30 Company officials were plainly pleased with the subject matter and its representation, and they sold the images to buyers living in Upper Canada and issued payment to Pelly for this sale.31 The images were likely sold to retired hbc officers who wanted to commemorate their service with the company. Despite this information on the sale of the print series, and after extensive research in the hbc archives, there are still many unanswered questions about the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series. It is unclear how many sets of the print series were created in England, as there is little primary information about the print series’ publication, its publisher, or its lithographer. Also ambiguous is which watercolours were used by Jones to create the Views in Hudson’s Bay lithographs because we do not know what happened to Pelly’s collection of Rindisbacher’s watercolours. As copyright laws during the nineteenth century did not uphold the standards of today, we do not know whether Rindisbacher was aware that his watercolours were used as the inspiration for the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series or whether he benefited from the sales. To complicate matters, Rindisbacher made a practice of creating variations of the same scenes. Laura Peers explains that Rindisbacher “was a good judge of his patrons’ desires” and created multiple variations of the same scenes that he knew would sell.32 This makes it difficult to link Rindisbacher’s watercolours to Pelly and the Views in Hudson’s Bay since none of Jones’s lithographs are exact copies of Rindisbacher’s watercolour variations. Three of Rindisbacher’s watercolours are similar to Jones’s lithographic scene The Red Lake Indians Salute Governor Bulger at Fort Douglas (see figure 5.2), A War Party at Fort Douglas Discharging Their Guns in the Air as a Token of Peaceable Intentions (see figure 5.3), and Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell at Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1815 (see figure 5.4). The watercolours show that Rindisbacher omitted or added figures, objects, and attire in his variations. For instance, the watercolour A War Party at Fort

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Douglas is the only depiction of Bulger dressed in a blue collared coat rather than a military uniform, a choice that Jones also adopted in the lithographic variation of the scene. In the watercolour Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell, the scenery appears to be the same as in the rest of the images – with the river to the left and the fort in the background on the right – but the location in the title is different. Before Bulger was governor of the Red River Settlement, he served as captain of the Royal Newfoundland Fencible Regiment and was stationed at Prairie du Chien. Bulger commissioned Rindisbacher to create the watercolour in memory of “saying farewell to his [Indigenous] allies when he abandoned Fort Mackay at the close of the War of 1812.”33 The changes in Rindisbacher’s watercolour variations show the malleability in depicting Indigenous and settler encounters. Rindisbacher did not strictly paint what he witnessed in Red River; his interpretations suited wider political purposes, including the tastes of his patrons. Comparing the watercolours to the lithographic variation shows that Rindisbacher was driven by aesthetic priorities. Unlike Jones, Rindisbacher painstakingly added details to figures and their attire, such as the Indigenous men’s finely painted silver nose piercings or the precisely spaced dots that look like seams on the Indigenous men’s leggings. The Indigenous men in the watercolours also have tattoos and painted faces, which are omitted by Jones. As Rindisbacher learned how to paint from a miniaturist painter, his training likely affected the way he perceived and interpreted subjects.34 Mary Allodi claims that the artist “was a miniature painter at heart … His [Indigenous] costumes are painted bead by bead, feather by feather.”35 The intricate details included in Rindisbacher’s watercolours suggest that the artist tried to make the scenes more personal and convincing for the buyer. Rindisbacher’s imagery portrays “aspects of colonial culture … the nostalgia of colonial agents for the adventures of living in the wilderness, enjoying an exotic and uncivilized lifestyle.”36 The artist directly targeted an audience of colonialists in the Red River Settlement who wanted memorabilia of the area; his images appealed particularly to hbc officers, like Bulger and Pelly, as it gave them

5.2 Opposite top Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Indians Salute Governor Bulger at Fort Douglas, ink and watercolour, 1822–24. Manitoba Museum, hbc 83-23.

5.3 Opposite bottom Peter Rindisbacher, A War Party at Fort Douglas Discharging Their Guns in the Air as a Token of Their Peaceable Intentions, ink and watercolour 1823. Royal Ontario Museum, 951.87.3.

5.4 Peter Rindisbacher, Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell at Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1815, ink and watercolour, 1823. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1968.262.

physical memories to take back to Britain or other retirement venues after their service in the settlement ended. Even though Jones simplified the scene, he copied the way that Rindisbacher composed the image. The figures located in the image’s foreground make viewers feel as though they are close to the interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups, witnessing it as it takes place. This sense of immediacy makes the scene seem real. Marcia Pointon asserts that portraits combine elements of fiction and reality: “Portraiture is a slippery and seductive art; it encourages us to feel that then is now and now is then. It seems to offer factual data while simultaneously inviting a subjective response. It offers – in its finest manifestations – an illusion of timelessness, the impression that we can know people other than ourselves and, especially, those among the unnumbered and voiceless dead.”37 Constructing the scene in this way distracts from the fact that the narrative is a combination of first-hand accounts and mediations based on colonial art market tastes. Reinterpreting Rindisbacher’s watercolours with a lithographic process enabled Jones to increase the scene’s exposure in colonial art markets, as there

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was an appetite for such portrayals. Lithographs look similar to watercolour paintings, but they take less time and are less expensive to reproduce. Alois Senefelder, a German playwright, first developed lithography in 1796, using the repulsion of water and grease to cause the ink applied to the stone to imprint an image onto the paper that is pressed to the stone.38 The inscription “del” next to “H. Jones” at the bottom left of the image in the McCord Museum’s lithograph is an abbreviation of the Latin word delineavit, meaning “drawn” – or drawn on stone.39 The lithographic process allowed the makers to duplicate the scenes inexpensively and to advertise the images to a larger audience than Rindisbacher could reach in the Red River Settlement. Publishers displayed the title pages of print series in bookshops or in the street to publicly advertise the prints for sale.40 This form of advertising is depicted in the satirical hand-coloured mezzotint A Real Scene in St. Paul’s Church Yard, on a Windy Day, which portrays people tripping and stepping over one another due to the distracting print advertisements pasted outside a shop (see figure 5.5). The title page of the Views in Hudson’s Bay (see figure 5.6) advertises the lithographs with the following inscription: “Views in Hudson’s Bay. Taken by a Gentleman on the Spot in the years, 1823 and 1824. Illustrative of the Customs, Manners and Costumes, of those Tribes of North American Indians Amongst whom Capt. Franklin has passed in his present and former arduous undertaking. To be continued in numbers.” The text “Taken by a Gentleman on the Spot” communicates that the images were created in the moment and on location, suggesting that the artist drew the events with scientific accuracy as they took place. Rindisbacher’s practice of modifying his images and creating variations of the same scenes contradicts this claim; however, the statement shows that a sense of immediacy was an important selling point for a public enamoured with the idea of fast and timely information from the wide expanses of empire. It also reiterates the seductive quality of portraiture – its ability to make scenes seem real even though they are intermixed with fact and fiction. The print series’ advertising also targeted a colonial market with a longestablished interest in North American Indigenous culture. Tobin explains that images depicting diplomacy between Indigenous and European groups “tapped into an already existing tradition – the iconographic representation of a European and a Native American treating peacefully together.”41 The diplomatic exchange between the groups signalled “the non-violent transfer of [Indigenous] lands to white colonists.”42 This colonial ideology is reinforced on the print series’ title page by the mention of “Capt. Franklin” and

5.5 Right Robert Dighton, A Real Scene in St. Paul’s Church Yard, on a Windy Day, hand-coloured mezzotint, 1783. Library of Congress, Washington, dc, lc-uszc2-6414.

5.6 Below H. Jones, Views in Hudson’s Bay, 1825. Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Views in Hudson’s Bay Fonds, N7563.

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his explorations of northern lands. Sir John Franklin was a British explorer who attempted to find the Northwest Passage in the early nineteenth century. British and North American newspapers faithfully followed his land expeditions of the northern North American frontier in 1819–21 and 1825–27.43 Although print series were commonly dedicated to significant public figures in order to increase sales,44 the mention of Franklin, like the ethnographic quality of lithographic “views,” purposefully advertised the prints as visual extensions of colonial mapping and tacit British land claims to these spaces. In 1825 Franklin embarked on his second exploration to map the Arctic’s terrain, and he kept the public updated on his journey by sending letters to the press about his current location and its conditions. He also described his surveying trips for the public in travel books, a popular print genre during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gillian Poulter explains that explorers like Franklin would create or purchase drawings and watercolours as souvenirs of their travels and subsequently publish the images in lithographic format in travel books.45 Although not all of Franklin’s imagery depicted Indigenous people, the images that do are similar to Rindisbacher’s and Jones’s images since they distinguish Indigenous people from colonialists, notably by their clothing. Poulter contends that the “images appear to codify and naturalize the position of [Indigenous] people within the colonial social hierarchy, thereby providing a basis for the creation of colonial identity.”46 Rindisbacher’s and Jones’s images codified Indigenous people through dress by repeatedly portraying them in generic attire – such as with feathers and moccasins – that differentiated Indigenous people from colonialists while masking individual identities and unique cultures. The codified social hierarchy communicated in travel imagery established a commonality between British subjects and colonialists by visually separating them from Indigenous people. This connection was a vital aspect of colonialism, as it enabled images to adopt “a delegatory function, forging and maintaining social links across vast ranges of space.”47 Colonial imagery decreased the distance between Britain and the North American frontier, even though the identities formed by settlers living in North America were vastly different from the British subjects living in the metropole. The narratives circulated through The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers were also framed within colonial ideology. The scene and its variations were likely based on Governor Bulger’s public farewell to the Red River Settlement in April 1823. The communities in the Red River Settlement gathered at Fort Douglas to say goodbye to Bulger; he also issued his own public

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reply to their formal address. The statements in this exchange were handwritten and later preserved in the hbc archives. In the documents, the “inhabitants” state their “unfeigned regret” at hearing that Bulger will be leaving the settlement by the summer – mere months away.48 It is unclear which residents of the Red River Settlement are included under “inhabitants,” but considering the Swiss settlers’ opinions on the hbc, it is unlikely that this address speaks for the settler population as a whole. According to the archival documents, Bulger replied to the Red River Settlement communities’ farewell by communicating his “pleasure” in finding that the communities were “satisfied” with his administration, and he thanked his listeners “for the gratifying manner in which your sentiments have been conveyed to me.”49 He explained that he must retire his position due to his rapidly declining health, claiming that he would not “survive six months” if he remained in his station.50 Bulger’s health problems may also have been a strategic fiction, reflecting his dislike of the Red River Settlement. The governor found the winters in this locale particularly hard, and he complained in a personal letter to Andrew Colville, a fellow hbc officer, of the “excessive coldness” of his room, which, at one point, was “completely filled with snow.” He sarcastically conveyed his feelings about the situation: “You will judge from this what a comfortable, what a happy life, mine must be.”51 Bulger’s farewell to the Red River Settlement is visually and thematically an equivalent event to Bulger’s farewell to Fort Mackay in Prairie du Chien. The similar scenes make it clear that Rindisbacher used Bulger’s farewell as a diplomatic trope, which he changed and modified to suit his buyer’s needs. In Jones’s reinterpretation of the scene, the image title states that the Indigenous group is “visiting” the governor, suggesting that the two groups were brought together by an established relationship between them rather than by an important event that warranted their peaceful interactions. The diplomatic relationship that the lithographic variation emphasizes was also reinforced through a subsequent diplomatic image in the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series. The lithograph The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825 moves the Indigenous and settler groups inside Fort Douglas to portray a meeting in the Colony House (see figure 5.7). The settlers on the right side of the image were likely members of the Council of Assiniboia since the council ensured the adherence to British law in the Red River Settlement and gathered to record grievances and settle matters by vote.52 There is no indication in the Council of Assiniboia’s minutes from 1822 to 1823 that the members met with a particular Indigenous leader or group.

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However, in 1822 Bulger repeatedly discussed meeting with Peguis, a leader of an Ojibwe community from the Red River area, as shown in a published account of his letters. In Bulger’s letter of 7 December 1822, he wrote again to Colville about his situation at Red River and his interactions with Peguis. According to Bulger, on 15 September 1822 Peguis “intimated a desire to hold a council” with Bulger, which he “immediately complied with.”53 Bulger explained that Peguis was unhappy with how the Ojibwe had been treated by the hbc and by Selkirk since signing the 1817 treaty: “I asked Pigowis [sic] if he had not, with other chiefs, signed a paper, conveying the land to His Lordship, which the old rogue at first strenuously denied; but being more closely questioned, and informed that I could produce, not only the paper, but some of the persons who saw him sign it, he confessed he had signed it, but without consulting his chiefs and young men, who were always reproaching him with what he had done.”54 In 1817 Selkirk negotiated with Assiniboine, Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis communities to grant him access to their land in exchange for tobacco.55 Selkirk and the hbc believed that the Indigenous communities had ceded their land by signing the treaty.56 However, Peguis understood that the treaty negotiated a land rental and that Selkirk was to make rent payments to the Indigenous groups.57 In 1859 Peguis allegedly wrote a letter to the Nor’Wester newspaper about the treaty disagreements: “We never sold our lands to the said Company, nor to the Earl of Selkirk; and yet the said Company mark and sell our lands without our permission. Is this right? I and my people do not take their property from them without giving them great value for it … and is it right that the said Company should take our landed property from us without permission, and without our receiving payment for the same?”58 As Peguis disputed the treaty for over thirty-seven years, it is likely that his interactions with Bulger were repeated and that they garnered enough public knowledge for Rindisbacher to construct images about these meetings, events later reinterpreted by Jones with much of the political purpose of these meetings erased.59 In Jones’s lithographic variation of the governor of the Red River Settlement meeting with an Indigenous group at Fort Douglas, it is possible that the “Red Lake Chief ” depicted in the foreground of the image is Peguis, although this claim is disputed, as it remains unclear whether a specific Indigenous leader is depicted. The chief wears a top hat with feather plumes, a blue and red chief ’s coat, a white shirt with a medal around his neck, red and blue leggings, and moccasins. These items of clothing, particularly the

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5.7 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825, 1825. Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Views in Hudson’s Bay Fonds, P-180.

top hat and the chief ’s coat, were exchanged during gift ceremonies between colonial representatives and Indigenous people.60 Selkirk gave the chief ’s coat and the silver medal around Peguis’s neck to the Indigenous leader during the 1817 treaty negotiations.61 The medal acknowledges the assistance that Peguis and his community gave to settlers who immigrated to the Red River area in 1812.62 The Indigenous leader was also well regarded in the community and referred to as the “Colony Chief.”63 In the lithograph depicting the governor of the Red River Settlement meeting with the “Red Lake Chief ” inside the Colony House at Fort Douglas, the Indigenous leader continues to be the largest figure in the scene and the focal point of the image, emphasizing his importance. The “Red Lake Chief,” or

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Peguis, stands near the centre of the image with his outstretched arm pointing toward a man smoking tobacco and a British flag on the left side of the image, which is a possible reference to the 1817 treaty. By depicting Peguis as the only speaker in the scene, the images portray his continuing agency in communicating his grievances and indicate that he was respectfully heard by the hbc officers – although his aims were wholly ignored. Peguis is shown to change his clothing from the arrival scene to the scene inside Fort Douglas. In the Colony House, Peguis no longer wears the chief ’s coat or the top hat, but he still has the medal that Selkirk gave him around his neck. The medal represents Peguis’s identity as “Colony Chief ” in the Red River Settlement, communicating his recognized standing in the settler and Indigenous communities. Peers notes another occasion when Peguis changed his attire from trade clothing to his own regalia in order to confront a Cree council, which is a comparable situation to Peguis’s change of clothes in these scenes. In the circumstance with the Cree council, it is probable that Peguis altered his attire in order to legitimize his authority to negotiate terms with the council since the clothing signified his role as an Ojibwe chief.64 Similarly, Peguis’s change of dress in the lithographs may convey his role as chief to both the Ojibwe community and the settlers. By communicating Peguis’s authority through his stature and clothing, the scenes stress Rindisbacher’s understanding of Peguis’s arguments about the 1817 treaty rather than the disparaging views that Bulger communicated about Peguis in his 1822 letter to Colville. Jones’s interpretation of the scenes unknowingly conveyed Rindisbacher’s possible sympathy toward Peguis’s situation. As Rindisbacher and the Swiss immigrants experienced horrible conditions in the settlement due to Selkirk’s and the hbc’s negligence, Rindisbacher’s watercolours may reflect the reported Swiss resentment toward the corporation. However, Rindisbacher’s construction of the scene was also shaped by his participation in a colonialist art system. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith makes clear, “[b]y the nineteenth century colonialism not only meant the imposition of Western authority over indigenous lands, indigenous modes of production and indigenous law and government, but the imposition of Western authority over all aspects of indigenous knowledges, languages and cultures.”65 Even though Rindisbacher’s emphasis on the “Red Lake Chief ” may reflect his criticism of the hbc, his constructions of Indigenous people and culture are mediated through his understanding of colonial art, which Jones reinforced in the lithographs. Indigenous people in the images are constructed through European conventions,

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particularly with Peguis’s pointing gesture in the interior scene at the Colony House. Peers explains that, “[w]hile conventional within European sculpture and painting, such gestures would never have been made by Ojibwa and northern Cree people, for whom pointing was exceptionally rude and potentially dangerous: it was the way that evil-intentioned individuals sent harmful power in witchcraft or shamanic feuds.”66 Peguis’s identity and pose conform to European customs rather than to the conventions of his own culture. These conventions are also reiterated in the arrival scene, where the governor is greeting the Indigenous group outside of Fort Douglas. In this scene, Peguis stands in a contrapposto position, with most of his weight placed on his right leg, making his posture look similar to a Greek or Roman statue. Peguis’s portrayal “amounts to an idealization and Europeanization of the original sitter and begins a process of hybridical representations of [Indigenous] leaders.”67 Even though the scenes display Peguis’s authority and agency, the non-Indigenous interpretation strips Peguis of important aspects of his culture and identity. Clothing was also a form of colonial visual language that was used to mediate Indigeneity. Vivien Green Fryd contends that although both Indigenous and non-Indigenous men are portrayed as masculine in colonial art, the Indigenous men are “alien” in comparison to the clothed non-Indigenous men because of the former’s “nakedness and accoutrements – trade blanket, hunting pouch, and body paint.”68 For European and Euro-American viewers, this colonial convention stereotyped the Indigenous men as foreign and uncivilized. It also failed to make ethnic distinctions between North American cultural groups since it used the same visual language – piercings, body paint, and a lack of clothing – to construct a generic form of Indigeneity. By simplifying Indigenous people, non-Indigenous artists denied Indigenous people a place in colonialist societies.69 The simplification and denial of complex Indigenous identities in the lithographs are also reinforced by the details of maps in the interior scene at the Colony House. In the background of the scene, the maps hang on the back wall of the house above the Indigenous and settler figures. Maps symbolize “discovery, order and ownership” since they were used by colonialists to rename and reorganize Indigenous land in order to construct a colonial territory.70 Mapping causes the idea of ownership, or the claim of ownership, to become a visual reality.71 The maps on the wall represent Selkirk’s and the hbc’s claim of territorial control over the Red River Settlement and Indigenous traditional lands. They also reiterate the iconographic representation

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of diplomacy between Indigenous and colonialist groups, which Tobin shows is a key characteristic of colonial art. The maps would have reassured viewers through their depictions of the peaceful transfer of Indigenous land to the hbc and their contradiction of Peguis’s claims.

pr inted images: vary ing for mats and inter ac tions By viewing The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers in context with its sequential scene from the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series, we see a layer of the scene’s narrative that would be incomplete without both lithographs. The lithographs placed together communicate an emphasis on colonial narratives – the peaceful transfer of land from Indigenous communities to the colonialists. However, Rindisbacher’s watercolour variations and the historical context show that the repeated colonial ideology conceals underlying criticisms of hbc policies from Swiss and Indigenous perspectives. The scene’s narrative was simplified through its repetition in watercolours and multiple lithographs. Our understanding of the scenes changes due to the way that the lithographs were purchased, collected, and displayed. An important part of this research project required tracing all of the publicly available prints and print series in order to understand how the lithographs were printed and sold. I found a total of thirteen print series in museums, galleries, archives, and libraries across Canada and the United States.72 According to Clifford Wilson, the print series sold as a bound print portfolio – a collector’s item – for one pound each.73 However, the paper size differs from print to print, suggesting that the lithographs were printed on a standard sheet of paper and later cut to size. The formats of the print series also differ from one another, suggesting that the prints were sold as an unbound series that could be formed into a portfolio or album or be individually framed at the owner’s preference. The print series’ versatile format allowed the collectors practical and aesthetic options in constructing their “views” of northern North America. In particular, the formats that allowed tactile interaction – such as print portfolios, albums, or varnished prints – enabled owners to connect with the printed narrative on a personal level. As Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart have noted with respect to colonial-era photographs, “[o]ne senses strongly the embodiment of the colonial gaze, of an image actually being handled, put away, brought out. While such a reading must remain conjectural, it does at least point to an object that was not merely purchased and filed away but used, and engaged with constantly. It bears the marks of its own history as

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an object.”74 The markings left on printed images – dirt and grime from a person’s touch, creases and rips from use, faded and yellowed ink from exposure to light – demonstrate the different ways that collectors chose to interact with the print series, shaping the image’s history as a printed object and affecting the way that its narrative was told. The materials used to construct the different formats of the print series also reflect the collector’s aesthetic choices and our understanding of the series’ narrative. One series, located at the British Columbia Archives, is a bound portfolio. Presented in a book format, the prints are enclosed between two thick sheets of plain yellow board, which are secured by blue leather on the portfolio’s spine. On the middle of the cover is a rectangular sheet of thin white paper with the text “Views in Hudson’s Bay”; the text appears to have been stamped by hand since the letters are not laid out in a straight line, suggesting that it was crafted by an amateur. Comparing this portfolio to another leather-bound version of the print series acquired by the Toronto Public Library shows that there was a wide range of materials that owners could use to bind their portfolios. The Toronto Public Library’s print portfolio’s cover is also a thick board material, but the board is carefully sealed within soft red leather, red fabric, and thin gold detailing, giving the appearance that it was crafted by a professional. The variances between the two leather-bound portfolios reflect differences between their owners’ taste and means, suggesting that the prints moved within a variety of social circles. Within the British Columbia Archives’ print portfolio, the lithograph The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers (see figure 5.8) is the first print after the print series’ title page. A yellowish layer of grime covers the sheet of paper, and further signs of deterioration are present on its jagged edges, worn thin. The bottom right-hand corner of the sheet is particularly dirty and yellowishbrown, marked by years of fingers turning the page. The personal investment in these images is evident. This bound version of the lithographic scene was clearly appreciated and understood in the context of the entire print series rather than as a singular, individual print narrative. The intensive interaction with these images recalled colonial sites with deep significance to the individual or the family that owned the print series. For a nineteenth-century colonial collector, particularly a retired hbc officer, the print series communicated a reassuring visual narrative about the colonial process. Another version of the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series located at Library and Archives Canada was once stab-sewn and bound with thread.

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5.8 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. British Columbia Archives, NWs 972.13 R579v.

Stab-sewing stitches the sheets of paper together on the margin, or left edge, of the sheet.75 The remains of stab-sewing are evident in this print series’ version of The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers (see figure 5.9), which has three holes equally spaced on its margin; in the top hole, the remnants of a thick string dangle from the lithograph, showing that it once joined each of the sheets together. The sheet also displays signs of wear from page turning on the top and bottom edges on the right, but the yellow-brown damage from fingers is not as pronounced as it is on the British Columbia Archives’ lithograph. Unlike the previous lithographic versions of this scene, the image on the sheet is framed with a dark yellow line that bleeds into the image. This discolouration is caused by mat burn when a framed image is

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5.9 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. Library and Archives Canada, 2878052, 1970-188-1754.

exposed to light over a long period of time. The edges of the sheet beneath the mat and frame are not exposed to light, whereas the rest of the sheet, particularly the image, is exposed to light continuously. This caused a yellow line to form around the edges of the mat. The evidence of mat burn suggests that the stab-sewing was likely unravelled to separate the lithograph from the series in order to frame and display it on a wall. According to Antony Griffiths, framing is a “sign of at least moderate prosperity. For the working classes it was the rising standards of living in the early nineteenth century that first made framed prints affordable … In earlier years in poor households prints would have simply been pinned or glued to the wall, or pasted to a wooden or card board and hung by a string on a hook.”76 Hanging the print in one’s domestic interior, rather than placing the image in a print portfolio for private study, reflected the owner’s means and desire to exhibit the work for the household and guests, suggesting again the routes travelled by images such as these.

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5.10 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. Library and Archives Canada, 1989-485-4.

A method similar to framing lithographs is glazing prints; like protective glass, varnish shielded printed images from insects, smoke, dust, and debris, and it enabled you to wipe the varnished surface without affecting the image.77 Glazing was a cheaper option than framing since it was more expensive to pay for a sheet of glass.78 In an unbound version of the print series also located at Library and Archives Canada is a glazed version of the arrival scene (see figure 5.10). It is evident that at one time the edges of the sheet were cut and cropped close to the image border since this lithograph is notably smaller than the rest of the examined print scenes. It looks as though someone placed a yellow filter over the image, as the colours are faded and distorted due to the varnish’s aging and to the print’s exposure to light over a long period of time. What was once a cobalt blue collared coat on the governor of the Red River Settlement is now lime green; the cream-coloured blanket draped around

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the Indigenous leader’s waist is now a deep velvety-red. The wild colours in the image due to the effects of the spoiling glaze distract from the image’s narrative, affecting the way the lithographic scene can be understood.

conclusion The different formats in which the lithograph The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers were circulated and viewed affect our understanding of the image’s narratives. Within the context of the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series, the lithograph is one scene of six that creates a conversation about the Red River Settlement. The print series also gives viewers sequential before and after images that link the portrayal of the “Red Lake Chief ” meeting the governor of the Red River Settlement outside of Fort Douglas and the depiction of their meeting inside the Colony House, further establishing an ideological reading of a peaceful land transaction between the two groups. The versions of the print scene that were sold individually, such as the McCord Museum’s lithograph, lose this context. The print series that circulated in print portfolio or bound formats communicated a visual narrative in which the viewer had to physically turn the pages of the print series to view each lithograph. This tactile understanding was lost in the framed lithographic versions. The various ways of viewing and interacting with the lithographs show how nineteenth-century print culture catered to the desires and means of its metropolitan and colonial viewers and buyers. Even though the lithographic process made it cheaper and easier to reproduce colonial art and visual ideology, the sense of immediacy from viewing images “taken on the spot” disguised this repetition. Tracing one scene’s movement from watercolours to lithographs to different lithographic formats moves our understanding of images beyond their singular content. It encourages us to consider how the same image can have its own story and be interpreted in a variety of ways. By utilizing everyday art and printed visual communication, the scenes normalized depictions of British power in foreign lands, serving the colonial project by legitimizing the settler colonial claim to northern North America.

acknowledgments This chapter is dedicated to my mum, Philippa Margaret Mercer. Thank you to Beverly Lemire for the opportunity to contribute to the Object Lives research project. I am grateful for your mentorship. My participation in the Object Lives project was an invaluable

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part of my graduate student experience. Thank you to Anne Whitelaw, Laura Peers, Sarah Carter, and the Object Lives collaborators for your advice, insights, and camaraderie. This chapter is an extension of my master’s thesis, “Views in Hudson’s Bay (1825) and Peter Rindisbacher: Constructions of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Culture in the Red River Settlement.” Thank you to my thesis supervisors, M. Elizabeth Boone and Joan Greer, for your endless support. A number of art collectors, technicians, archivists, curators, and librarians gave me access to images and archives, making my research possible. Thank you to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta, the British Columbia Archives, the Glenbow Museum, the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Toronto Public Library, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery of Canada, the McCord Museum, the West Point Museum, the Gilcrease Museum, the University of Minnesota Libraries, the Yale Center for British Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the private collectors.

notes 1 Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, 158. 2 LeBeau, Currier & Ives, 4. 3 Yonan, “Toward a Fusion,” 235. 4 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 3. 5 Roberts, Transporting Visions, 11. 6 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 3. 7 Edwards and Mead, “Absent Histories,” 21, 26. 8 Ibid., 21. 9 Bumsted, Trials and Tribulations, 11. 10 Ens, Homeland to Hinterland, 9. 11 Coutts, Forks of the Red and Assiniboine, 69. 12 Ibid., 8–9. 13 Ibid., 98. 14 Ibid. 15 Bumsted, Trials and Tribulations, 36. 16 Ibid., 43–4. 17 MacLeod, “His Work at Red River,” 31. 18 Bumsted, Trials and Tribulations, 47. 19 Ibid. 20 Arndt, “Peter Rindisbacher Family,” 104. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

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23 Bumsted, Trials and Tribulations, 48. 24 Arndt, “Peter Rindisbacher Family,” 104. 25 Josephy, Artist Was a Young Man, 41. 26 Morand, “Peter Rindisbacher,” 22. 27 Goering, “Peter Rindisbacher,” 44. 28 Mainardi, “Copies, Variations, Replicas,” 130. 29 Wilson, “Pelly’s Picture Books,” 34. 30 Stewart, “Hudson’s Bay Company’s Contribution,” 34. 31 Ibid. 32 Peers, “Almost True,” 527. 33 Josephy, Artist Was a Young Man, 41. 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Allodi, “Red River Artist,” 34. 36 Peers, “Almost True,” 536. 37 Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, 28. 38 Godfrey, “Prints,” 603. 39 Haunton et al., “Prints.” 40 Griffiths, Print before Photography, 185. 41 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 64. 42 Ibid. 43 London’s Morning Post reported on 29 December 1825 that Franklin had painted “two large eyes” at the “bows of the canoe” to comply with an Indigenous “superstitious prejudice,” which believed that the eyes helped to keep the boat travelling in a straight direction. Similar news stories were reported in both England and the United States during Franklin’s travels. “North American Expedition,” Morning Post (London, uk), 29 December 1825. 44 Twyman, Lithography, 1800–1850, 227. 45 Poulter, “Representation as Colonial Rhetoric, 12. 46 Ibid. 47 Roberts, Transporting Visions, 3. 48 Copies of documents related to Andrew Bulger, 3 April 1823, Archives of Manitoba, Bulger Family Fonds, folders 3–4, E.153/1–4. 49 Copies of documents related to Andrew Bulger, 9 April 1823, Archives of Manitoba, Bulger Family Fonds, folders 3–4, E.153/1–4. 50 Ibid. 51 Bulger, Papers Referring, 28. 52 Laudicina, “Rules of Red River,” 39. 53 Bulger, Papers Referring, 11.

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54 Ibid. 55 Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers, 67. 56 Peers, Ojibwa of Western Canada, 126. 57 Peguis, “Native Title to Indian Lands,” Nor’Wester, 14 February 1860, 3. 58 Ibid. 59 To my knowledge, Rindisbacher painted two variations of Bulger meeting with an Indigenous leader inside the Colony House: (1) Peter Rindisbacher, Captain Bulger’s Palaver, 1822–23, watercolour on paper, 39.1 x 51.8 cm, Gilcrease Museum, GM 0226.1339; and (2) Peter Rindisbacher, Captain Bulger, Governor of Assiniboia, and the Chiefs and Warriors of the Chippewa Tribe of Red Lake, in Council in the Colony House in Fort Douglas, May 22nd, 1823, 1823, watercolour, ink, and sepia ink on paper, 30.3 x 21.9 cm, McCord Museum, M965.9. 60 Peers, Ojibwa of Western Canada, 37. 61 The medal is discussed by Shave, “John West,” 17–18; and the chief ’s coat is discussed by Thompson, Chief Peguis, 16–17. 62 Shave, “John West,” 17–18. 63 Peers, Ojibwa of Western Canada, 89. 64 Ibid., 160. 65 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 67. 66 Peers, “Almost True,” 529. 67 Pratt, “Truth and Artifice,” 35–6. 68 Fryd, “Rereading the Indian,” 83–4. 69 Poulter, “Representation as Colonial Rhetoric,” 19–20. 70 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation, 17. 71 Ibid. 72 This number reflects the prints that were acquired as the Views in Hudson’s Bay print series, not as individual prints. Within this number are print series that are missing the title page or one of the lithographic scenes. 73 Wilson, “Pelly’s Picture Books,” 34–5. 74 Edwards and Hart, eds, Photographs Objects Histories, 13. 75 Griffiths, Print before Photography, 170. 76 Ibid., 417. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 418.

6 The Wampum and the Print Objects Tied to Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi’s London Visit, 1824–1825 jo n athan laine y and anne whitelaw

In November 1824 four Wendat chiefs from Lorette (now Wendake) began a seven-month voyage to London in order to petition King George IV for assistance in a land claim dispute over the seigneury of Sillery near what is now Quebec City. Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi, Chiefs André Romain Tsohahisen and Stanislas Koska Ahrathenha, and War Chief Michel Sioui Tehashendaye reprised earlier journeys to London to remind the British of the Wendat’s pledge of loyalty to the Crown in exchange for protection of their territories. The 1824–25 visit was the result of several failed attempts by the Wendat to have their land claims heard by local British officials in Lower Canada, and they undertook the lengthy journey to Britain to underscore the urgency of their demands and to request the Crown’s support. There are many objects associated with this voyage to London: medals, greatcoats, correspondence, newspaper articles, a mug, portraits, and other regalia that exist in both material and representational form. Two objects connected to the visit, however, are notable for their symbolic status and cultural significance, and both can be found at the McCord Museum in Montreal: a lithographic print of Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi presenting a wampum and the wampum itself (see figures 6.1 and 6.2). Intimately connected and widely known, both the wampum and the print have appeared over the past two centuries in a variety of contexts and in the service of messages ranging from settler histories of Quebec to Wendat sovereignty. The material connection between the wampum and the print has not been explored, and unpacking

6.1 Charles Joseph Hullmandel, hand-coloured lithograph after Edward Chatfield, Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi, 1825. Gift of Mrs Walter M. Stewart, McCord Museum, M20855.

6.2 Wampum belt, Wendat, c. 1760, with detail. Shell beads, hide, and plant fibre. Gift of Mrs Walter M. Stewart, McCord Museum, M20401.

how these objects have circulated – separately and together – since the time when each was produced reveals the complex intersections of visual and material culture, as well as the shifting meanings of these objects as they were deployed by successive interlocutors.

the wampum and the pr int The print shows Tsawenhohi, grand chief of the Wendat between 1811 and his death in 1844,1 presenting the Great War Belt that symbolized his nation’s alliance to the British Crown. Depicted in a landscape setting, Tsawenhohi is wearing a dark greatcoat with European insignia, epaulettes, and cuff decorations, as well as silver arm bands, a ceinture fléchée, an embroidered knife sheath, red leggings, and moccasins embroidered with moose hair or porcu-

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pine quills. His hair is adorned with feathers and styled in the Wendat fashion, closely cropped on the top and sides and long in the back, and the artist has paid great attention to Tsawenhohi’s facial painting, large earrings, and nose piercing. Finally, he wears two large medals around his neck: the silver medal presented to him by General Isaac Brock in 1814, featuring the likeness of George III, and the gilt medal that he was given by George IV in 1825. The print is the best-known representation, or image, of Tsawenhohi and was printed in London in 1825 by one of the main champions of lithography, Charles Joseph Hullmandel, shortly after he published his highly regarded treatise on lithography, The Art of Drawing on Stone. Taken from a drawing by Edward Chatfield, an artist principally known for his drawing of the grand chief and a second drawing of the three other Wendat chiefs,2 the print is hand-coloured and can be found in many collections in Canada and abroad. At the bottom, the printed text proclaims that the print depicts “Nicholas Vincent Tsawanhonhi [sic], principal Christian chief of the Huron Indians, established at La Jeune Lorette, near Quebec, habited in the costume of his country, as when presented to His Majesty George IV, on 7 April 1825, with three other chiefs of his nation, by Generals Brock and Carpenter. The chief bears in his hand the wampum or collar on which is marked the tomahawk given by his late Majesty, George III. The gold medal on his neck was the gift of his Majesty on the presentation.” The print at the McCord Museum was acquired in 1957 through Mrs Walter Stewart at the same time as the wampum belt that it depicts. At the time of the acquisition, Alice Turner, director of McGill University Museums, noted that the gift of the wampum was “all the more valuable as an addition to our own remarkable collection of belts, in having with it the extra identification of the print of Chief Nicholas Vincent Tsawanhonhi [sic] holding this very belt as part of the regalia in which he was presented to George IV.”3 This comment is key to our understanding of this acquisition, as the print is invoked not as an object in and of itself but as authenticating the wampum belt’s connection to Tsawenhohi and more particularly to the 1825 visit with the king. The wampum measures 120 by 7.2 centimetres, features a central hatchet or axe, topped by a diamond-shaped motif, and is flanked by seven and eight white stripes on each side. According to Margaret M. Bruchac, who undertook a detailed physical analysis of the belt,4 all of the beads are made from whelk and quahog marine shells, but they are not even in size or condition, which suggests that they were probably gathered together from multiple sources. The white whelk beads, especially, vary rather dramatically in size.

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A few of the white beads show signs of desiccation, which is typical of beads that have been exposed to the elements. Of particular interest, although there are no glass beads, this belt includes two wampum-shaped beads that were likely carved from bone and painted black on both ends. It appears that they were included in the original weave of the belt, given the traces of plant fiber, but they have apparently come loose and were secured, during one stage of repair, with red thread. This belt also includes two oval wampum beads that mimic French oval glass beads from the same era. The original warp is leather – most likely brain-tanned deerskin – and the original weft material appears to be dogbane/Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum). Red traces remain on the beads and on the leather warps, evidence that the belt was used in a war context. The densest application of red ochre and/or vermillion is around the hatchet in the centre of the belt.5 There is also evidence of the red having been washed away, most probably from being used and worn through time. Indeed, the belt bears dense evidence of multiple repairs and reweaving at different times, including some obvious repair with a double-twist commercial thread dating to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. If the belt needed to be repaired several times to reinforce its structure, that was not only because it is very old but also because it was used and worn by the Wendat chiefs in the later part of the nineteenth century. Damage and repair could have happened during these years of public display. Made from seashells found along the Atlantic Coast, wampum beads were an important barter item in the fur trade, which was in full expansion at the beginning of the seventeenth century in northeastern North America. The Iroquoian peoples living inland used them in their diplomatic relations with neighbouring nations. Strung on belts of varying length containing anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand beads, the alternation of white and purple beads created different designs – squares, diamonds, hexagons, circles, lines, zig-zags – and different symbols, as well as pipes, hatchets, human or animal figures, buildings, letters, and numbers. Belts were offered during formal meetings to confirm what had been said and to make the speeches official. The British superintendent of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson, clearly explained this political function to DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York, in 1753: “[I]t is obvious to all who are the least acquainted with Indian affairs, that they regard no Message or Invitation be it of what consequence or nature it will, unless attended or confirmed by a String or belt of Wampum, which they look upon as we do our Letters, or rather Books.”6 Europeans also received, produced, and exchanged wampum belts in their interactions with the

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Indigenous peoples who practised this form of diplomacy. Developed around 1615 when the beads manufactured for trade became numerous enough, this diplomatic system was in place for about two centuries.7 Certain wampum belts were kept for long periods to preserve their message and to serve as a reminder of the terms of treaties and mutual agreements. Their messages were repeated from time to time in order for members of the next generation to learn the commitments and the history of their nation.8

the diplomatic life of wampum The wampum belt under discussion was known among the Wendat as the Great War Belt. According to wampum diplomacy, the symbol of an axe and the presence of vermillion pigments are clear evidence that the belt was produced in a context of war. When Samuel Douglas Smith Huyghue visited the Wendat at Lorette in 1846, he met with the wampum keeper, who presented him the “wampum belts from the collection preserved in the Council House of the Hurons at Lorette.”9 Huyghue made a drawing of eight belts and wrote down some explanations. For the belt of interest here, he noted, “The great war belt, bearing in the centre the device of an axe, painted with vermilion, and on each side a row of stripes, symbolical of as many villages engaged in hostilities with a common enemy, which latter, the small white diamond near the central emblem may possibly be meant to represent. This ‘collier’ was used in the early American and perhaps also in the old French wars.”10 This belt symbolizes the war hatchet given to the Wendat by King George III around 1760 to request their military support in the war against the French. In 1825, when Governor General George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie, visited the Wendat village, he noted in his journal that “the Chief made his speech of welcome, presenting the wampum … It had a tomahawk worked in beads on it, ‘indicating,’ as he said, ‘that he was ready to raise the hatchet whenever his Great Father (the King) shall call on him to do so.’”11 Put in the context of Wendat history, it is fair to think that British officials gave this belt to the Wendat around 1760 when they became allied to the British in order to support their efforts to conquer the French in North America. It is in this specific political context that some early peace and friendship treaties were concluded between the British and the First Nations living along the Saint Lawrence River. In changing their allegiance from the French to the British, the Wendat offered their military support in exchange for assurances that their customs and territories would be protected.12

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Respectful of wampum diplomacy traditions of the northeastern woodlands, Wendat chiefs presented the belts related to the history of their nation in order to support their assertions when meeting with leaders of other nations. The belt that Tsawenhohi brought to England in 1824 was a testimony to the foundational alliance that the Wendat and the British had cemented at the very beginning of the establishment of the British regime on Wendat lands some forty-five years before. For example, during the colonial conflicts of 1763–66 (Pontiac’s War), 1775–84 (American Revolution), and 1812–14 (British-American War), the belt was likely taken out and its history retold as the Wendat defended the British against their enemies. By reminding the British of their constant loyalty and military efforts, the Wendat called on the British to reciprocate by defending the interests of their allies and by supporting them in their land claim against local settler interests. The Wendat’s 1824– 25 trip to England was congruent with the petitioning practice that they had initiated in 1791 to claim back the lands that they firmly believed to be theirs. Indeed, the first official Wendat petition to colonial authorities was sent in 1791, most probably under the initiative of Louis Vincent Sawantanen, the first Indigenous person from Canada to earn a bachelor’s degree.13 Wendat leaders pleaded their case on several occasions in the following years. They were also heard before the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada in 1819, 1821, and 1824.14 Unsuccessful in all these attempts, the Wendat pushed their case even further when they decided to petition the king directly for the restoration of their land. This was not the Wendat’s first trip to England: they had been there in 1807 and again in 1819, and they would go back in 1829–30, each time arguing for the restoration of their territories and each time unable to secure a meeting with the king. In preparation for their 1824–25 trip, Tsawenhohi and his fellow chiefs requested presents from the secretary of Governor General Ramsay “to appear more respectfully [before the king] and as Native warriors.”15 They were apparently refused these gifts. In November 1824 the four Wendat ambassadors embarked from Quebec on the ship Indian to land at Liverpool after a month-long journey; a few days later, led by William Cooper, a gentleman who was made an honorary chief and given the name Tahourenché by the Wendat Nation, they arrived in London, where they were welcomed by the mayor. According to a letter sent by Tsawenhohi to the chiefs at Lorette on 4 January 1825, the four travellers were treated like dignitaries and ambassadors during their time in London.16 During the few months of their journey, they met with several parliamentarians and participated in many dinners and other evening events, during which

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they sang their “national melodies” and exhibited their “national dances.”17 For example, on 27 April 1825 they were invited to a dinner under the patronage of the Duke of Gloucester for the benefit of deaf mutes;18 their presence at another dinner party in London was recounted somewhat satirically in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal.19 The meeting with George IV took place on Thursday, 7 April 1825, at Windsor Castle, where the grand chief, two chiefs, and the war chief were accompanied by Sir John Chapman,20 the former mayor of Windsor, and Irving Brock, the brother of Sir Isaac Brock, hero of the 1812–14 war in British North America. Our knowledge of the visit comes primarily from a letter written by Brock to Miss Caroline Tupper dated 12 April 1825 and published ten years later. In the letter, Brock notes that the Wendat diplomats entered Windsor Castle wearing “for the first time, the brilliant clothes which Mr. Butterworth had had made for them,” which caused them to look “grand and imposing.”21 Brock notes that after some preliminary conversation, the king “addressed the Indians in French, very distinctly, fluently, and loud: ‘I observe you have the portrait of my father; will you permit me to present you with mine?’ The marquess then produced four large and weighty gold coronation peer medallions of his Majesty, suspended by a rich mazareen blue silk riband” (see figure 6.3).22 According to Brock, the king also “inquired of their passage to this country, the name of the ship and of the master, and was persevering in his questions as to the treatment they had experienced at his hands, whether they had been made comfortable in all respects, and if he had been polite and attentive.”23 A fine and clever diplomat, Tsawenhohi managed to find a way to speak directly to the king despite the fact that the Wendat leaders had been previously informed that, according to etiquette, they should answer any questions that the king might be pleased to ask but not introduce any conversation of their own. Speaking in the Wendat language, which was then translated into French by War Chief Michel Sioui Tehashendaye, Tsawenhohi did not address the main reason for their trip – their desire to see their possession of these lands recognized by the British government – but rather insisted on the Wendat’s gratitude to the king, whom he described as being like a “father” whose role was to protect his “children”; in this way, Tsawenhohi reminded the monarch of the mutual responsibilities of each party within the alliance of 1760. As reported in The Times, the king answered “that he had listened with great delight to their affecting and loyal address; that he had always respected the excellent people who formed the various tribes in his North American

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6.3 Medal given to Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi by George IV. Canadian Museum of History, no. III-H-473.

possessions, and that he would avail himself of every opportunity to promote their welfare, secure their happiness, and prove himself to be indeed their father.”24 After this meeting, which lasted about fifteen minutes, the four men visited the facilities around Windsor Castle and participated in a royal dinner, where they sang a war song. The Wendat delegation remained in London for a few more weeks before returning home.

pr ints as mater ial culture Although the wampum is a key object of material culture associated with the 1824–25 visit of the Wendat to London, the prints documenting the visit also bear analysis: there are two prints, clearly of the same hand – Chatfield’s – and one can assume that they are companion pieces. The first print, as already described, shows Tsawenhohi presenting the wampum (see figure 6.1); the second print depicts the three other Wendat leaders in a similarly pastoral setting, attired in the greatcoats presented by their British hosts, with arm bands, feathered and furred headdresses (or a top hat in the case of Stanislas Koska

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Ahrathenha), embroidered moccasins, ceintures fléchées, embroidered bags and knife sheaths, facial painting and piercings, and pipes (see figure 6.4). The caption anchoring the print gives the names of the three men and notes that they are “three chiefs of the Huron Indians, residing at La Jeune Lorette, near Quebec, in their national costumes.” Each measuring 33.3 by 29 centimetres, the two lithographs would have been available through print shops and dealers, an affordable souvenir of the remarkable – and well-documented – stay of these “exotic” visitors from the colonies. Lithography emerged as an inexpensive and relatively simple reproductive process, first in Germany in the early 1800s and then in London in the 1810s, with Charles Joseph Hullmandel publishing his treatise The Art of Drawing on Stone in London in 1824 following several other publications on the

6.4 Charles Joseph Hullmandel, hand-coloured lithograph after Edward Chatfield, Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians, 1825. Toronto Reference Library, Baldwin Collection, jrr 56 Cab III.

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advantages of the planographic method.25 Although prints had consistently delivered mass-produced illustrations of current events, lithography was particularly useful for the rapidity of its inking processes and the direct translation of the original drawing onto paper. Print historian Michael Twyman notes that with the right approach, ink-based lithography could produce 30,000 prints without appreciable deterioration.26 With practice, lithography was equably amenable to the layering of coloured tints and the application of cross-hatching to create an expressive tone, resulting in a print that closely approximated the look of the original drawing or painting.27 Inexpensive, quick to produce, attractive, and easily available in print shops, lithographs allowed information to be transmitted effectively and to circulate easily and widely to a diverse range of publics. In other words, the nature of the medium – lithography – informed its mode of circulation and thus how the message itself circulated. Both the print of Grand Chief Tsawenhohi and that of the three other Wendat diplomats are representations of the visit. But they are also objects that were distributed, displayed, and collected at the time of their visit as well as after the fact. So what is the “object life” of this print? For too long we have looked at images as illustrations; indeed, the very term “image” denies any sense of materiality to paintings or prints by focusing on the visual. As we know, but tend to forget, paintings and especially prints move around: they are picked up, handled, exchanged, and often thrown away. In her book Transporting Visions, Jennifer Roberts examines how American settler paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries moved from the United States to the art centres of Europe. Writing about the paintings of such American artists as John Singleton Copley and John James Audubon, Roberts argues that these artists could obtain recognition and validation and could improve their practice as artists only if their paintings were seen in London, Paris, and other European capitals. Participation in major exhibitions sometimes resulted in sales. But more importantly, it occasioned reviews and commentaries in newspapers, which circulated back to the United States, and it brought correspondence with European artists who could offer advice and suggestions for improvement. In addition to mapping the important critical reception of American artists by their European counterparts, Roberts describes the challenges of packing paintings for overseas shipping; the necessity for reliance on contacts in Europe to ensure proper presentation of works in exhibitions; and the length of time between the production of the work and its exhibition, along with return information on its reception. As she notes,

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“in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the dissemination, circulation or other transmission of an image took muscle and it took time.”28 Prints, of course, circulated somewhat differently. For one thing, you needed very little muscle to transport a print. Lithography, particularly in 1825 when the medium was still in its earliest development, was one of the most inexpensive printing techniques; yet it produced attractive images and as a result was used to document newsworthy or interesting events. The appearance of four Wendat representatives in London over a period of seven months in 1824–25 garnered mention in newspapers and magazines and was an obvious subject for a print. Coll Thrush’s book Indigenous London examines the travel of Indigenous people to the metropolis – usually to engage in some form of diplomatic discussions. He examines both Londoners’ reactions to the arrival and presence of Indigenous people in the city and the experience of the visitors themselves. Particularly interesting are the written accounts by Indigenous travellers of their time in London: figures such as Mohegan preacher Samson Occom and Mohawk leader Joseph Brant Thayendanagea were staggered by the class divisions that they encountered, the rapid pace of movement, the smells, the lack of nature, and the strange differences between the way that people did things in London compared to in their own communities.29 Indigenous visitors also commented on what one might ironically describe as the lack of civility of the people they encountered, and they were particularly annoyed, if not angered, at the ease with which Londoners felt compelled to look at and touch them without any form of invitation. Thrush does not mention the Wendat visit specifically, but we can imagine a number of similarities with the diplomatic visit of Thayendanagea a few decades before.30 Lithographic prints fed the imperial metropole’s fascination with Indigenous visitors such as these.

circul at ion of the pr int Although the circulation of the print and the wampum remains the primary focus of this chapter, the literal circulation of the individual (or group) is equally of interest, particularly in that what is represented on the print might differ from what we know happened from various first-hand accounts. The print, for example, shows Tsawenhohi in a conventional pose: standing tall, one arm outstretched with the wampum on display, he points to the wampum with the other hand, calling attention to it and its symbolic importance. Tsawenhohi is in an active pose that suggests both the performance

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of this reading and the presentation of the document to a viewership familiar with such narrative devices. In other well-known representations – for example, John Verelst’s much reproduced painting of Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, one of the “Four Indian Kings” who met Queen Anne in 1710, and the 1780 portrait of Sir John Caldwell “in native costume”31 – we can see Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders holding up the wampum almost as evidence. The pointing finger, meanwhile, functions aesthetically to guide our eye down the figure’s body and toward the wampum belt. But it also underscores the importance or status of the belt and its fundamental place in the diplomatic discussions for which Tsawenhohi was in London. The image itself, however, tells us little about the activities of the Wendat in London and in fact does not even locate them in London – that being left to the written description at the bottom of the print, which notes the arrival of Tsawenhohi, his introduction to London by Irving Brock, and his meeting with George IV. Instead, Tsawenhohi is depicted in a natural setting and is standing on grass, with some ferns in the foreground and what could be viewed as pine trees in the background. The accompanying print of the three chiefs is similarly pastoral in nature, seating André Romain Tsohahisen on a rock flanked by Stanislas Koska Ahrathenha and Michel Sioui Tehashendaye, with vegetation in the foreground and a sparsely branched pine tree to their left. Despite the welldocumented presence of the four Wendat men in London, the visual record of their journey emphasizes the stereotype of the Indigenous person as one who resides in nature, not in the city. There is also the matter of the wampum itself: historians, art historians, and other scholars have inferred from the print that Tsawenhohi presented the wampum to the king during the course of their time together. However, there is nothing in the accounts of the visit that clearly says that the wampum was even shown to the king. Given the wealth of detail in Brock’s letter to Caroline Tupper, would such a keen observer have omitted a detail as significant as the grand chief taking out this or any of the other wampum belts that the chiefs would have brought with them? Its omission from Brock’s narrative is suggestive. However, in view of the fundamental importance of wampum to the diplomatic process, specifically its status in recording and relaying agreements, alliances, and commitments, as well as its deployment by Indigenous peoples at meetings to remind other parties of these agreements, the Wendat ambassadors would have brought out and presented the wampum at their meetings with British officials.32 Moreover, Jonathan Lainey’s 2004 research uncovered that at least one of the other belts depicted in Huyghue’s

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drawing was also brought to London, and we can thus infer that it, too, was presented during discussions, although not necessarily with the king. Therefore, although Chatfield’s drawing might rely on pictorial convention rather than providing an accurate depiction of the events of 7 April 1825, for a viewer aware of the reasons for the Wendat’s journey, the image fully conveys the diplomatic nature of Tsawenhohi’s visit. The message was clear that Britain needed to live up to the agreement recorded by the wampum. For nineteenth-century European or Euro-American viewers, the prints also fulfilled a documentary function by providing a significant level of detail in the depiction of the costumes of the Wendat leaders, including the face painting, piercings, and other ornamentation on their bodies and the embroidery on their moccasins. The accuracy and detail of the drawings suggest that the four men sat for the artist or that the artist had direct and lengthy access to them. But whereas the print of Tsawenhohi locates the reason for his visit in his relationship to the Crown – evident in the text stating that he was “presented to His Majesty George IV … by Generals Brock and Carpenter” and that he “bears in his hand the wampum or collar on which is marked the tomahawk given by his late Majesty, George III” – the print of the three other leaders remarks only that they are shown “in their national costume.” Returning to Thrush’s exploration of the reception of Indigenous visitors to London, we see in these prints the contradictory readings of the Wendat visit: on the one hand, the representation of the wampum and the reference to the tomahawk clearly identify a political relationship between the two nations; on the other hand, the placement of all four diplomats in a natural environment (not London) and the emphasis on their national costume highlight the exoticism of Indigenous visitors to the British capital and a tacit distancing of these visitors from the city streets and sites of power. Indeed, the prints served the curiosity of viewers who would have read numerous accounts of the Wendat delegation and wanted a visual representation. Although the movements of Tsawenhohi through the streets of London are relatively easy to map, the circulation of the print representing this activity is less obvious. Copies of the prints of Tsawenhohi and the three other Wendat chiefs can be found in the collections of the Château Ramezay, the National Gallery of Canada, the McCord Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the Musée de la civilisation du Québec, and the Archives de Montréal; prints sometimes appear for sale on eBay. Online, the print is ubiquitous, coming up in searches for “Nicolas Vincent,” “Huron Chief,” and even “Wampum.” A 2017 special issue of the journal racar:

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Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review on Indigenous art history features the print twice: once in an essay on the Wendat artist Zacharie Vincent and again in an essay on ideas of community in Wendat cultural production.33 Unlike prints produced as series – such as those discussed by Julie-Ann Mercer in chapter 5 of this volume – the lithographs of Tsawenhohi and the three other Wendat leaders are known to us through their presence in individual and institutional collections. Both prints appear in the collection of W.H. Coverdale, president of Canada Steamship Lines from 1922 to 1949, who acquired roughly 3,000 works depicting Canada’s early history from the French regime to Confederation, most now housed at Library and Archives Canada. More than fifty years later, in 2006, the National Gallery of Canada purchased copies of both prints, a clear indication that the aesthetic, as well as historical, value of these depictions of the Wendat delegates continues to be relevant. Given the large number of prints that were made through a printing process known for its ease and affordability, we can also assume that many copies of the lithograph of Tsawenhohi and his fellow chiefs were discarded when interest in their time in London disappeared. The same cannot be said of the wampum.

f ro m t r a d i t i o na l u s e s to t h e wor l d o f c o l l e c tor s Hereditary in Wendat society, wampum belts were collective property items held by the chiefs or wampum keepers. When Wendat traditional institutions like chieftainship structures started to change at the end of the nineteenth century, the belts were then transmitted within the family rather than from chief to chief. In practical terms, this practice meant that a child would then become holder of a wampum belt even though he or she did not hold the position of a traditional chief. These sociopolitical changes explain in part why some individuals felt that they could sell these diplomatic objects of collective property to private collectors. When Tsawenhohi passed away in 1844, the belt was transmitted to the next hereditary chiefs: Simon Romain Ondialaréthé, grand chief from 1844 to 1870, and François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché, grand chief from 1870 to 1883, himself from a lineage of influential traditional life chiefs who inherited the responsibility over important material culture and archival records.34 At the passing of Tahourenché in 1883, the belt remained in the Picard family, and it was Paul Picard, Tahourenché’s son, who kept it as an heirloom alongside other significant historical objects.

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Mainly because of his difficult financial situation, Paul Picard lost the wampum to Cyrille Tessier, a wealthy notary and numismatist who acquired the belt and other objects of Wendat cultural significance for his own collection. Tessier was such an important collector of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that his assemblage was among the most valuable of its time, comparable to those held by national and provincial institutions.35 In the winter of 1895, fellow collector David Ross McCord noted that the belt, as well as about ten medals, had been placed “for safe keeping” in the vault of Cyrille Tessier, at least temporarily.36 In an article published in the Lewiston Journal on 27 March 1926, Tessier appeared in a photograph with some of the wampum belts from his personal trove; we can easily recognize the belt in question at the very left of the photo. Unfortunately, the news piece remains silent on the belts themselves, with the journalist noting that “once he warned his visitors not to encourage him to talk of wampum. His collections, he said, are his weakness.”37 Tessier’s silence about his wampum collection may have had to do with the fact that three years before, Paul Picard’s son, PierreAlbert, had tried to convince Tessier to return the objects that Paul Picard had sold to Tessier at “a ridiculous price” when Paul Picard was in a very difficult situation some thirty years earlier.38 When Tessier passed away in 1931, his son Joachim Desrivières Tessier gave part of his wampum collection to the Numismatic Museum at Laval University (now the Musée de la civilisation du Québec) in Quebec City. But he kept this belt and the lithographs for himself, most likely because of the belt’s notoriety and incredible value. On several occasions, the original Wendat holders showed the belt in public. The last Wendat owners of the belt, Grand Chief François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché and his son Paul Picard, are shown wearing the belt over their shoulders in some photographs, including in an undated photo by J.E. Livernois (see figure 6.5). Once the belt was taken out of the Wendat community, however, it remained largely invisible, although preciously preserved by the Tessier family. Throughout these decades, the wampum belt was mainly remembered through its representation in the 1825 Chatfield print, whose continued circulation maintained the wampum’s public visibility. However, while the belt was in Tessier’s possession, its existence was rarely mentioned.39 It was only in 1951 that the belt reappeared in public during an exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts to commemorate the 1701 founding of Detroit by Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac. For this occasion, Joachim Desrivières Tessier lent the belt as well as his copy of the lithograph of Tsawenhohi.

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In the exhibition catalogue, curator Edgar Preston Richardson described the wampum as follows: “Tradition is that this wampum was one of the three constituting the Peace Treaty of Montreal in 1701 between the Hurons, Iroquois and French. The Iroquois wampum is preserved at Caughnawaga near Montreal, the French is in Paris (National Archives?). The principal motif of the wampum is the buried hatchet … The inscription of this engraving wrongly states that the hatchet on the wampum was a gift to the Hurons from George III.”40 There are many false assumptions in this statement: the peace of Montreal involved up to forty nations, not just the three cited; dozens of wampum belts were exchanged during the 1701 discussions; and the wampum belt then preserved at Kahnawake (“Caughnawaga”) is much more likely the one that was given by the Wendat to the Iroquois in 1677, which was preserved in the church at Kahnawake until it was stolen.41 The information about the hatchet being buried is also an invention. And the argument that the information in the print’s caption is false does not appear to be based on anything other than a lack of fit with the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. As we have seen before, oral tradition as well as Tsawenhohi’s speeches consistently linked the belt to the Wendat alliance with the British. Unfortunately, the interpretation put forward in the Detroit catalogue was repeated in 1957 when the belt entered the McCord Museum collections: a newspaper article announcing the acquisition, titled “McGill Gets Indian Belt Possibly Used in 1700,”42 falsely reiterated that the belt was given at the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. What is even more fascinating is that until very recently, this interpretation of the belt circulated through publications, books, articles, and digitally on the Internet. If the print successfully allowed the wampum’s “existence” to be maintained despite the fact that it disappeared from circulation and the public view for more than sixty years until it was acquired by the McCord Museum, it is ironic that the print did not effectively serve the cause of the original gesture of Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi. His intentions and his message were ignored. In the 1950s collectors and curators questioned the veracity of the text on the print and proposed a totally new meaning and interpretation. At the same time, as the belt changed hands, it also lost its original meaning, even though the accompanying print was there to remind viewers of its significance to Wendat claims. Not only was the wampum’s core message not heard, but for a time, it was also silenced, discredited, and even changed. Once in the hands of private collectors, the belt was reinterpreted according

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6.5 J.E. Livernois, François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché, Grand Chief of the Hurons of Lorette (1870–83), n.d. Tahourenché is wearing the belt that Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi brought to London in 1824. Archives du Conseil de la Nation huronne-wendat, Wendake.

to the background or the intention of its new owner: at the end of the nineteenth century, numismatist Cyrille Tessier thought that he was collecting “Indian money,” whereas his son probably wanted to give the belt more monetary value by linking it to the historical significance of the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. Of additional interest in relation to the circulation of the print is that the text at the bottom of the print was misprinted. The “T” became an “I,” so “Tsawanhonhi” became “Isawanhonhi.” This mistake circulated so widely that it became the most common spelling in different databases of national institutions and in publications everywhere.43 The resilience of such mistakes underlines the power of these prints and the importance of thinking critically

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about their circulation as objects. It also reveals their informational function, as well as the power and influence of national heritage institutions, whose errors are blindly reproduced by scholars of all kinds.

conclusion Wendat warriors took arms several times to protect British interests during the colonial conflicts happening in North America, reflecting their alliance with the Crown. In 1824–25 the Wendat expected the British to reciprocate by supporting them in their claims of territorial rights. Unfortunately, although they were able to exchange pleasantries and promises with important people in London, nothing concrete came of their diplomatic trip. The principles of alliance had been shared by the British conquerors for some time after 1760, but they had quickly shifted their focus to civilizing projects that would reduce Indigenous populations to insignificance. Immediately after the last colonial war of 1812–14, Indigenous peoples had lost their importance as military and commercial allies and had become expensive burdens. If the logic of alliance with the British colonial power still prevailed at the beginning of the mandate of Grand Chief Tsawenhohi, it gradually gave way to an imperial logic dictating the subjection of Indigenous peoples. This subversion of Wendat political endeavours can also be observed in the ways that key political objects and figures, and their representation, were appropriated and reworked by settler colonial society as part of a much larger process of controlling Indigenous peoples. Once they passed into the hands of nonIndigenous collectors and institutions, the wampum and the print were depoliticized through their depiction as relic items of supposed “vanishing races.” The narratives surrounding them as well as the representation of these significant political figures were changed, stereotyped, silenced, and forgotten. If colonialism works by replacing Indigenous peoples both in reality and symbolically, then perhaps the subversion and recategorization of objects and messages is part of this process. In this telling of two objects’ lives, we focus on the stories told by the wampum and the print that ultimately found themselves at the McCord Museum in Montreal, objects that had a long physical connection in the collection of Cyrille Tessier, if not in the hands of the descendants of Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi. Both objects reveal signs of their long histories. The wear on the wampum was discussed earlier; the print shows a large tear in the bottom left-hand corner, a tear at the top, and a tear on the right-hand side.

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There is also some discolouration in various areas, likely due to water or bad storage, as well as a musty smell. There are creases in the bottom third of the print, including one very large crease across the width of the print, indicating folding. The print arrived at the McCord Museum in 1957 already mounted on cardboard, suggesting that it had been put on display or that its extensive handling required some form of stabilization. Both the print and the wampum came to the McCord from the collection of Cyrille Tessier, who held onto these objects until his death in 1931. Some few months afterward, his son Joachim Desrivières Tessier donated the majority of his wampum to the Numismatic Museum at Laval University, but he kept the belt in question and the print with him. Only in 1957 did Mrs Walter Stewart donate them to the McCord. We know quite a bit about the provenance of the wampum but little about the print, other than who drew the original for lithographic reproduction and who printed and published it. We do not know how many prints were made, how these circulated, or how they were received by a British and imperial public. Both its appearance in many Canadian collections and its continued contemporary relevance – whether as an object for sale on eBay, an acquisition by a public institution, or an illustration for a scholarly article –suggest that the print continues to resonate with audiences curious about the presence of Wendat at the British court. Given the combined donation of the print and the wampum (and the McCord Museum’s 1957 assertion that the print authenticates the wampum), as well as the ordinariness of the print, it would be logical to think that Tessier acquired the two objects from the same source, perhaps doing so at the same time. The wear and tear on the print suggest that it was something that was kept very close to an individual, perhaps rolled up or stored in a drawer. Although there is no evidence that Tsawenhohi was given this print by any of his British hosts, we can speculate that in addition to the coat and other objects that he received as gifts, he would also have been given a print to commemorate his time in London. If so, the circulation of these two objects – in the context of the trip to London – begins to yield some profound connections. The wampum belt continues to hold great significance for the Wendat people today. It is currently part of the national flag as well as on the letterhead of any official correspondence by the Conseil de la Nation huronnewendat. Reproductions of the belt have also been made: Wendat artist Teharihulen Michel Savard made one from real wampum shell beads for an exhibition at the Maison Tsawenhohi, a cultural centre in Wendake that

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is located in the house that Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi built in 1807 for his home.44 And in 2017 both the belt and the print were featured in the Canadian History Hall at the Canadian Museum of History in a section on land and treaty rights. Although the status of the wampum as an object of material significance has long been acknowledged, the material status of the print has been less recognized, a result of the longstanding repression of the other senses in interpretations of visual culture. As we suggest in this chapter, both the wampum and the print provide important entries into our understanding of the 1824–25 Wendat visit to London. And they underscore the need for scholars to attend to the role of material culture in Indigenoussettler relations.

notes 1 Named war chief of the Wendat Nation in 1803, Nicolas Vincent saw military service in the wars of 1812–14 fighting alongside the British. In 1811 he was named grand chief of the Wendat Nation and given the name Tsawenhohi. Tsawenhohi is the multicentenary title of the traditional, hereditary grand chief among the Wendat. It has often been interpreted as meaning “The Vulture” or “The Falcon,” but recent studies strongly suggest that the word Tsawenhohi refers instead to an osprey. For a full biography of Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi, see Sawaya, Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi. 2 Very little has been written about Edward Chatfield’s career or work beyond his depiction of the four Wendat leaders. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Chatfield (1800–39) as a painter and author who wrote art criticism under the pseudonym Echion. He studied with the history and genre painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and was known for his portraits and history paintings, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Cust and Sunderland, “Chatfield, Edward.” Canadian art historian J. Russell Harper includes a brief entry on Chatfield in Early Painters and Engravers in Canada. 3 Alice J. Turner to Joachim D. Tessier, 24 September 1957, McCord Museum, Alice Johannsen Administrative Papers, file no. 333 – Madame Stewart. 4 Margaret M. Bruchac, Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, personal correspondence with Jonathan Lainey, 22 September 2017. 5 The superintendent of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson, explained in 1771, “Their belts are mostly black Wampum, painted red when they denote War … [A]n axe is also sometimes described which is always an Emblem of War.” Sir William Johnson to Arthur Lee, “on the customs, manners and languages of the Indians,” Johnson Hall, 28 February 1771, in O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History, vol. 4, 437.

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6 Sir William Johnson to DeWitt Clinton, Governor of New York, March 1753, in ibid., vol. 2, 625. 7 Lainey, “Le prétendu wampum.” 8 Lainey, “Les colliers de wampum.” 9 Samuel Douglas Smith Huyghue, “Some Account of Wampum,” December 1879, Museums Victoria, Melbourne, ms XM1495, fol. 3, cited in Lainey, La “monnaie des Sauvages,” 108. 10 Ibid., cited in Lainey, La “monnaie des Sauvages,” 109, with an image of the drawing of eight belts. Notice that Huyghue’s drawing of the Great War Belt is not perfectly accurate: the belt is shown with seven rows of beads, whereas the original has nine rows, and the diamond beside the hatchet looks more like a “+” on Huyghue’s drawing. 11 Dalhousie, Dalhousie Journals, vol. 2, 36. 12 The Huron-British Treaty of 1760 was unanimously recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Sioui [1990] 1 scr 1025. It is not known, however, whether the wampum belt in question was actually exchanged during this agreement specifically. 13 Sawatanen graduated from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1781. Lainey and Peace, “Louis Vincent Sawatanen,” 114. 14 Sawaya, Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi, 2114–15, 2121–3, 2131. 15 Louis de Salaberry to Henry Darling, 30 August 1824, Library and Archives Canada, Records of the Department of Indian Affairs, rg10, vol. 494, 30837–8, our translation from the French. 16 Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi to the chiefs at Lorette, 4 January 1825, Library and Archives Canada, Neilson Collection, mg24-B1, vol. 5, 19–22. 17 “The Canadian Chiefs,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 13 (1825): 607–8; “The Canadian Chiefs,” The Times (London, uk), 23 April 1825, 3; “Visit of the Wyandot Indian Chiefs to the Lord Mayor,” The Times (London, uk), 22 April 1825, 4. 18 Roger Auger, “Inventaire sommaire du fonds Paul Picard, notaire huron,” Archives du Conseil de la Nation huronne-wendat, Wendake, 1994, item no. 113. 19 “The Canadian Chiefs,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 13 (1825): 607–8. 20 Although the text on the print reads “Carpenter,” the account by Irving Brock states that “Chapman” was present at the meeting between the Wendat and the king. As he was the former mayor of Windsor, the presence of Chapman at the meeting makes the most sense. 21 Brock Tupper, Family Records, 115. The clothes referred to are likely the greatcoats, made at the insistence of John Butterworth, member of Parliament, who wrote to Lord Bathurst, then secretary of state for the colonies, about the arrival of the Wendat delegation and the diplomatic aims of the visit. Sawaya, Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi, 2126nn96–7. In a letter sent by Tsawenhohi to the chiefs at Lorette on 4 January 1825, he mentions proudly that they received new clothing: “We have received presents of clothes in the fashion of

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England. We are wearing very beautiful clothes.” Library and Archives Canada, Neilson Collection, mg24-B1, vol. 5, 21, our translation from the French. 22 Brock Tupper, Family Records, 117. Made by Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, these four “gold” medals were actually made of gilt silver (called vermeil in French). The medal that was given to Tsawenhohi is now at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec (no. III-H-473), as is the George III medal that Tsawenhohi was wearing when he met with the king (no. III-H-472). Both of these medals and other objects – more medals, a wampum belt, and silver bracelets – were sold to a British Columbia collector in the 1970s by a descendant of Maurice Sébastien Agniolen, who followed François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché as grand chief of the Wendat from 1883 to 1896. In 1909 Wendat priest Prosper Vincent informed David Ross McCord that he was in possession of Tsawenhohi’s medal but said that the family would not allow him to let it go. Prosper Vincent to D.R. McCord, 4 October 1909, McCord Museum, McCord Family Papers, file 5307. See also Lainey, La “monnaie des Sauvages,” 117–18, 146. 23 Brock Tupper, Family Records, 119. 24 “The Canadian Chiefs,” The Times (London, uk), 12 April 1825, 2. 25 Twyman, Lithography, 1800–1850. 26 Ibid., 119. 27 Ibid., 122. 28 Roberts, Transporting Visions, 1. 29 Thrush, Indigenous London, 103–32. Coll Thrush observes, however, that this experience of London was also felt by British arriving in the capital city from small villages and cities, so it was not particular to Indigenous visitors. 30 See, for example, the accounts of the Wendat chiefs’ public appearances in “The Canadian Chiefs,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 13 (1825): 603–8; “The Canadian Chiefs,” The Times (London, uk), 23 April 1825, 3; “A Few Days Ago, the Four Canadian Chiefs,” The Times (London, uk), 5 July 1825, 3; “Visit of the Wyandot Indian Chiefs to the Lord Mayor,” The Times (London, uk), 22 April 1825, 4. 31 John Verelst’s painting Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, subtitled Emperor of the Six Nations, was painted in 1710. Along with the other paintings of the “Four Indian Kings” who travelled to London in 1710, it was rendered as a mezzotint by John Simon shortly thereafter and circulated widely. The original paintings are at Library and Archives Canada (C-092415, C-092417, C-092419, and C-092421), and the portrait of Sir John Caldwell “in native costume” is at National Museums Liverpool. The painter is unknown. 32 For instance, when the chiefs met with the Lord Mayor on 21 April 1825, Tsawenhohi delivered a speech in which he stated “that he had seen the King, whose goodness to the Indians would ever bind them to his service, and unite them in battle against all his enemies.” We can clearly recognize the idea referring to the original 1760s war alliance between the

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British and the Wendat. “Visit of the Wyandot Indian Chiefs to the Lord Mayor,” The Times (London, uk), 22 April 1825, 4. 33 de Stecher, “Art of Community,” 56; Vigneault, “Repenser le temps et l’espace,” 93. 34 Lainey, La “monnaie des Sauvages,” 121–9; Lainey, “Le fonds Famille Picard,” 94–8. 35 Lainey, “Le fonds Famille Picard,” 95–6. 36 David Ross McCord, “Huron Belts of Wampum. Lorette. Dec. 16 + 21, 1895. + other objects,” 1895, McCord Museum. 37 W.A.M., “A Longfellow Letter Written in French Never before Published,” Lewiston Journal (me), 27 March 1926, magazine section, A-1. 38 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Fonds Famille Picard, P882, S1, SS1, no. 3; P882, S1, SS2, no. 8; P882, S2, no. 3. 39 See, for example, Morin, Les médailles décernées aux Indiens, 42. 40 Richardson, ed., French in America, 49, 51. 41 Lainey, La “monnaie des Sauvages,” 266–8. 42 “McGill Gets Indian Belt Possibly Used in 1700,” McGill Daily, 8 October 1957, 3. 43 In 1879 Sir James MacPherson Le Moine could be the first to have publicized the wrong spelling after having observed “a quaint old engraving … on 30th May at the Rink Exhibition of Arts and owned by Mr. Emile Bureau of the License department.” Le Moine, Historical Notes, 15. 44 In 2001 the Government of Canada through the minister responsible for Parks Canada, acting on the advice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, designated Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi as a person of national historic significance. He was nominated by the Huron-Wendat Nation to be considered for this honour.

sidebar five Active Imperial Networks j onathan laine y and anne whitelaw

According to Walter Bromley, Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi left London “loaded with presents to his family and people.”1 Indeed, many objects either resulted from or are associated with this trip to England, and some can now be found in museum collections. We know, for instance, that in addition to the coats and the gilt medals, each of the Wendat delegates received a portrait of George IV.2 This print, made by Charles Turner, was based on a well-known painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. According to Quebec sociologist Léon Gérin, who published his study on the Wendat in 1901–02, one of Michel Sioui’s descendents, Thomas Sioui, “was very proud of a picture hung up in the best room of his house, a portrait of George IV, a royal gift to Michel Tsioui [his father], when as one of the Huron delegation he visited London in 1824.”3 The one that was given to Stanislas Koska is preserved at the Canadian Museum of History (see figure S5.1). On 15 June they received a small commemorative medal from John Garratt, the mayor of London, cast on the occasion of the laying of the

foundation stone of the London Bridge.4 And, of interest in the context of the present discussion, Tsawenhohi was given the opportunity to pull a lithographic print at Knight and Bagster printers in Bartholomew Close, London (see figure S5.2). These visitors actively engaged with imperial London. One year after his return from England, Tsawenhohi received a mug from Elisabeth Bagster, wife of Samuel Bagster Jr, on which is written in French with golden letters, “Madam Bagster to her, friend. Nicholas Vincent Tsawanhonhi. Grand chief of the, Hurons. London, 1825.”5 The greatcoats that they received deserve a little bit more attention, as they may have had an influence on the clothing style of Wendat chieftainship. Indeed, it seems that these coats became the de facto uniform of Wendat chiefs and leaders thereafter. The known iconography from the early nineteenth century does not show Wendat men or chiefs wearing coats like the ones they received in London. The material culture in museums related to the Wendat from the same era

S5.2 Handbill printed by Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi featuring the arms of King George IV. The inscription explains that Tsawenhohi printed the bill with his own hand at Knight and Bagster printers in Bartholomew Close, London, 7 March 1825. Library and Archives Canada, negative C-111475. S5.1 Engraved portrait of George IV after the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The plaque at the base of the frame reads, “Presented by the hands of His Most Gracious Majesty George IV to Stanislas Coska, April 7th 1825.” Canadian Museum of History, 993.40.10.

does not include any either. The chiefs and men usually wore justaucorps,6 or hide or linen jackets. According to German chaplain Friedrich Valentin Melsheimer, who visited Lorette in 1776, “their ordinary clothing consists of a shirt, a coat made of coarse cloth, a woolen blanket, which they hang over their shoulders, cloth stockings, sewed together outside and which reach up to the fleshy part of the leg, and shoes of leather without heels. They know nothing of trousers, using in the place of that article a linen cloth which is bound across the hips.”7 Rings in nose and ears, linen beaded pouches, a knife sheath, and a

white shell or brass breastplate completed their usual regalia. Forty-five years later, in 1820, the chiefs’ coats were described as a “short coat of the most beautiful blue cloth,” and their regalia included silver bracelets between the shoulder and the elbow, deer skin moccasins with porcupine quill embroidery, leggings, a beaver hat, George III medals, and large fourinch earrings.8 It seems that following the 1825 visit, the coats became part of the symbols strictly related to chieftainship as they were passed along from one chief to the other. In his will, Tsawenhohi mentioned that he wanted the George IV medal and

the coat that he had received during his 1825 trip to be given to the second and third great chiefs who would follow him: “Seventh, the named testator gives and bequeaths to the person who will be named grand chief after him, his gold medal, his gallooned capot, if it still remains on the day of his death, as well as his red stone pipe … that after the death of the grand chief, who will have succeeded him, the above-named gold medal be gifted and given over to the second and third grand chiefs who will be named after his death, with the understanding that the third named chief can give and bequeath it to whomever he sees fit.”9 Worthy of notice is the fact that in the following years, the coats were slowly transformed to meet Wendat aesthetic traditions. The epaulettes, clearly reflecting British uniform style, were adapted by Wendat women artists, who added the moose hair embroidery to epaulettes, collars, and sometimes pocket flaps.

Saturday, Nicholas Vincent, the Chief of the Hurons,” Quebec Gazette, 6 November 1844. 5 Musée de la civilisation du Québec, Collection Famille Picard, 59–15. 6 A justaucorps is a knee-length coat worn by French men throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, often as part of a three-piece ensemble. 7 Melsheimer, “Journal of the Voyage,” 165. 8 de Gaspé, Les Mémoires, 261, our translation from the French. Wendat silver armbands bearing the coat of arms of George III are currently at the Canadian Museum of History, III-H-478 a-b. 9 “Septièmement donne et lègue le dit testateur à la personne qui sera nommée grand chef, après lui, sa médaille d’or, ainsi que son capeau galonné, s’il subsiste encore, au jour de son décès, de même que son calumet de pierre rouge … qu’après la mort du grand chef, qu’il l’aura succéder, que la dite médaille d’or, soit donnée et remise au second et troisième grand chefs qui seront nommés après sa mort, lequel dit troisième chef, la pourra donné et légué à qui bon

notes

lui semblera.” Lainey, La “monnaie des

1 Brock Tupper, Family Records, 120.

Sauvages,” 152n29, our translation from

2 Scott, Edinburgh Annual Register, part 3,

the French.

135. 3 Gérin, “Hurons of Lorette,” 87. 4 The one given to “second chief of the Huron Indians” André Romain is currently in the Musée de la civilisation du Québec, Collection du Séminaire, 1992.322; “A Few Days Ago, the Four Canadian Chiefs,” The Times (London, uk), 5 July 1825, 3; “On

7 A Brief History of a Complicated Sweater Appropriation, Arctic Sovereignty, and Postwar Winter Fashion l aurie k. bertram

How can a popular sweater pattern help to illuminate the relationship between cultural and territorial appropriation in the North? As an Icelandic Canadian, I am very familiar with a particular sweater pattern that I spot almost every day in the winter while riding the subway, shopping at the store, or walking down the sidewalk. For decades in the Nordic countries, a pattern known as an “Eskimo peysa,” or “Eskimo sweater,”1 with its bold, heavy yoke and strong, contrasting geometric designs, was popular with knitters. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, similar-looking garments labelled “Icelandic sweaters” had become increasingly popular in North American fashion. By the middle of the twentieth century, North American consumers had embraced the style and its wintery name, which conjured up romantic images of Arctic adventure for trips to the local ski hill. As American clothing companies reproduced the trend, Mary Maxim, a major craft and needlework mail-order company, began to draft patterns for knitters eager to emulate the latest in winter wear at a reasonable price.2 By ordering patterns like “Scandinavian,” “Norse,” or “Icelandia,” housewives could produce for their families garments that emulated the fashion-forward winter wardrobes of Grace Kelly and the Kennedy family. Far from a passing fad, this sweater has continued to make a major imprint on global fashion. In cotton, acrylic, and wool, manufactured versions of this sweater pattern are still widely available through retailers like Gap, H&M, Old Navy, and Urban Outfitters, which

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eagerly supply more southerly shoppers interested a wintery, “Arctic” look (see figures 7.1 and 7.2). People from all walks of life have embraced this now globalized pattern, although few are aware of its original meaning or its complex place in the history of the North. What is the real history behind this distinctive design? How did it achieve such a huge international reach? This chapter examines the hidden political history of the sweater and how conflicts over Arctic territories helped to popularize the design in international fashion. After a brief discussion of the relationship between power and the appropriation of Indigenous design, this chapter engages with writing on the history of the nuilarmiut, or beaded shrug, worn as part of Greenlandic women’s national costumes and the basis of the sweater’s yoked, geometrical design (see figure 7.3). My research then turns to how this design emerged in the 1950s as a staple of North American winter wear as a direct result of Cold War conflicts over northern territories and the larger militarization of the Arctic. I argue that an affiliation between this sweater pattern and the Icelandic sweater, or lopapeysa, emerged in Scandinavia in the 1950s. This newly labelled “Icelandic sweater” trend was then exported to North America during a period when the United States was developing trade deals designed to prevent Soviet infiltration of strategically and symbolically essential northern territories. The sweater fad began a series of reproductions of the pattern in North American and global fashion that have endured for more than half a century. By focusing on the complex history of this particular pattern and the ways that more southerly populations came to be clothed in it, I seek to better understand the historically intertwined relationships between the appropriation of design and the appropriation of territory.

appropr iat ion and norther n desig n Indigenous styles increasingly shaped North American knitwear trends in the 1950s and 1960s. Although they were rooted in much older textile traditions, both Cowichan-style “Indian” and so-called Icelandic sweaters grew in popularity roughly during the same period and reflected a growing public appetite for chunky, distinctive knitwear.3 Cowichan sweaters originated in Indigenous Salish communities on the Pacific Coast of British Columbia and were an elaboration of a longer wool-production economy that dated back to the precontact era.4 By the twentieth century, community knitters had become famous for their production of distinctive sweaters that relied on undyed

Clockwise 7.1 Mary Maxim, “Worsted Weight Knitting Pattern No. 890,” n.d. Collection of Laurie K. Bertram.

7.2 Urban Outfitters sweater emulating the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design, 2019. Photo by Laurie K. Bertram.

7.3 Alfred Stephenson, Gertrud in Beaded Collar, c. 1930–31. Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge, England, P48/16/241.

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wool and a range of geometric patterns that included waves, animals, and a host of creative adaptations that reflected the tastes and ideas of individual knitters.5 To the untrained eye, Icelandic and Cowichan sweaters, especially those produced from outside these communities, initially appear to share some similarities, even though they evolved in distinct contexts separated by more than 8,000 kilometres. Both are often chunky knit sweaters featuring bold geometric patterns that employ the same “graph-style” knitting pattern. Similarities in later sweaters also reflect how mass marketing and the acceleration of widespread design appropriation had influenced knitwear patterns by the middle of the twentieth century, including the popularity and marketability of certain styles, colours, and cuts, such as an emphasis on curling-style or bomber-style garments. Others reflect how manufacturers and knitwear companies also began to blend design elements from both Cowichan and northern sweater traditions, including Mary Maxim’s “Saranac” cardigan. By the middle of the twentieth century, these appropriated patterns from northern and/or Indigenous communities had been commoditized on a much larger scale by a range of designers and manufacturers. Famous Kwakwaka’wakw carver Ellen Neel noted that by 1958 even Scandinavian exporters were shipping “Indian sweaters” made in Sweden to North America in order to capitalize on their popularity.6 Part of the allure of such garments was the “Indigenizing” function that many believed clothing could fulfil. Cloaking a growing North American consumer base in these garments enabled more southerly, non-Indigenous populations to perform a kind of personal, intimate claim to coveted northern territories in Cold War culture. Appropriation, or the “relocation, annexation or theft of cultural properties” by another culture,7 often refers to the many ways that western European colonial powers and Euro-American societies have taken, usually without permission, the intellectual property of Indigenous peoples. The West commoditized and consumed Indigenous design as a way of cataloguing and containing populations that they sought to control. As Deborah Root argues, “other cultures became signs and fragments of a world destroyed in advance and of a difference and authenticity that could be consumed in the West.”8 Root explains that art and fashion, disguised in allusions to glamour and style, can most effectively “gild ugly social and historical facts” of colonial violence and dislocation “with a patina of taste and beauty.”9 Arguably, the fashion industry has been one of the enduring offenders in the theft of Indigenous design. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Indigenous

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designers, activists, and community members have increasingly pushed back against the appropriation and unauthorized commoditization of more southerly Indigenous design in North America. In 1979 Salish knitters and their allies protested the appropriation of the Cowichan name by a nonIndigenous company. Vancouver’s Yarn Barn had taken out a patent on the term “Cowichan” at a time when larger problems with imitation sweaters were seriously affecting the income of Salish knitters.10 Other campaigns include well-known cases like the 2016 lawsuit against American retailer Urban Outfitters by the Navajo Nation for using its name to sell a line of “Navajo hipster panties” and the 2013 protests against the Swedish retailer H&M for selling a feathered headdress that one Indigenous customer, a woman in Winnipeg, called “a mockery of our culture.”11 In addition to the economic concerns that appropriation poses to Indigenous economies, these last two cases are part of a larger, longer protest movement against the bastardization and commoditization of Indigenous design by non-Indigenous clothing designers and retailers that frequently reuse such designs with no knowledge of their original meaning or significance. As both Cynthia Cooper and Beverly Lemire illustrate well in chapters 3 and 4 of this volume, the processes of dressing and colonization are closely linked in northern landscapes as part of what Lemire terms “the colonization of winter.” Cooper writes that settler appropriation of Indigenous clothing was one of the most visible ways that non-Indigenous Canadians imagined their own “fitness for a rough lifestyle in a challenging climate.” Although the appropriation of more southerly First Nations and Métis culture in Canada receives the lion’s share of both media and academic attention, it is clear that the appropriation of Arctic design is also a serious problem with distinctive dimensions for Inuit communities. Historically, the geographic distance between southern Canada and the North has arguably compounded the issue, allowing distant, more southerly designers to repeatedly appropriate and reproduce Arctic design, especially for winter wear, without the awareness of community members. Non-Indigenous designers and stores can alter and sell Inuit designs to southerly customers looking for an “Arctic” parka or sweater until the designs become so diluted and absorbed into consumer fashion that their origins and larger history can become difficult to pinpoint. In addition to the economic damage that appropriation inflicts on Indigenous designers, clothing producers, and small businesses, Veronica Dewar explains that acts of appropriation also often distort the complex meanings of stolen garment designs. In a call that could be applied to all Indigenous

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communities in the North, Dewar argues for more substantive engagement and consultation with communities by the fashion industry regarding the proposed use of Inuit designs. “We are no longer willing to be treated like artifacts in museums,” she states, “and that includes our living culture which is embodied in our clothing and other symbols of Inuit culture.”12 More recently, online access to fashion collections has begun to destabilize this dynamic, and movements within Inuit Canadian communities have begun to challenge southerly practices of design appropriation.13 Across the Davis Strait, where Greenlandic garments have long been appropriated by Scandinavian designers and colonial officials, such acts have also garnered a strong response.

the g reenl andic national costume The Greenlandic national costume features a blend of textures, materials, and styles that represent the long and complex history of this enormous Arctic island. More than a simple regional style, the national costume emerged as a political symbol for the Greenlandic home rule movement in the early twentieth century and continues to occupy a critical place in Greenlandic social and political expression.14 The Greenlandic home rule movement targeted Danish control of the island and encouraged native Kalaallit, or Greenlanders, to embrace traditional arts and styles. Still, the national costume incorporated a blend of new and old design, using traditional Greenlandic styles and materials, like sealskin, to make traditional kamik, or boots, in combination with materials acquired through trade, including silk and glass beads (see figure 7.4). Beads are perhaps the first thing viewers might notice about the national costume, specifically the nuilarmiut (see figure 7.5). This large, brightly coloured shrug is made of a network of beads that features a geometric design unique to each female wearer. The detail on each of these garments is intricate, and their production is time-consuming. As Greenlandic seamstress and needlework instructor Gertrud Kleinschmidt writes, a single nuilarmiut requires 65,000 beads. The garment is only one component of the labourintensive national costume, which would take a single maker up to two years to complete.15 Glass beads have a long history in Greenland. They likely first arrived with the Norse when they settled on the island around 990.16 Although these Norse networks had seemingly evaporated by 1450, the rise of a bustling European

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7.4 Mads Pihl, Women in Greenlandic National Costume, n.d. Courtesy of Visit Greenland.

whaling industry along the coast of Greenland over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only a few generations later, renewed Greenlandic ties to international markets and ushered in a new era of Greenlanders’ access to European goods, including beads. As trade networks began to spread across the Arctic, beads began to appear on Inuit clothing in ways that reflected the continuation of traditional design and new opportunities for personal expression.17 Greenlandic clothing scholar Rosannguaq Rossen notes that the first incarnation of the nuilarmiut dates to 1863, when Dorothe Rasmussen, an eighteen-year-old Danish-Greenlandic bride, chose to wear a bunch of beads around her neck as part of her wedding costume. Rasmussen was well-known and influential in her community and set this particular fashion for local

7.5 Beaded shrug (nuilarmiut), c. 1992. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1992.29.1.

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women who began to make larger and larger versions of the original neckpiece as a sign of status. As Rossen explains, the more beads a woman could display became a sign of how much her family could afford and in turn represented her husband’s success as a hunter.18 Despite its ties to the Greenlandic independence movement, a larger network of female makers and wearers shaped the evolution of the Greenlandic costume and the nuilarmiut over time and should be understood as its authors. The costume has also survived in its current form in part because of the protests of those who hope to halt any further alteration. The deep symbolism of the Greenlandic costume means that acts toward its appropriation might generate significant backlash for a variety of reasons. Cunera Buijs and Mariane Petersen argue in their analysis of East Greenlandic style that some garments, particularly those made with sealskin, could also contain “cosmological or spiritual dimensions,” evident in the continued use of this clothing during major spiritual and personal events, including confirmations and weddings, albeit in Christian churches.19 The nuilarmiut and the national costume also more broadly reflect the central role of older Greenlandic women in the preservation of material traditions, which is arguably affirmed by the central role of women in protests against “abuses” of the national costume as well as by the many months of labour that they pour into its creation. Although some Greenlanders might chafe at alterations to the national costume, Rossen argues that younger generations of Greenlandic artists and designers have embraced artistic experimentation and reinterpretation. Rossen reports that these different generational perspectives have created some conflict. For example, while the Greenlandic designer Bibi Chemintz was experimenting with the national costume for a photo shoot by the artists Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer in 2014, an elderly woman “gave her the middle finger” and shouted, “I’m calling the police for your treatment of the national costume!”20 Even more hotly contested are alterations to the costume by foreign designers.21 In the spring of 2009, community members took to the streets of Nuuk to protest the use and abuse of the national costume by the Danish fashion designer Peter Jensen in his fall-winter collection. Jensen reported that he had even received death threats for his work,22 which included a pair of the costume’s kamik reworked into a mass-produced high-heeled version destined for the shelves of Top Shop.23 These boots, a central symbol in Greenlandic traditional fashion, became the focus of the protest. Although the designer and numerous fashion journalists were confused and surprised

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by protests against the designer’s “loving tribute” to Greenlandic culture, it is clear that they had underestimated the boots’ meaning and significance for many Greenlanders.24 Histories of appropriation must attend to the acts of individual designers, but it is also critical to acknowledge the much broader shifting political motivations that surround the process by which more southerly bodies come to dress “Arctic.” Indeed, the transformation of an original piece of Greenlandic material culture, like the nuilarmiut, into mass-produced sweaters bearing the same design required a much larger network of international producers, retailers, and policymakers, each of these groups having its own set of interests and motivations. This network included the Norwegian handiwork advocate Annichen Sibbern, who was responsible for creating the first knitting pattern based on the nuilarmiut around 1930. Sibbern named the sweater pattern “Eskimo peysa,” borrowing images of the nuilarmiut that she had seen in the George Schnéevoigt film Eskimo, which appeared in Norwegian movie theatres in 1930.25 This was in many respects, however, a hybrid garment, one that copied the pattern of the Greenlandic nuilarmiut while preserving the structure of traditional circularly knit Norwegian sweaters.26 This connection between Norwegian and Greenlandic traditions reflected Sibbern’s engagement with Scandinavian colonial politics. As both Kate Davis and Harpa Hreinsdóttir describe further in their individual work, Sibbern was a Norwegian nationalist who drafted her knitting pattern based on the nuilarmiut as part of larger campaigns to assert Norway’s historical connections to Greenland.27 During this period, Norway was engaged in a conflict with Denmark, Greenland’s colonial ruler, over lucrative fishing rights off the Greenlandic coast. Norwegians claimed that their medieval roots in Norse Greenland trumped Denmark’s more recent title to the island and its valuable natural resources. Ásdís Jóelsdóttir reminds us that some sweaters with bands of pattern across the chest predated the Eskimo sweater;28 however, Sibbern’s more circular pattern for a yoked sweater and its nametag were eventually embraced by knitters across Scandinavia and the Nordic countries. Just as the nuilarmiut acted as part of a symbol of national Greenlandic identity in the twentieth century, both Davis and Hreinsdóttir argue that the adoption of a Greenlandic pattern by Norwegian women in the early 1930s was a deliberate political act that was part of a larger conflict over resources and Norwegian territorial expansion. In other words, Sibbern’s sweater pattern offered Norwegian women a venue to show their support through “quietly knitted

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nationalist sentiment.”29 The pattern was published in several Norwegian women’s knitting forums and spread throughout the Nordic countries, where women from a range of communities embraced the style and began to experiment with variations.

or ig ins of the lopapeysa ( i ce l a n d i c s we ater ) Hreinsdóttir reports that Sibbern’s sweater pattern arrived in Iceland through women’s magazines, and it is clear that yoked sweater patterns emulating the nuilarmiut have enjoyed several waves of popularity since the 1950s.30 Although Icelandic women first encountered the pattern in imported Scandinavian knitting and women’s magazines, a pattern for “Grænlenzk peysa,” or Greenlandic sweater, was featured in the Icelandic women’s magazine Melkorka in 1956, the year that the same magazine issued a special edition devoted to Greenlandic culture (see figure 7.6). That edition even provided readers with a drawing of the nuilarmiut, leaving little doubt that Icelandic readers were aware of the source of the design.31 However, by the late 1950s, this fundamentally Greenlandic design was increasingly exported to North America and marketed as “Icelandic“ to North American consumers.32 How and why did this particular pattern change ethnicities, from Greenlandic to Icelandic, in international trade in such a short period of time? Understanding how the Greenlandic nuilarmiut became associated with the Icelandic sweater in less than a decade requires an investigation into how Icelandic knitters engaged with en vogue patterns based on the nuilarmiut as well as into the political and economic conditions that fostered the sweater’s intense popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. In Icelandic, the term “Icelandic sweater” is translated as “lopapeysa,” although in the Icelandic language this term has particular connotations that are not immediately understood in English. “Lopapeysa” refers to a sweater knit from lopi, a particular type of thick, relatively rough, single-strand yarn made from the wool of the Icelandic sheep. Just as the nuilarmiut assumed political meaning in campaigns for Greenlandic national recognition, its cousin the lopapeysa, with its reliance on locally produced wool, has also been historically linked to Icelandic declarations of sovereignty.33 In the postwar era, Icelandic lopapeysur appeared regularly in a series of confrontations over fishing rights around Iceland, including the Cod Wars with Britain during the 1950s and 1970s.34 The sweater, Guðrún Helgadóttir writes, became part of the Icelandic “uniform or vernacular national dress” in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to be the cornerstone

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7.6 “Hannyrðir: Grænlenzk Peysa,” Melkorka 1 December 1956.

of the Icelandic hand-knitting industry.35 Icelandic scholars who have analyzed the enduring popularity of the sweater in Icelandic culture write that it is the wool itself, rather than the yoked pattern, that imbues the sweater with its symbolic power. Wool and sheep have been vital to Icelandic history, culture, and endurance in an often challenging landscape that for centuries precluded many forms of agriculture.36 Indeed, the Icelandic sheep itself, a breed that was initially imported by medieval Norse settlers in the late ninth century, has been essential to survival for Icelanders. The deep medieval roots of Icelandic sheep culture and other stories about the origin of the sweater reinforce its intense symbolic power.37 Although the nuilarmiut pattern is now synonymous with “Icelandic sweaters,” this is not to suggest that the lopapeysa itself is not considered an imposter in Icelandic culture. Regardless of the designs that appear on these sweaters, it is the use of Icelandic wool and

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the fact that they are hand-knit, often with circular needles, that give them an Icelandic designation among Icelanders. Sweaters using any pattern, even those without a yoke, can be considered lopapeysur. Ásdís Jóelsdóttir writes that by the 1970s the most popular form of this sweater featured a heavy patterned yoke and matching trim along the bottom of the body and sleeves using wool in the natural colours of the Icelandic sheep.38 Such patterns often replicated the circular pattern of the original nuilarmiut but could also blend in new Icelandic components. As Lotta Kaarina Nykänen discusses in her analysis of lopapeysa designs, Icelandic knitters and knitwear designers increasingly began to add in Icelandic design components like áttablaðarós, an eight-petalled rose or star that dates to the seventeenth century, and popular Icelandic imagery like horses and ravens.39 Today, sweater production remains an important revenue stream for Icelanders supplementing their household income with knitting to sell in the country’s booming tourist market, which welcomed roughly 2 million visitors to the island of 350,000 people in 2017.40 The integral place of the hand-knitting industry and wool culture in Icelandic society quickly becomes evident in debates surrounding the island’s iconic sweater. Organizations such as the Handknitting Association of Iceland strive to protect their craft and challenge other Icelanders who have tried to sell cheaper sweaters produced without Icelandic wool using international labour, arguing that the garments are not “Icelandic.”41 The history of the lopapeysa is rooted both in the longer history of the hand-knitting industry and in more recent political and economic shifts in twentieth-century Iceland. Knitting was an important export item for centuries, but Icelanders traditionally knit with more finely spun wools. Conversely, “bulky, twisted, single-strand” lopi was not used in clothing until the late nineteenth century.42 The expansion of the fishing industry in Iceland at the start of the twentieth century created “an urgent need for warm clothing,” and bulkier lopi sweaters offered stronger protection against the elements and were more quickly produced and cheaper than sweaters made with finer wool.43 In spite of these earlier roots, the popularity of lopi sweaters using a variety of patterns took flight more seriously during the First World War and the economic crises of the 1930s and late 1940s as Icelanders became increasingly isolated from imported clothing markets.44 The growth of a lopapeysa home cottage industry catered to tourists to the island, even offering Allied and nato soldiers stationed on the island easy access to a warm souvenir.45 These sweaters, however, were also intensely popular among

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Icelanders, evident in the growing number of advertisements for lopi sweaters for sale – as well as lost lopapeysur – in wartime Icelandic papers.46 As Léo Árnason’s store on Laugarvegur Street in downtown Reykjavík announced to Icelandic customers in 1941, sweaters made from lopi were “warm, good … and inexpensive,” offering locals valuable access to quality clothing during wartime scarcity.47 Lopapeysur were embraced by Icelandic workers contending with both the sea and a rough, cold climate while working outdoors, evident in advertisements for these sweaters aimed at “fishermen and working men” in the 1940s.48 Sources suggest that this “Icelandic” designation was due to the numerous Icelandic “fisherfolk” often seen wearing bulkier sweaters with bold geometric patterns.49 Others imply that it was the use of imported Icelandic wool in Swedish sweaters that led to this affiliation.50 Ásdís Jóelsdóttir writes that the term “Eskimo sweater” and more southerly perceptions about Iceland were the cause, noting that since “the word ‘Iceland’ suggests an exotic icy, cold country … many people thought that Icelanders might be ‘Eskimos.’”51 Whatever the cause, Elsa E. Guðjónsson, noted Icelandic textile scholar and editor of the Icelandic Women’s Association’s magazine Húsfreyja, reportedly encountered the “Eskimo peysa” already marked as “Icelandic” in a Swedish pattern book in 1956.52 She republished a version of the Swedish pattern, which was originally to be knit in the colours of the Icelandic flag, in Húsfreyja in 1957, announcing to her readers, “The Swedes call this type of pattern ‘Iceland’s Sweater.’”53

ma de in s we de n: the icel and ic ski sweater The Swedish knitwear industry played a central role in popularizing “Icelandic” sweaters in North American markets. Although some smaller Icelandic exporters were selling lopapeysur to the United States in the late 1950s,54 most of the earliest sweaters marketed as Icelandic to North Americans were produced in Sweden. Like many other Nordic countries in the postwar era, Sweden was a recipient of American funding offered to postwar European countries under the Marshall Plan and became partners in lucrative trade agreements with Western allies in exchange for its alignment with Western democracies during the Cold War. During the late 1950s and the 1960s, access to massive US and allied markets helped to support existing wool production in Sweden while fostering the rise of new design talent, like Kertsin Olsson,

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7.7 Forstmann Knitwear’s Icelandic wool sweaters, Women’s Wear Daily, 11 June 1957.

who launched Bohus Stickning, a luxury sweater brand that produced yoked sweaters in angora.55 Other Swedish brands, like Jersey Modeller, quickly gained a larger following for their “Icelandic sweaters” by establishing agreements with American importers, who sold the sweaters in “color combinations like those of the Arctic northern lights” at skiwear and clothing shops across the United States.56 Women’s Wear Daily wrote of the trend in 1958, explaining that “[w]ool knit ski and after-ski sweaters in arresting Icelandic designs are a Swedish export to the United States market reported to have doubled sales since they were introduced in this country last year.”57 Indeed, it is clear that North American companies were quick to capitalize on the Icelandic trend (see figure 7.7). In 1957 Forstmann Knitwear took out advertisements in Women’s Wear Daily that featured a smiling reindeer dressed

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in a yoked sweater. The advertisements announced, “Here’s the scoop of the ’57 sweater season – Forstmann’s Icelandic Wool Sweaters. Soft and shaggy … They’re dyed in a whole palette of sales-conscious colors, so you won’t want to miss ’57’s most talked-about sweater story.”58 In addition to the role of postwar funding and commerce in bolstering the production of this sweater pattern in Sweden, the Icelandic sweater was also made popular by expanding political and military investments in the defence in Iceland itself. The timing of this Arctic-themed fashion trend’s emergence in Cold War North America is revealing, coinciding with continued concerns over who could potentially build military installations in Iceland and Greenland. Winter wear was visibly shaped by this attention to the Cold War tensions in the North, further evident in the popularity of “moon boots” and “spaceman” suits for skiers during the pursuit of human space travel during this same period.59 As tensions over potential Soviet nuclear bombs crossing the Arctic waxed and waned, North Americans increasingly embraced fashions that reflected the Cold War political fixation with the North. By the late 1950s, the United States military accounted for US$350 million in annual spending in support of extensive military installations in Alaskan territory, and the Government of Canada had been tasked with maintaining twenty-two bases of the Distant Early Warning Line in its Arctic territory. In both Canada and the United States, postwar development initiatives further encouraged designers and consumers alike to imagine national futures in the North that complemented the need to protect and enhance expensive military installations based at those latitudes. While discussing his plans for resource development in the North, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker pushed “Canadians to realize your opportunities!” and to invest in the “opening of Canada’s northland.”60 North American ski wear and winter wear in the late 1950s and early 1960s reveals its performative function – one that testified to the ability of the wearer to master both the slopes and snow-covered landscapes as North American military installations in the Arctic expanded. This reinforces Anne Gilbert Coleman’s assertion that Scandinavian and Alpine fashions increasingly came to dominate North American ski culture because of the importance of those regions to anti-Soviet defence in the postwar era.61 As postwar allies united against the spread of Communism in western Europe, European “traditional” styles were marketed as politically palatable representations of international “friendship,” Western tolerance, and the power of the free market.62

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As sales of Swedish- and American-produced Icelandic sweaters boomed in North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greenlanders and Icelanders alike remained cut off from the profits of manufacturers using the style. In the later 1960s a new generation of Icelandic exporters took notice of the “Icelandic sweater” trend and began to compete for a share of the American market.63 In 1962 a US Navy lieutenant governor, Thomas Holton, and his Icelandic wife, Hanna, began a knitwear brand called Hilda Ltd with this American market in mind.64 Although the couple boasted celebrity American clients after their brand was established in the United States, they began by contracting sweaters from mainly rural knitters and processed orders in their Reykjavík apartment, where “there was wool everywhere … [I]t suffocated us. It was in the coffee, the tea, the milk.”65 The burgeoning fashion industry in the country benefited immensely from foreign demand for Icelandic wool. Far from simply employing legions of hand knitters on contract, the boom fostered the rise of new clothing-production factories and jobs. By 1964 the knitwear company Hekla employed between 130 and 150 Icelanders in the remote northern city of Akureyri.66 By 1968 lopi and lopi sweaters were being imported to the United States as “luxury products.” Initially, it appears that foreign producers of “Icelandic sweaters” were one more link in a longer chain of design appropriation that saw the nuilarmiut transformed into a popular style of sweater eventually produced for the American winter wear market. Although Icelandic knitters appear to have been simply capitalizing on a trend established for them by Scandinavian knitwear designers, the ways that Icelandic entrepreneurs and producers were welcomed into the sweater-production market suggest a particular dynamic and degree of privilege that accompanied Iceland’s new status as a strategically essential island. Indeed, the rise of the sweater export market in Iceland was tied directly to the strengthening of nato and American military interests in Iceland itself. Echoing Annichen Sibbern’s use of the nuilarmiut in Norwegian campaigns for territorial rights in Greenland, the intense growth of the Icelandic knitwear industry and export market must also be understood as directly related to Icelanders’ strategic position and relative privilege in negotiations with the United States during a period of political instability in Iceland and the larger militarization of the Arctic. The rise of the Icelandic sweater industry in the early 1960s was rooted, at least partly, in international conflicts over Iceland during the Cold War. Although Iceland was a small and remote northern country, the island was a hotly contested territory from the 1940s onward because of its proximity

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to the Arctic Circle and potential ability to act as a military base for strikes against either the United States or the Soviet Union. Greenland was also a highly coveted territory but one still claimed by Denmark, which controlled American expansion into the region. Iceland was a member of nato and initially the involuntary host of an Allied military base on the island during the Second World War. The base was opposed by many Icelanders, and popular antagonism toward any foreign occupation endured in the Cold War era. In spite of protests, the Government of Iceland signed a deeply controversial defence agreement with the United States in 1951, which permitted the creation of a permanent American air base in the tightly knit, insular country. Few Icelanders welcomed the installation, and so, in an attempt to neutralize this unhappiness and to buy Icelandic support for their continued military presence, American officials struggled to create palatable economic deals with the cash-strapped but ambitious Icelandic government. Lucrative economic partnerships became a key tool in securing Iceland’s relationship with the United States during a serious Cold War conflict over the country in the 1950s. Although the country was a founding member of nato, the late 1950s marked an unstable point in Icelandic-American relations, particularly after the Icelandic people elected a left-wing government in 1956, which demanded abrogation of the country’s defence treaty with the United States.67 The election reflected the strength of socialist sentiment on the island, much to the concern of the United States. As Iceland was largely a rural, underdeveloped country until the 1950s, the government was also negotiating for massive loans from both the Soviet Union and the United States to help finance its modernization plans.68 Generating Icelandic support for alignment with nato goals was no small feat in the 1950s and 1960s, and the country continued to maintain strong ties to the Soviet Union. Icelandic-American relations continued to suffer from the intense unpopularity of the American airbase at Keflavík, near the capital of Reykjavík, among the Icelandic public. The destabilization of IcelandicAmerican relations and the closeness of members of Parliament to the Soviet Union during this period were of serious concern to American officials. The potential loss of Iceland as an ally not only posed a strategic concern to the defence of the West via the North but also “threatened to hand the Soviet Union a propaganda victory.”69 The fall of the leftist coalition in 1959 marked a new era in Icelandic economic development and commercial exports. A series of reforms ensured

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years of improved economic stability in the 1960s and improving trade with the West. Much to the chagrin of the United States, however, the Soviet Union had become Iceland’s biggest trading partner in the middle of the 1960s because Iceland was willing to barter its fish in exchange for valuable imports like cement and oil that were expensive but integral to the island’s modernization process.70 The Soviet Union also absorbed large quantities of the knitwear produced by Icelandic clothing manufacturers. As Hekla’s factory manager Ásgrímur Stefánsson explained, most of the factory’s 8 million kronor in exported knitwear went straight to the Soviet Union, and Hekla was “very happy with that.”71 Increasingly, however, Icelandic exporters began to shift their focus to major markets in Western countries as the popularity of Icelandic knitwear exploded. By 1969 Icelandic imports to the United States were on the rise, signalling the general improvement of American-Icelandic relations as well as the success of targeted trade deals and funding initiatives. In 1970 Iceland signed on to the European Free Trade Association, and these new customer bases transformed Icelandic knitwear production on the island. As Ásdís Jóelsdóttir argues, these new markets, coupled with the surplus of wool on the island, “became the starting point for a huge wool industry and major exports.”72 During this time, the garments – in beige, brown, and cream – were increasingly designed to showcase the natural colours of the Icelandic sheep. This focus on the Icelandic sheep itself arguably helped Icelandic wool producers to begin shutting out their Swedish competitors through stronger brand recognition. This trend made trade more firmly reliant on Icelandic producers and highlighted the difference between “authentic” Icelandic sweaters and those produced by “imitators.”

conclusion The Icelandic sweater, including the countless versions bearing the original “Eskimo peysa” pattern, remains an integral part of Iceland’s fashion economy, bolstered by the immense growth of the country’s tourism industry. On every corner in downtown Reykjavík, souvenir stores encourage visitors to dress like a local in a garment that, on the surface, is tied to the medieval settlement of a far northern country. Although the material used to make the lopapeysa itself indeed testifies to the powerful cultural legacy of “sheep culture,” wool production, and life on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the longer history of the

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Greenlandic nuilarmiut pattern emblazoned across its shoulders speaks to a more complex modern history of northern design, one deeply shaped by political contests over territorial sovereignty and militarization. Originally rooted in campaigns promoting Greenlandic sovereignty and independence, the nuilarmiut was first appropriated and translated into knit form by Annichen Sibbern around 1930. Sibbern created a pattern based on the beaded yoke to encourage other Norwegian women to knit a claim asserting Norway’s colonial entitlements in Greenland, overriding the claims of the Greenlandic people, during a period of conflict with Denmark. The pattern became popular throughout Scandinavia and arrived in Iceland via women’s magazines. “Eskimo” and “Grænlenzk” sweater patterns were then merged in Iceland with the increasingly popular bulky lopi sweater, well suited to changing economic conditions and tough weather on the island. An affiliation between Icelanders and bulky sweaters with a heavy yoke was strong enough by the late 1950s that when Swedish and North American knitwear producers began to capitalize on public appreciation for these garments, they were marketed as “Icelandic sweaters.” Although, as Ásdís Jóelsdóttir argues, Icelanders had been exporting knitwear for centuries, the rapid expansion of the market for Icelandic sweaters in the postwar era reflected the new economic deals brokered with Iceland by foreign powers invested in securing this politically and militarily significant island in the Cold War era. The consumption of exotic sounding “Icelandic sweaters” produced by Swedish and North American designers and manufacturers boomed during this period of heightened awareness of the Far North, fostered in part by Cold War anxieties about Arctic-based nuclear bombing capabilities and militarization. Because of their strategically significant place in global politics, Icelanders enjoyed a series of beneficial trade agreements with both the Soviet Union and nato allies that fostered the growth of their wool industry as the popularity of the sweater grew. As the Americanized “Icelandic sweater” came to represent the Icelandic people and later simply the Arctic, memories of its Greenlandic origins faded. Although lopapeysur remain popular in Iceland, mass-produced versions of the garment in cotton, merino, and polyester were increasingly reproduced by innumerable international clothing producers. These mass-produced sweaters and tops, often labelled simply as “holiday sweater” or “fair isle,” have increasingly become detached from Iceland as well, merely offering North American consumers an Arctic-like appearance devoid of any specific references to its history or cultures of origin.

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7.8 Flyer for Greenlandic store Pilersuisoq featuring a wool sweater based on the nuilarmiut, 4 April 2019.

Histories of the appropriation of Indigenous design, including more recent campaigns against fashion designers who have taken from Inuit and First Nations communities, are correct to condemn the actions of individual designers. However, we must also acknowledge and understand the larger, very real political and economic forces that enable and encourage the taking of design and the relationship between cultural and territorial appropriation. Mass-produced sweaters now bearing the nuilarmiut pattern are more than just unauthorized copies of traditional patterns; they are documents from complex, modern international conflicts in the Far North.

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The transformation of the nuilarmiut into a long line of sweaters and tops – both hand-knit and mass-produced, bearing myriad names – has also required a large network of international producers, retailers, and policymakers, each of these groups having its own set of interests and motivations regarding both fashion and northern territories. In this respect, the pattern seemingly evades singular meaning. It remains simultaneously a memento from a Greenlandic wedding in 1863 and a testament to generations of Greenlandic women and makers. It also invokes the legions of Nordic knitters, sheep farmers, and business owners who made their livelihoods with the pattern. Yet the global popularity of this particular sweater is clearly rooted in transnational clashes over northern territories. Owing to the Greenlandic independence movement and Scandinavian-led conflicts that first motivated its transition into a knitting pattern, followed by a constellation of postwar security campaigns in the Arctic that fostered its mainstream North American debut in the 1950s and 1960s, this sweater pattern is a complex political document about power, identity, and territory. Knitting remains a popular pastime in Greenland, and since Danish remains the most commonly spoken European language on the island, local Greenlandic knitters eagerly embrace and consume imported Danishlanguage knitting patterns and magazines. Many of the sweaters, or tujuulussuaq, knit by local women reflect trends in knitwear in the Nordic countries. As Greenlandic social media crafting groups, knitting festivals, and even grocery store flyers reveal (see figure 7.8), these sweaters frequently include “Icelandic” patterns that replicate the heavy, geometric yoke established by the nuilarmiut. Such images of Greenlandic knitting reveal that the appropriated nuilarmiut, now worn around the world, has come back to Greenland in a new incarnation, one that bears the imprint of more than a century of political, cultural, and economic contests over Arctic land and sovereignty.

notes 1 I use the inaccurate label “Eskimo” here because it was the historical label assigned to this sweater, but I do so with a keen awareness of the history of the term. Often used as a blanket label to describe far northern people, the word “Eskimo” has historically been applied to a range of diverse Arctic populations, including Inuit, Icelanders, and Yupik people. As a result, it can be a reflection not of northern people themselves but of how southerly populations have historically misimagined and attempted to claim intellectual

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supremacy over the northern populations. For an expanded discussion, see Bertram, “‘Eskimo’ Immigrants.” 2 Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries, 546. 3 “Bulky Jacquard Indian Sweaters,” Women’s Wear Daily, 14 March 1956, 39. 4 Olsen, Working with Wool, 36. 5 Ibid., 271–2. 6 Cited in ibid., 282. 7 Welchman, Art after Appropriation, 1. 8 Root, Cannibal Culture, xi. 9 Ibid., 18. 10 Olsen, Working with Wool, 293. 11 Pangburn, “Navajo Artist”; Kim Wheeler, cited in “H&M Faux Feathered Headdresses.” 12 Dewar, “Keynote Address,” 24. 13 In 2015 Nunavut’s Salome Awa threatened legal action against ktz, an English fashion retailer, for selling a sweater based on her great-grandfather’s parka. The family considered the parka sacred because it included a protection spell that her great-grandfather had received in a dream. An image of Awa’s great-grandfather wearing the distinctive parka, which featured two hands emblazoned on the chest, had appeared in publications that had since travelled around the world. Not only did the retailer use the design without the family’s permission, but it was also guilty of “breaking the Inuit sacred laws of duplicating someone else’s clothing … and for profit of all things.” cbc Radio, “Nunavut Family Outraged.” 14 Thuesen, ”Dressing Up in Greenland,” 103. 15 Kleinschmidt, “Formal Clothing,” 104. 16 In the eastern Arctic more broadly, oral narratives as well as archaeological studies suggest that a number of different Indigenous populations encountered medieval European goods through the Norse sometime between 990 and 1450 as the Norse pursued a lucrative trade in the Arctic for polar bear pelts, walrus ivory, and narwhal tusks that could be sold at a premium in European markets. Pluskowski, “Narwhals or Unicorns?”; Krogh, Viking Greenland, 31. 17 “Treasures Gallery: Inuit Parkas,” online exhibit, Canadian Museum of History, https:// www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/treasure/262eng.shtml. 18 Rosannguaq Rossen, in conversation with author, 4 June 2018. 19 Buijs and Petersen, “Festive Clothing,” 85. 20 Rossen, “Don’t Touch!”; Rosannguaq Rossen, personal communication with author, 12 March 2018. 21 Rossen, “Don’t Touch!”

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22 Cited in Odell, “Greenland Deeply Offended.” 23 Bumpus, “Peter Jensen.” 24 Long, “Ready to Wear.” 25 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 290–1. 26 Davis, Yokes, 10. 27 Ibid., 10–11; Hreinsdóttir, “Hvað er Íslensk Peysa?” 28 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 283. 29 Ibid., 10; Hreinsdóttir, “Hvað er Íslensk Peysa?” 30 Hreinsdóttir, “Hvað er Íslensk Peysa?” 31 “Hannyrðir: Grænlenzk Peysa,” Melkorka, 1 December 1956, 82. 32 “Haustsýning Rammagerðarinnar,” Tíminn, 15 October 1966, 2. 33 Helgadóttir, “Nation in a Sheep’s Coat,” 59. 34 Ibid., 62. 35 Ibid., 59. 36 Ibid., 65. 37 For example, some Icelanders replicate the claim that the sweater was borrowed from an Incan design by Auður Laxness, the wife of the Nobel laureate novelist and Icelandic national hero Halldór Laxness. Árnason, “Screaming Jumpers.” 38 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 283. 39 Nykänen, “Lopapeysa,” 19. 40 Hafstad, “Iceland Expects 2.3 Million.” 41 “Selja ‘íslenskar’ lopapeysur sem eru prjónaðar í Kína,” Vísir, 1 June 2012, https://www.visir. is/g/2012706019935. 42 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 286. 43 Ibid. 44 Soffía Valdimarsdóttir reports that lopi spinning and knitting were discussed in the 1920s, but Ásdís Jóelsdóttir contends that the popularity of the wool did not take hold until the 1940s. Valdimarsdóttir, “Ull er Gull”; Jóelsdóttir, Saga fatagerðar, 109. See also Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 287. 45 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 287. 46 See, for example, “Fundizt,” Íslendingur, 23 December 1943, 2; “Grá lopapeysa tapaðist,” Vísir, 20 August 1943, 4; “Tapað lopapeysa,” Morgunblaðið, 31 May 1945, 11. 47 “Lopapeysur, lopahosur,” advertisement, Morgunblaðið, 8 November 1941, 1. 48 “Lopapeysur,” Vísir, 17 March 1941, 4. 49 “Well known to skiers, these sweaters had their origin on the water and are named for the colorful Icelandic herring fishermen who inspired the distinctive geometric designs in the sweaters.” “Keeping Warm,” Yachting 114 (1963): 106.

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50 “Islandströja,” Nationalencyklopedin (2010), https://www.ne.se/uppslagsverk/ordbok/ svensk/islandstr%C3%B6ja. 51 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 290. 52 Hreinsdóttir, “Hvað er Íslensk Peysan?” 53 Elsa E. Guðjónsson, “Íslandspeysu,” Húsfreyjan, 1 March 1957, 17. In spite of the emphasis on commercially dyed yarns, Guðjónsson noted that there was a demand for colours produced naturally by the Icelandic sheep as early as 1958. 54 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenskan lopapeysa, 110. 55 Davis, Yokes, 10. 56 “Imported Ski Sweaters Order in Indian, Icelandic Patterns,” Women’s Wear Daily, 2 October 1957, 50; “Northern Lights Colors in Icelandic Patterned Sweaters,” Women’s Wear Daily, 13 August 1958, 55. 57 “Northern Lights Colors in Icelandic Patterned Sweaters,” Women’s Wear Daily, 13 August 1958, 55. 58 “Headlining the Fashion News,” ad, Women’s Wear Daily, 11 June 1957, 93. 59 For example, on the popularity of space themes in 1960s winter wear, see Jill Newman, “Outer Space Look for Kids Strictly Tabu,” Women’s Wear Daily, 28 July 1969, 1. 60 Diefenbaker, “Opening Campaign Speech.” 61 Coleman, “Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing,” 590. 62 Ibid., 589–91. 63 To recognize this new generation’s inroads into the American market is not to negate the activities of early exporters like Ásgeirsson or attempts to promote Icelandic knitwear in the United States before 1960; however, it is clear that most of the export activity in the country’s knitwear industry took off in the 1960s. 64 Thomas Holton, cited in Shapiro, “Tom and Hanna Holton.” 65 Thomas Holton, cited in ibid. 66 “Staldrað við á Akureyri að vinna íslenzkri vörun markað: Heimsókn í fataverksmiðjan heklu,” Fálkinn, 26 June 1964, 22. 67 Ingimundarson, “Buttressing the West,” 93. 68 Ibid., 93–5. 69 Ibid., 81. 70 Ibid., 87. 71 “Staldrað við á Akureyri að vinna íslenzkri vörun markað: Heimsókn í fataverksmiðjan heklu,” Fálkinn, 26 June 1964, 25. 72 Jóelsdóttir, Íslenska lopapeysan, 295.

8 Clare Sheridan British Writer, Sculptor, and Collector in Blackfoot Country, 1937 sarah carte r

The cover of the London society magazine The Tatler on 29 December 1937 was a departure from the usual images of royalty, film stars, cricketers, and gentry. It featured a photograph of “Mrs. Clare Sheridan in a Blood and Blackfoot Head-Dress.” The caption read, “The famous sculptress, authoress and traveller lived amongst the Blood and Blackfoot Indians all through last summer; main object to collect local colour and detail for a new book … to be called Redskin Interlude, a companion book to Arab Interlude, which was published in 1936” (see figure 8.1).1 Through donning this headdress, just as she had frequently been photographed in Arab dress earlier that decade, Sheridan sought notoriety and hoped to shock her contemporaries, but the Tatler image was also carefully composed to sell her forthcoming book and her sculptures. It was an example of appropriation of Indigenous material culture for the purpose of self-promotion, and the stunt would not have been appreciated by her Blackfoot hosts,2 whom she had left just weeks before, taking along crates of their objects, which she had rapaciously and voraciously collected. But Sheridan’s encounter with the Blackfoot was more complicated than celebrity, objects, and details for a book. Unlike most British travellers of the Victorian era, whose writing served to consolidate colonialism, Sheridan did not assert the superiority of the British as colonizers of Indigenous peoples but questioned it.3 Yes, she was a privileged member of elite British society – a cousin of Winston Churchill – with a sense of entitlement, but as an admirer

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8.1 “Mrs. Clare Sheridan in a Blood and Blackfoot Indian Headdress,” The Tatler, 29 December 1937.

of communism and a critic of British imperialism, she was a dissenter and renegade who was viewed as dangerous and subversive. She was tracked and monitored for nearly thirty years by the British Secret Service, which described her as “disloyal” and “anti-British.”4 She frequently outraged her cousin Winston, such as in 1920 when she travelled to Russia and wrote a glowing tribute to the new regime there, had an affair with a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary, and sculpted Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In 1931 she befriended and sculpted Mohandas Gandhi in London, describing

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him as a saint, although she knew that her cousin regarded him as an enemy of the British Empire and would not meet with him.5 Not at all afraid to speak out and criticize, in Redskin Interlude, Sheridan condemned and censured the colonial regime to which the Blackfoot were subjected. She criticized residential schools, missionaries, and oppressive government laws. She learned a great deal from the Blackfoot, found much to admire, and sought to convey her sentiments to a Western readership, educating them about what was taking place in this far-flung corner of the declining British Empire. Sheridan was not, however, free of the stereotypes and ideas of racial hierarchies of her day, as even the book title indicates. On the other side of the encounter, the Blackfoot people whom Sheridan met, lived with, sculpted, and acquired objects from had their own reasons to exploit the visiting celebrity.6 Yes, there was an uneven power dynamic between an impoverished people and an elite British woman with cash. But the Blackfoot used Sheridan’s visit as a strategic opportunity to acquire a powerful ally who could bring to a world stage the injustices and hardships with which they contended. Among her earliest acquaintances in Montana was a Blackfeet man who “told her about the Indian Grievance with a capital G.”7 For her closest Kainai (Blood) friend and host, Aisstaohkomiaakii (Comes Calling Woman) – referred to by Sheridan in her writing as “Esto,” the diminutive of her full name, sometimes written as Estochamachi, and by settlers as Ethel Tailfeathers – Sheridan was an influential patron, critical to her son Gerald’s emergence as an artist. Sheridan could also promote Blackfoot arts and crafts, particularly women’s work. The Blackfoot knew that their objects and knowledge had value and that they deserved payment for their work, as well as for sitting for portraits and sculpture; Sheridan frequently grumbled in her book about their firm expectations to be paid well for their labour, their art, and their other products.8 The Blackfoot were clearly in desperate need of money, with few options and opportunities for income during the Depression. Clare Sheridan (1885–1970) spent about fourteen weeks from late June to early October 1937 with the Blackfeet of Montana and the Blackfoot of southern Alberta.9 She first attended Winold Reiss’s art colony in Glacier Park, Montana, and in late August relocated north to the Kainai Reserve in southern Alberta, where she lived with the Tailfeathers family. This chapter explores dimensions of the encounter between the Blackfoot and Sheridan, with particular attention to the objects that she collected. Why did she collect? Her book suggests that she harboured romantic views of a “traditional”

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pristine lifestyle that she saw as suppressed and endangered by Canadian government officials of the Department of Indian Affairs (dia). She found the Blackfoot outlook on life “beautifully simple” and questioned “whether modernization is an aim to be pursued.”10 A desire to capture and preserve what she feared was dying out led in part to her collecting objects. She also believed that she was assisting an impoverished people with her purchases. Sheridan’s book permits rare insight into the objects that she acquired, their creators and owners, and the people who sat for her as models. Many of these objects and some of her sculptures are now at the Hastings Museum in England. Writing about this collection, curator and anthropologist Max Carocci stresses their educational value, noting that collections such as Sheridan’s “invite both lay viewers and researchers to reflect more closely upon the far reaching role that material culture has in creating, resisting, or challenging specific cultural representations.”11 Collectors, according to Carocci, “saw themselves as educators and carriers of important messages of cultural tolerance, and ecological respect.”12 Sheridan’s sculptures were also a means of capturing and preserving; most depict stoic, phlegmatic males who seem so serene and tranquil, with eyes almost closed, as to be asleep. They resemble death masks.13 Although Sheridan presented herself in Redskin Interlude as a unique visitor to Blackfoot country, she was in fact one of a steady stream of outsiders from the late nineteenth century who collected Blackfoot stories and artwork, painted portraits, and took photographs.14 As Blackfeet historian Rosalyn LaPier has argued, the Blackfeet adapted to the new “unexpected” economy by selling their stories.15 The Blackfeet long recognized that they could benefit from interactions with influential outsiders, gaining potentially useful allies. Sheridan was undoubtedly seen in this light; she was adopted, given a Blackfoot name, and presented with gifts to confirm and ratify the relationship. For the Kainai Nation, Sheridan’s status as a prominent British woman would have been important and valuable, as they saw the British, particularly the Crown, as their treaty partner. Sheridan did not disappoint, as Redskin Interlude was in part a plea on their behalf.16 Among the many “outsiders” visiting the Blackfeet and Blackfoot of Montana and Alberta, there were considerably fewer women. Sheridan’s account is rare in that it sheds light on Blackfoot women – one in particular.17 Her host, Esto Tailfeathers, is a dominant character in the book, a talented, strong, and opinionated woman, not unlike Sheridan, who often noted the similarities. Esto was indispensable as Sheridan’s translator and intermediary, making

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8.2 Aisstaohkomiaakii, Comes Calling Woman, 3–4 August 1925, Beatrice Blackwood. Aisstaohkomiaakii (Esto Tailfeathers) is holding her son Gerald Tailfeathers. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1998.442.62.

introductions to relatives and friends and accompanying Sheridan on almost all of her visits to Kainai homes and events. Esto is shown in figure 8.2 with her infant son Gerald.18 An important, although short-lived, legacy of Sheridan’s visit was to encourage Esto Tailfeathers to publicly champion the preservation and production of Kainai arts and crafts, which she did until her death in 1940.19 Sheridan also made dia officials and the surrounding settler community aware of the outstanding talent of Esto’s young son, artist Gerald Tailfeathers, who in later years (as Gerald T. Feathers) stated that the first artwork he ever sold was to Sheridan.20 His charcoal drawing of Big Bull is included in her book and is at the Hastings Museum, as is Sheridan’s sculpture of the same man (see figures 8.3 and 8.8). Through a presentation that I gave at the Kainai High School in October 2017, I learned that although Sheridan has been forgotten, the people in her

8.3 Gerald Tailfeathers, Big Bull (Piikani), 1937. Tailfeathers did this charcoal drawing at age twelve. Hastings Museum, Clare Sheridan Collection, 983.78.23.

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book, whom she not only wrote about but also sculpted, photographed, and collected from, are very vividly remembered by family and friends. One woman, for example, was pleased to see photos of the well-preserved Hudson’s Bay Company coat that her grandfather Night-Gun made for Sheridan. Despite the offensive title, Redskin Interlude was received like a lost photo album of family from the 1930s. There is great interest in the objects that Sheridan acquired, with a mixture of responses, including sorrow at the poverty of the Kainai that must have led them to part with ceremonial and sacred treasures now in such a distant location.21 There is a tension here in that Sheridan celebrated and wanted to preserve what she saw as “traditional” Kainai culture but removed precious objects from that community. Judy Half also reflects on this widespread pattern of colonial collection in chapter 10 of this volume.

t h e ka ina i (blo od) nation The Kainai, or Blood, First Nation of southern Alberta occupies the largest reserve in Canada. Together, the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, whose vast territory once spanned the present USCanada border. They began reserve life in 1880, following the negotiation of Treaty 7 in 1877, and were subjected to the strict administration of the Department of Indian Affairs, which implemented the repressive Indian Act. Under this legislation, Indian agents, residential schools, and missionaries were supposed to help the Kainai to shed their culture, religion, language, and lifeways, and there were two residential schools on the reserve for that purpose, one run by the Catholics and another by the Anglicans. But the Kainai were resistant and resilient even as these forces took their toll. Kainai men, for example, became successful ranchers despite numerous obstacles, including a concerted federal government “Greater Production” campaign during and immediately after the First World War to undermine this industry on the reserve.22 Connections with the British Empire and monarchy began well before Treaty 7, but this agreement affirmed and sanctified the relationship. The Blackfoot understood that the treaty was made with Queen Victoria, that it set out a relationship with the Crown forming a bond of trust, and that her emissaries agreed to care for them as she would her own children. The connection to the British was kept alive on both sides; dia officials, the NorthWest Mounted Police, and visiting dignitaries such as governors-general

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frequently drew on “Great Mother” rhetoric, as did the Kainai and other Blackfoot orators.23 Like other treaty people of western Canada, the Kainai deployed images of a just British monarch to critique betrayals of that relationship and to appeal to the British over the heads of settler authorities. Yet there was more than simply performance of loyalty to the Crown. The Kainai contributed more soldiers to overseas service in the First World War than any other Treaty 7 nation. The campaign that undermined Kainai ranching, however, also soured devotion to the war effort.24 By the 1930s there was good reason for the Kainai to be jaded about the usefulness of loyalty to the Crown. The British Empire was eroding in the 1930s, and critics of colonialism and imperialism were numerous and vocal. But for the Kainai, the relationship with their British treaty partner remained important, as it does to this day; the Union Jack is on the flag of the Kainai Nation. That the British connection was valued is visible in Redskin Interlude. Sheridan described the celebration for Nora Gladstone, one of two students selected from Anglican-run St Paul’s Indian Residential School to attend the spring 1937 coronation of George VI, making her one of 9,000 students sent from all over the empire. At the Kainai celebration, the walls were richly decorated with Union Jacks and coronation flags.25 In 1936 the Kainai made Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir an honorary chief, giving him the name Eagle Head, after an honoured Blood leader who was wise and noted for his generosity.26 The ceremony was performed by the distinguished chief Shot Both Sides (subject of a Sheridan sculpture), who flew the Union Jack outside his tepee. This flag also flew over the imposing St Paul’s school building, constructed in 1924 and opened in 1925. Sheridan’s welcome by the Kainai was undoubtedly related to her perceived strategic utility as a British emissary with influential connections. Sheridan’s visit took place toward the end of a decade of intense economic depression in western Canada, and the Kainai economy was intertwined with that of the region and nation.27 Drought and dust storms characterized the Dirty Thirties. American anthropologist Esther Goldfrank, who visited the Kainai in the summer of 1938, wrote about the impact of the extreme drought: “From 1930 to 1932, the number of acres cultivated decreased 50 per cent; farm income dropped from the substantial level of $100,000 to a miserable $24,000 and the seasons of 1934–5–6 were in many ways the most discouraging to Indian farmers.”28 Some farmers ceased to cultivate crops.29 These were the physical, political, and cultural circumstances in play when Clare Sheridan arrived in Kainai territory.

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cl are sher idan, n ée frewen Clare Sheridan, née Frewen, was from a family ranked among the British gentry for centuries. Her father, Moreton Frewen, squandered a sizable inheritance on gambling and horses, but in 1881 he married New Yorker Clara Jerome, and her money came to the rescue, although he eventually squandered that as well.30 Clare’s mother was one of three famous American Jerome sisters known as “the beautiful, the witty and the good.”31 Clare’s mother was the “good.” The “beautiful” was Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill (their son being Winston Churchill). As with many European noblemen and royalty, Moreton had a fascination with the North American West, and in 1879 he acquired a ranch in Wyoming, where he spent most of his wife’s fortune. A renowned “raconteur” who entertained with stories such as his (alleged) acquaintance with Lakota chief Sitting Bull and who collected Native American “curios,” Moreton’s adventures drew Clare to the North American West.32 She wrote that she had been “brought up on Redskin stories. Stalking, armed with bow and arrow, was the favourite game of myself and my brothers.”33 Born in London, Clare spent her childhood in Ireland and Sussex, was educated by governesses, and attended a convent school in Paris and a finishing school in Germany. In 1910 she married Wilfred Sheridan, a stockbroker, and had three children (one of whom, a daughter, died at age three). Wilfred died in battle in France in 1915. Clare Sheridan never remarried and resolved to write and sculpt for a living. Her biographer describes Sheridan as a “penniless widow,” as her husband’s firm went bankrupt, and her father died heavily in debt in 1924.34 Sheridan had to rely on her talents and social capital to shape her life. According to her British Secret Service file, she made no income from her writing or artwork, which bolstered the idea that she was a Russian agent, as she appeared to be “comfortably off.”35 Independent and adventuresome, Sheridan travelled widely to sculpt and write books about her travels, including Russian Portraits (1921) and My American Diary (1922). In 1925 she moved with her two children first to Constantinople and then to Algeria, where she built a house at the edge of the Sahara at Biskra. There, she “adopted Arab ways and clothes”; headlines in the British papers included “Mr. Churchill’s Cousin ‘Turns Arab.’”36 Arab Interlude (1936) described these years. Redskin Interlude is in some ways a companion piece, in which she often compared the desert and the Arabs to the prairie and the Blackfoot.

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Sheridan’s son Dick was the centre of her life, but he was reckless, “wild, undisciplined.”37 His safety became her obsession, mainly because of a family curse that eldest sons would not live beyond twenty-one.38 In January 1937 Dick died of appendicitis in Algeria, age twenty-one, and to deal with her grief Sheridan began to carve in wood, starting with a memorial to her son. She then decided to head for the North American West, so she sailed across the Atlantic, shipping Dick’s Ford car with her, and sought “peace of mind among the Red Indians,” wanting to be “miles away from civilized life.” She thought that she would write and sculpt and that “[w]hen I have forgotten all my sadness, and when the days of mourning are over, I shall come back.”39 She claimed to be in frequent spiritual communication with her deceased son, who advised her “from beyond” to cross the Atlantic and lose herself in creative work.40 A possible further motivation for Sheridan’s 1937 travels was her conviction that she had Native American ancestry. When Sheridan was interviewed for the Lethbridge Herald in August 1937, the headline read “Clare Sheridan Likes Indians and Reveals That Her Great Grandmother Was of This Race.” Twenty years later, she wrote of her trip, “I little knew that I was cauterizing my wounds; that out of the great plains among those beloved Indians whose blood flowed in my veins I was to find my ‘medicine.’”41 The Jerome sisters believed they had distant Iroquois ancestors through a maternal grandmother, and even Sir Winston was known to believe the story, although there was no genealogical evidence to supports this claim.42 Clare once wrote that her ancestor was Arapaho but that “all the efforts of my English father to unearth the record were frustrated by our mother’s American relations!”43 Such claims of Indigenous ancestry, according to anthropologist Circe Sturm, are driven by a desire to belong, to find a meaningful life, to repudiate whiteness, and to find a remedy for the “ills of the modern world … while keeping their white privilege.”44 This analysis seems to fit Clare’s profile as a critic of the power and damage done by British imperialism. She sought connection to an identity outside of Britishness and whiteness while firmly remaining a member of elite British society.

w ith the bl ackfeet and the reiss art scho ol in montana Winold Reiss was a German-American artist fascinated with Native Americans. In the 1930s he established a summer school (also referred to as a “colony”) in Glacier Park, Montana, where Blackfeet were the models, a project sponsored

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by the Great Northern Railway.45 Sheridan knew of the Reiss school from an artist friend, and the school was her ultimate destination as she set out to cross the continent by car. But a first stop for Sheridan was Washington, dc, to meet with John Collier, director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who had introduced a host of progressive policies, including those intended to revive and sustain Indigenous arts and crafts. She then motored to Wyoming to find her father’s ranch.46 At the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Sheridan met Hans Reiss, brother of Winold and also a sculptor, and they drove together to the Montana art colony. Always independent, Sheridan preferred to live outside the colony but worked alongside the artists there. Here, she also attended ceremonies, including the Sun Dance, and started to collect, claiming that some people showered her with gifts, whereas others wanted money and presents from her in exchange. The Blackfeet Reservation in Montana was the epicentre of the activities of visiting artists and “storytakers.”47 Outsiders were not as welcome on Canadian reserves, but as Redskin Interlude demonstrates, there was nonetheless much cross-border interaction. While in Montana, for example, Sheridan travelled to Alberta to the Kainai Sun Dance with writer James W. Schultz, a long-time resident among the Blackfeet and the author of dozens of articles and books about them. Blackfeet “storytakers” such as George Bird Grinnell and Schultz were dedicated Indian rights advocates. Sheridan was undoubtedly seen in this light as a potentially powerful British ally and advocate.48 From early on in her visit, the Blackfeet groomed Sheridan to be their ally and spokesperson in the world beyond their communities. Sheridan was soon adopted while in Montana and given the name Star Woman.49 The ceremony ended with a “powerful shove in the back which sent me forward several paces, and meant that I had ‘gone forward into the tribe.’”50 An Elder then told her that on her return to Washington she was to intercede for them so that they might receive funds owed to them. Sheridan did not so promise but could only “stammer sympathetically,” as she was an “alien from ‘across the water.’” If she were an American citizen, she “would certainly have promised.”51 It was likely disappointing to the Blackfeet that she did not make this promise, but they did not give up on her. Through adoptions and the bestowing of names and honorary chieftainships, Indigenous nations brought influential, powerful people into their kin networks, and the person so honoured accepted responsibilities in exchange.52 Gifts were important to solemnizing the relationship created, and Sheridan received gifts at this ceremony, namely a beaded belt and purse as well as a

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beaded bag, the latter of which she described as “a work of art both in colouring and design.”53 Sheridan’s collection had begun. Sheridan met Kainai and Piikani people from Canada while in Montana, sculpting the Kainai chief Shot Both Sides and meeting his wife, Misaamahkoiyinnimaakii (Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman), a renowned medicine woman.54 Sheridan usually paid fifty cents to those who posed for her.55 She also gave Shot Both Sides “the biggest turquoise Navajo ring that I could find,” which was worn by his wife, whom Sheridan took on a “shopping expedition” to Browning.56 (Although Sheridan did sculpt Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman, there is no photo of this work in the book.) Sheridan began to learn of key differences between reserve life in Canada and reservation life in the United States, including that “[i]n Canada white people are not allowed on to the Indian Reservations without a permit from the Agency, nor is it obtainable without a good reason.”57 Accompanied by Schultz, she first travelled to Alberta in July 1937 to attend the Kainai Sun Dance, obtaining a “pass” from the Indian agent on the Kainai Reserve.58 In a Lethbridge newspaper report of this visit, Sheridan was described as an “internationally known writer and sculptor” who had been “received into the Blackfeet tribe with great ceremony at their recent sun dance.”59

w ith the tailfeathers family on the kainai reserve While in Montana, Sheridan met Esto Tailfeathers, whose son Gerald, aged twelve, was already a talented artist. Winold Reiss gave him free tuition. Esto, her husband, Sakoyena or Sako (Fred), and their children were staying at the “Indian camp” of the art colony. Esto called on Sheridan one day upon “hearing that there was an Englishwoman at the chalets,” and from then on, every day at five o’clock, they had tea at the Indian camp.60 Sheridan wrote, “I was bewildered by her excellent English and her sophistication, until she told me she was half-Irish. We became great friends.” Esto was Sheridan’s host and translator on the Kainai Reserve, and in all ways the visit would have been impossible without her. She was educated at St Paul’s Anglican School, one of the pupils of Jennie Wells, who was remembered fondly by her students.61 Esto was also described by an Indian agent as “a very clever woman. Educated at a mission school, she became a pillar of the Anglican church and a valuable helper to the Ven. Archdeacon [S.H.] Middleton.”62 Esto’s Irish father died shortly after she was born, Sheridan learned, and her mother then married Crazy Crow, a renowned warrior and horse raider. Esto was very close to

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her stepfather, and Sheridan got to know the elderly Crazy Crow well, acquiring several objects that were his. Esto’s husband was a farmer and minor chief of the Kainai for many years. Esto Tailfeathers and relatives are depicted in figure 8.4. Esto’s mission education, according to Sheridan, had distanced her from the teachings of her own people. Esto apparently could not “explain anything about Indian custom or religion.” “Miss Wells’s Girls,” as they were known, were sent to school at an early age and only rarely spent holidays with their relatives.63 (Goldfrank described them as the “most progressive women of their generation – and the most ambitious.”)64 Sheridan claimed that Esto was inspired to learn about and to appreciate the value of “Indian art, Indian taste and Indian traditions” only after meeting her and other art colony visitors who admired these talents.65 It “never occurred to her before that there was any value in anything except Indian blood (she was proud of that).”66 Sheridan noted that Esto’s “upbringing had instilled into her the false necessity of copying White people. Suddenly she found herself among intellectual Whites whose only idea was to steep themselves in Indian lore.”67 Following Sheridan’s visit, Esto did become very involved in the preservation, creation, and promotion of Kainai artwork and clothing.

8.4 Left to right: Chief Bob Tail, William Wadsworth, Phillip Wadsworth, Sadie Bruisedhead with unknown girl, and Esto Tailfeathers with her son Fred Tailfeathers Jr, c. 1940. Courtesy of Rick Tailfeathers.

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Near the end of August, Esto invited Sheridan to stay with her family (nine children, with two grown and on their own) on the Kainai Reserve.68 The necessary permission was acquired from Indian agent J.E. Pugh, and from him Sheridan gathered that “it would be the first time that a White person had ever lived with an Indian family on the Blood Reservation.”69 She was given one of two bedrooms, and the children were housed in tents outside. Sheridan wrote that there were many Kainai visitors “to see the strange phenomenon, a White woman staying with an Indian family.”70 Their neighbour Night-Gun was an early and a frequent visitor; every night after supper, NightGun would “sing to us, accompanied by his drum.”71 He presented her with the gift of a horse and a Mexican saddle. These items would have been very important, generous, and meaningful gifts of welcome and friendship, drawing Sheridan in to the wider circle of Kainai kin. According to historian Rosalyn LaPier, the Blackfoot would have keenly sympathized with Sheridan as a mother grieving for a lost son and would have great respect for her belief that she communicated with him still.72 Gifts were always exchanged, however, and Sheridan would have been expected to be generous in return. Frequently adding to her collection through gifts and purchases, each step of Sheridan’s time in the North American West was marked by objects arising from this place and from the Blackfoot people. dia authorities would not have been pleased to have Sheridan living on the reserve, although Pugh did not seem to object. She could embarrass the dia and their administration of impoverished reserves. Sheridan had an international profile, and she was a skilled writer and keen observer. Moreover, Sheridan’s behaviour would have shocked and dismayed most of settler society. She published an article titled “In Quest of the Red Indian” in the Lethbridge Herald in October 1937, which was likely received very critically and skeptically among non-Indigenous readers. Her article began with an account of her family credentials and circle of powerful international friends. She then described her admiration for the life of the Tailfeathers, and criticized St Paul’s Indian Residential School.

cr itic of residential scho ols and colonialism Early on in her visit, Sheridan learned, particularly from Esto and despite Esto’s work with Canon S.H. Middleton, that having to send their children to boarding schools was the greatest grievance of all parents. Sheridan wrote, “[T]hey have the natural abhorrence of every primitive parent to having their

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children removed from them. It results in unspeakable anguish. Parents and children suffer horribly. It was the only subject of complaint that I heard during the whole time I was on the Reservation.”73 In her October 1937 article in the Lethbridge Herald, Sheridan likened Middleton to “Dictator” Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, whom she knew personally.74 She questioned Middleton’s policies of cutting braids and suppressing Kainai customs and ceremonies, views that would have been rarely expressed by visitors or settlers. In Redskin Interlude Sheridan railed against residential schools and the compulsory attendance of children required by the Indian Act. She despised boarding schools herself and had refused to send her own children to these institutions, writing that “[i]n many ways Esto reminded me of myself … Esto was perfectly determined that she would not part with her children. She took exactly the same stand about boarding schools that I did once upon a time.”75 Whereas Sheridan had to fight only her traditional English family, Esto “had to fight the law which oppressed a conquered race, but the White in her was able to stand up to the Whites, while the poor Red mothers just bowed down before the horror of it, wept distressingly, and set up their tents by the roadside exactly facing the school, waiting for the hour when they might be allowed to glace at their children.”76 Esto insisted that her children return home every day from school, and she also insisted that her home was a better influence for her children than the school, and she was successful; her children lived at home, attending St Paul’s Indian Residential School as day students. Yet despite her sympathies with Kainai parents, Sheridan’s terms and descriptions indicate that she adhered to views of innate characteristics and abilities of “Whites” compared to “Reds” and regarded the Kainai as “primitive” despite her sympathies for these mothers and her shared revulsion at having to send children away to boarding schools. Canon Middleton and Sheridan frequently debated and completely disagreed on residential schools. She visited the schools several times and found each experience “infinitely more dreary.”77 The state of the school was made apparent by the fact that children would not smile when she or Middleton greeted them. Although she liked Middleton personally, she ended her chapter on their confrontations with the following question: “How can one argue when one side is convinced a thing is absolutely right, and the other that it is absolutely wrong?”78 To Sheridan, the school was a “prison-reformatory.” When she saw a “quantity of well-worn mortar-boards,” she was told that

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they were for the pupils in the choir and wrote, “I was not sure [if] I wanted to laugh or cry … Mortar-boards a substitute for eagle feathers.”79 Sheridan was not alone in the 1930s as a British critic of colonialism. English literature scholar Bernard Schweizer writes that this was a time of global anxiety, pessimism, turbulence, and disarray. The confidence of the British in the superiority of their “race” was waning as the empire transitioned to a commonwealth. What emerged was a new tradition of British travel writing by political radicals who expressed contempt for their home, had an impulse to flee and escape, and used their writing as a platform for their ideas. Yet they still took for granted the privileges, infrastructure, and social network that they enjoyed on their journeys as envoys from the “imperial metropolis.”80 Sheridan might be seen in this light – although her work does not belong in the same intellectual circles as that of Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Rebecca West, and other renowned writers of the genre.

c o l l e c t i n g a n d t h e p overt y o f t h e 1 93 0 s The poverty of the Kainai accounts, in part, for Sheridan’s collecting and also (in part) for why people parted with heirlooms and treasures. Sheridan described everyone on the reserve as poor. She learned at a pow wow in early October that only a few people wore their best clothing and beadwork because “most of them were in pawn. A little later they would be redeemed with harvest money.”81 The Tailfeathers had “reached rock bottom after six years without a harvest.”82 Sako Tailfeathers still went to work in the fields, but 1937 was particularly discouraging, as a promising crop was destroyed by grasshoppers. Sheridan believed that she was helping the Tailfeathers and the community by accumulating a “quantity of beadwork” made by Esto and others. She explained, “Although I had already accumulated a quantity of Indian beadwork (belts, bags, and moccasins) the temptation to have more kept Esto hard at work. If, for instance, someone made me a present of a belt, Esto made moccasins to match or vice versa. But although she needed all she could earn, she gave out work to those among her friends who were as much in need as herself. As far as I could make out, the Reservation was run on a system of ‘Help thy neighbour.’”83 People came to Sheridan with objects. For example, one day Mrs Rough Hair visited, along with her husband and adopted children: “[She] shyly produced a beaded belt. She had heard that I was collecting Indian work, and offered it to me for anything I would like to give … It was a lovely piece of

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bead-work, such as one never would find in a shop, and I was delighted.”84 Mrs Rough Hair said that “she had reached an age when she would rather have milk for the children than wear a smart belt.” But Sheridan also “coveted” certain objects and must have asked whether she could have them. When Sheridan visited the home of Mrs Rough Hair, her husband “let me have his eagle-claw necklace (that I coveted outrageously), it represents a great many eagles … Yellow paint on the claws and red paint on the fleshy part added to its already barbaric character.”85 There is no more information on what Sheridan gave or paid in exchange for this highly symbolic object (see figure 8.5). During another visit, Mr Rough Hair offered Sheridan an iniskim, or buffalo stone, a spiral fossil ammonite that often formed part of the sacred beaver bundle. It was half-sewn into a piece of rawhide that was embroidered with tiny sapphire, orange and crystal beads, and gleamed like a Cartier jewel … I held it preciously in my hand and longed to own it. I knew I must not offer to buy it, for then it would lose its magic. To my intense surprise, he offered it to me ceremoniously with a little speech. He said that because I was a friend he wished me to have this very sacred, thing and he promised to pray for me “through the mediumship of this medicine.” (Esto had difficulty in translating this.) It would bring me luck, he said, and safeguard me. I knew he had given me a thing he valued, because according to Indian ideals that is the only reason for giving.86 Sheridan did not mince words about the poverty of the Kainai. Among the poorest she encountered was the elderly couple Chief Shot Both Sides and Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman, whom she initially met in Montana. He was a grandson of Mékaisto (Red Crow), the famous Treaty 7 chief, and in 1915 he succeeded his father as chief. Shot Both Sides was a forceful leader who withstood all pressure to sell any of the reserve land. He spoke no English and adhered to Blackfoot religion. According to an Indian agent, he had “accumulated no worldly possessions, and has lived in much the same manner as the poorest of his people, and insisted on this way of life until his health broke” in 1954.87 He died in 1956. A mark of a great leader was his lack of worldly possessions, as he would give to people in need rather than accumulating material goods for himself and his family.

8.5 Eagle claw necklace obtained by Clare Sheridan from the Rough Hair family, Kainai First Nation, collected 1937. Hastings Museum, Clare Sheridan Collection, 983.78.1.

Chief Shot Both Sides and Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman lived in a shack with cardboard replacing broken windowpanes. The chief was dressed very shabbily. Sheridan wrote, “The fact is, that a people who are so poor, whose harvests seldom ripen, whose horses die in winter, who have no money, who manage to subsist on a weekly meat ration, can hardly be expected to put curtains on their windows, replace panes when they are broken,

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paint their bare walls, or have cupboards for their clothes. They have no clothes. The precious buckskins worn on rare occasions are stowed in an antiquated trunk. The rest, whatever little rest there be, is piled in a corner on the floor.”88 Sheridan added in mild rebuke, “I do think the Government might make it possible for the Chief of a tribe (and such a tribe) to live in decency. It isn’t as if he didn’t work. They all work.”89 Sheridan was continually astonished to be presented with gifts when the Kainai had so little. It is not clear that she ever understood the importance of gifts in Indigenous societies. Before Sheridan left the chief ’s modest cabin, Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman disappeared into the next room and reappeared carrying a “formidable tomahawk. The heavy stone was half-covered with hide and had a flexible hide-covered handle.” She said that her father had given it to her, explaining that it dated back to the “pre-White-man days” and that she had used it to make pemmican (see figure 8.6).90 Other gifts included mountain-lion claws obtained from Crazy Crow to make a necklace and on another occasion elks’ teeth on a rawhide string. There were gifts that people gave to say goodbye to her, including a pipe from the Wadsworths, of whom Annie Wadsworth was Sako Tailfeathers’s sister. Her name was Brown Woman, and her husband’s name was Wearing a Tail Feather Head Piece, but he was known as William (Billy).91 Sheridan did not understand the importance of this pipe, writing only that “Esto and I drove to the Wadsworths to say goodbye. They gave me a long, red stone pipe as a souvenir.”92 Central to religious, ceremonial, and diplomatic spheres, the receiver of a pipe had responsibilities to the people and to upholding protocols for the respectful care and use of the pipe.93 Crazy Crow gave Sheridan two scalps and told her that they were from two enemies he had killed at age seventeen. These are at the Hastings Museum.94 In return, she gave Crazy Crow a Hudson’s Bay Company coat that she had obtained in Montana. Crazy Crow also gave Sheridan a parting gift that “was infinitely precious to him. It was a ceremonial whip with a beaver handle decorated with bunches of eagle feathers. It was used in the Grass Dance to lash into dancing those [who] were sitting idle!”95 Parting gifts were often meant to protect and to ensure safe travel. On one of Sheridan’s last days on the reserve, Crazy Crow unravelled a roll of red flannel that held treasured objects and asked her to choose one. He said, “I want you to have something from me that will keep you always safe and well.” It was agreed that she would have a dyed eagle plume. Then he sang a prayer to her and applied paint to her forehead, chin, and cheeks. When she returned

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8.6 Stone pounder obtained by Clare Sheridan from Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman, Kainai First Nation, collected 1937. Hastings Museum, Clare Sheridan Collection, 983.78.7.

to the Tailfeathers, she looked in the mirror: “Was it mere chance, I wondered, that the blue crosses marked the places where, when he was a little boy, and I was ‘his lovely star,’ my son kissed me, holding my face between his hands?”96 Sheridan was catching a glimpse of Blackfoot culture that she did not entirely understand; these are standard marks when painting for protection. Sheridan asked Night-Gun to make her a blanket coat, writing that these were “prized by the Indians,” and she was pleased that “Night-Gun, a reputed fashioner of coats, was making me a new one.”97 It is not clear that she understood just why they were so prized. This yellow coat with black stripes is at the Hastings Museum (see figure 8.7). As noted earlier, one woman present at my talk at the Kainai High School on 19 October 2017 was pleased to see a coat made by her grandfather. Blanket coats had vital social and cultural significance among the Blackfoot, and in the mid-1880s they began to be used as a “ceremonial and identity-laden garment, which carried communally owned knowledge, and communicated ancient ideas integral to social order, cosmology and personal identity.”98 They played a role in identifying societal memberships, reinforcing the age-graded societies that were key cultural institutions for determining male identity among the Blackfoot. These coats

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“conveyed subtle messages of resistance, integrity and renewal, aiding people in protecting some of their social roles and ancient cultural values.”99 Sheridan also purchased objects from stores, such as at Norman Luxton’s Eye of the Goat Trading Post in Banff, where she acquired a buffalo robe and Stoney-Nakoda moccasins. In a letter to Luxton, she dearly sought a “feather war bonnet,” saying that she might need it for a sculpture and “might on some rare occasion wear it.”100 (She lost no time in doing so and perhaps was already imagining herself on the cover of The Tatler.) Luxton sent her two headdresses, and she gave one as a present to the Tailfeathers. (Although there are moccasins, there is no headdress today in the Sheridan collection.) The Tailfeathers accompanied Sheridan on the trip to Banff, where they had never been before, an indication of how limited travel was for Indigenous people of this era. Aside from attending Banff Indian Days, they were prevented from visiting the national park.101 Sheridan remarked that most Kainai had never been anywhere off the reserve, except to go to Browning in Montana, adding that when Esto needed buckskins for her work, she hoped to find some on neighbouring reserves. On the Morley Reserve west of Calgary, Sheridan went on a “shopping orgy,” her purchases including embroidered elk-skin gauntlets.102 The Stoneys, she learned from Luxton, had once been happy and prosperous but were now “almost starving,” so again she saw her purchases as assisting an impoverished people. On the Kainai Reserve, Sheridan stopped sculpting for a time but resumed on 20 September, her deceased son’s birthday. Her model was Mrs Black-Plume, who posed with her baby on her back secured by a tightly drawn shawl.103 She worked on it out of doors until the snow fell, with many curious neighbours and friends gathering to watch her.104

e s ca p ing the “int r icate cross-cur rents of world life” 105 “I don’t believe there is an English family who live more beautifully (it is the only word that applies),” Sheridan wrote about the Tailfeathers. “In England only a rich man could give his children what the Tailfeathers children enjoy.” Each had a horse, and “the prairie is theirs to the horizon. No hedges, no gates to shut them in.”106 What Sheridan sought and admired most about her life on the reserve was what she saw as its seclusion from the modern, industrial, cluttered, complex world beyond. “Here,” she wrote, “were 500 square miles inhabited by 1500 people, without shops, factories, newspapers, or politics.

8.7 Hudson’s Bay Company coat made for Clare Sheridan by Night-Gun, Kainai First Nation, 1937. Hastings Museum, Clare Sheridan Collection, 983.78.24.

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There was never any talk of war, of armaments, investments or labour troubles. A self-contained, poverty-stricken, serene world. Just as the Sahara awakens in one’s soul a deep spiritual consciousness, so too the prairie in the stillness of its immensity filled one with a realization of the Great Spirit.”107 Perhaps because she understood none of the language around her, she could assume that there were no politics and ambitions. Esto shared her views on the superiority of life on the reserve. She was sorry and concerned for Sheridan as she prepared to return to white people: “‘Gangsters,’ Esto said they were, ‘gangsters’! I’d be afraid to live among them.”108 Sheridan’s views were limited and skewered. They were those of a cultural tourist who was dabbling in cultures to fulfil her own purposes and priorities. There is a mocking, condescending, and patronizing tone to some of her observations, which often refer to “primitive races.”109 She described some customs and ceremonies as “old-fashioned absurdities.”110 But she also confessed how little she understood. Esto was not always nearby to translate, and sometimes Esto found translations into English of Blackfoot concepts challenging. Sheridan wrote for example that Crazy Crow was a frequent visitor and that they “used to joke together, he in his language and I in mine, neither understanding the other.”111

l e g ac i e s Sheridan claimed to be transformed and serene when she left Blackfoot country: “[T]he prairie, like the desert, enveloped me in peace. As one renewed, reborn, strengthened, I finally returned to England.”112 She had learned to “eliminate self-pity for all time and … relive my life.”113 Having arrived a “shattered wreck,” she wrote that “in the end I ‘found my medicine’ – it was living on the Blood Reserve.”114 Her biographer and relative Anita Leslie wrote, “When she returned to London … she was quite a different person. Many people who had grown accustomed to the other Clare – the romantic torpedo of a woman – no longer sought her company. But she had only changed; she had not stopped.”115 Yet Sheridan had not changed that dramatically. She lost no time in drawing attention to and promoting herself, while aspiring to scandalize. Immediately upon her return, for example, the Daily Mail featured a sketch of Sheridan in her Hudson’s Bay Company coat under the headline “She Lived with the Indians,” and another described her with “Scalps at Her Belt.”116 She quickly secured a photo shoot with Yevonde Middleton, known for her

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8.8 Claire Sheridan, Big Bull, plaster, 1937. Hastings Museum, Clare Sheridan Collection, 983.78.26.

creative portraits, particularly of women, in which she drew on costumes and props to build an “otherworldly air around her subjects.”117 (The Tatler cover reproduces the pose and position of the sketch of Big Bull that Sheridan bought from Gerald Tailfeathers, so perhaps she showed it to Yevonde.) In July 1938 The Tatler published another Yevonde photo of Sheridan in the same dress and headdress (a colour version of which was the frontispiece of Redskin Interlude), in which she is purportedly “making the sign of the sun in the Indian language.” Her forthcoming book and an exhibition of her Blackfoot sculptures were the point of that story.118 Sheridan believed that her artwork from Montana and Alberta was “the best work of my life.”119 Unfortunately, critics did not agree. At an exhibition in Piccadilly in July 1938, her first in England for seventeen years, not much sold. The Times noted, “About half Miss Sheridan’s works are large heads of North American Indians, in which character is emphasized, rather at the expense of general form, by flat planes unduly sharp at their junction.”120 The two sculptures at the Hastings Museum are examples of the “flat planes” that characterized her work (see figure 8.8).

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Redskin Interlude received little notice in Canada or the United States. Locally, it is difficult to find any attention beyond a meeting of the Cardston Book Lovers’ Club in June 1939 through a copy loaned by Esto Tailfeathers. It was noted rather frostily that Sheridan had not described local settlers “too gently.”121 There were reviews of Redskin Interlude in England, Australia, and New Zealand, all regions deeply engaged with colonial politics and their representation. Sheridan was heralded as a “keen champion of the whole Red Indian race.”122 She was praised for her “sympathy and understanding for, new and strange ways of life.” She pointed to “government bungling and systematic injustice,” and “blame for the present condition of the Indians she gives largely to the authorities.”123 It was largely read as the story of a disappearing people, under headlines such as “America’s Indian Remnant: White Woman’s Pathetic Picture” and “The Red Man and His Culture Doomed.”124 This summation was, however, a skewing of her more complicated picture. Overall, the Blackfoot emerge in her book as a resilient people despite the residential schools, poverty, restrictions on movement, confinement to reserves, and the other oppressive measures that they endured. Yet there is no doubt that Sheridan shared a view that their “traditional” culture was endangered. Correspondence from Indian agent J.E. Pugh to his Ottawa superiors in the fall of 1937 points to another legacy of Sheridan’s visit: a dia interest in fostering and promoting the arts and crafts of the Kainai. Pugh wrote, “We have had a very interesting visitor on the reserve … Mrs. Clare Sheridan, eminent author and sculptures … who has been encouraging the Indians in their handicraft pursuits.” Pugh was pleased to report that during the summer, “one Indian Woman [Esto?] earned around $100.00 for her work, sold to tourists.” This source of income was quite new to Pugh, and he sought assistance for other women to do the same by establishing sewing circles.125 The talent of Gerald Tailfeathers was only now apparent to Pugh, who sent samples of his art to Ottawa in November 1937 and received permission to purchase art supplies. Pugh attached an article by Sheridan praising Gerald as an accomplished artist. Samples of his art were sent to the National Gallery, and the director described them in December 1937 as “remarkable and extraordinarily accomplished for anyone so young.”126 Sheridan, however, did not take any credit for inspiring or helping to train Gerald. She wrote, “To say that Gerald was a promising artist would be inaccurate. He was an artist, as truly as anyone can be: far more so than many a student who s assumed to be

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‘studying art in Paris.’” She paid five dollars for his portrait of Big Bull, “the first picture he ever sold and not likely to be his last.”127 After Sheridan’s visit, Esto became prominent in the preservation, promotion, and sale of Kainai arts and crafts, working with the settler women of the Macleod Handicraft Guild, where she was made an “honourary member.”128 A 1938 article about “vanishing arts” and the work of the guild stated, “In the short history of our province we have had many outstanding women, but none has been more remarkable than Ethel Tailfeathers,” who “should be recognized as one of Alberta’s famous citizens for she is a true mother of her native land.”129 Esto spoke to the guild on “Indian Craft Work,” saying that she was determined to revive knowledge of tanning and curing hides and that she was working with an elderly Kainai woman who was the last to know the science of obtaining dyes from shrubs, trees, and flowers. She exhibited moccasins and described the different designs of the Blackfoot in contrast to those of the Cree. Esto said to the guild that American artists had pointed out “the beauty and symmetry of Indian design, and the masterly blending of colors which decorated their native apparel.” This gave her “confidence in the culture of her own race.”130 The guild also commissioned Gerald Tailfeathers to produce portraits of Blackfoot men for the Macleod Museum and the town library. Esto Tailfeathers’s work was cut short by her untimely death in 1940 at age forty-four. Tributes were paid at her service to “a woman of fine character, [a] good mother and home-maker and excellent scholar and citizen.”131 She was praised for her “gift for speech,” displayed at the May 1939 visit to Calgary of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Her obituary mentioned that her home was the “headquarters for Clare Sheridan when she visited the reserve.” It concluded, “She will be remembered as a native Canadian who bridged the gap between the Indian and the white man.”132 After returning to England, Sheridan had corresponded with Esto, who wrote the preface to Redskin Interlude. Sheridan wrote in 1940 that she intended to return to her Blackfoot friends, but she never did.133 Perhaps this was because Esto had passed away, as Sheridan could not have functioned in the Kainai community without her. Some of the last glimpses of Sheridan’s interest in the Blackfoot include photographs of her “in full Indian regalia” and one painting of the same done in 1941 by her friend Edward H. Blackmore of Eastbourne, Sussex. A plumber by trade, collector, and avid Indian “hobbyist,” Blackmore lectured on the North American Indians and was regarded as an authority.134

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A final legacy of the Blackfoot interlude is the Sheridan collection. She gave her collection to Blackmore shortly before her death, and it was then integrated into the Blackmore collection, which was later donated to the Hastings Museum. The Sheridan collection is not complete; items mentioned or worn in the book are not there.135 Sheridan’s collection however, read alongside her book, provides us with more than just insight into this idiosyncratic renegade collector and traveller. Her book brings to light the people who owned these objects and the people who posed for her, albeit through the author’s eyes and words. Their lives, Sheridan learned, and tried to convey in her book, were rich and full in many respects but limited and constrained through missionary and government power. The objects do not tell us much about Sheridan, except that they elicited in her a powerful desire to possess them. The objects are tangible reminders of an encounter at a time of drought and poverty on the Kainai Reserve and a testament to her friendship with Esto, who like Sheridan attempted to bridge two worlds. We are reminded of Crazy Crow, Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman, Night-Gun, and others who were so generous with gifts and knowledge despite poverty. It was a complex encounter, in which Sheridan drew on the strength and spirituality of the Kainai to heal her grief and to give her purpose and income through her book and artwork. The Kainai, too, had reasons to foster friendships with Sheridan, hoping to secure a powerful ally. Their hopes of sending a prominent British woman back into her world with knowledge of their predicaments were to some extent realized. Her book today constitutes a condemnation of conditions that the Kainai faced in the 1930s.Yet it remains troubling that precious objects are so distant from their community, like the “hundreds, if not thousands, of items from Blackfoot territory in uk and European museums.”136 Sheridan’s Blackfoot interlude leaves an ambivalent legacy.

notes 1 From her late twenties to mid-thirties, Clare Sheridan spent eight years in French Algeria. Her villa is (still) in the heart of the old oasis of Mcid in Biskra, northwest of the Algerian Sahara. She wrote of this experience in Arab Interlude (1936). Hiba and Molnar, “Towards Understanding.” 2 The Blackfoot (Nitsitapiisinni) people, referred to as Blackfeet in the United States, are comprised of three nations: the Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan or Northern Blackfeet), and Siksika (Blackfoot).

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3 On Victorian-era British travel writers, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes. On British writers of the 1930s who used travel writing as a platform for voicing radical, often anticolonial, political ideas, see Schweizer, Radicals on the Road. For a history of British dissent on empire and support for anticolonial resistances, see Gopal, Insurgent Empire. 4 Clare Sheridan was under surveillance from 1920 to 1949, although there was no surveillance during her 1937 travels to Montana and Alberta. Sheridan’s British Secret Service file is in the National Archives, Kew, England, kv2/1033. 5 On Sheridan, Churchill, and the British Secret Service, see Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, 121–9. On Gandhi, see Sheridan “Recalling Gandhi.” 6 See LaPier, Invisible Reality, 100–1. I am grateful to Rosalyn LaPier for her valuable comments on this chapter. See also Beck, Unfair Labor?. 7 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 86. 8 Sheridan’s grumbling about having to pay for sitters began with her first “model,” the distinguished Chief Turtle, who consented to pose for two dollars an hour (when the going rate was fifty cents per hour). He would not pose in his tent unless Sheridan paid him rent for the tent. She also bought him many packets of cigarettes (ibid., 82–3). Sheridan noted that the Blackfeet of Montana asked for payment if they were photographed, whereas the Kainai of Alberta asked not to be photographed at all (ibid., 122). 9 I first learned about Sheridan in historian Graham A. MacDonald’s essay “Clare Sheridan’s Western Interlude: The Importance of Being Well-Connected” (2005). In October 2005 I viewed the Sheridan collection at the Hastings Museum. Thanks to Catherine Harvey, formerly of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Hastings, England, and to photographer Alexander Brattell. Through MacDonald’s contacts with the family, I was graciously invited to visit Sheridan’s great-nephew Jonathan Frewen at the family’s historical home, the Sheephouse, in Brede, East Sussex, where I browsed through her scrapbooks and saw some of the sculptures from her visit to Alberta. See also MacDonald, Where the Mountains Meet. Many thanks to Graham and to Anita Frewen. 10 Sheridan, “In Quest of the Red Indian”; Sheridan, “My Stay among Indians.” 11 Carocci, “Colin F. Taylor Collection,” 109. 12 Ibid. 13 Heather Caverhill, a doctoral candidate in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, is researching the Winold Reiss art colony, including the work of Clare Sheridan. She pointed out the fascinating similarities between Reiss’s and Sheridan’s sculptures of prominent men such as Chief Turtle. My thanks to Heather for her valuable insights and comments on this chapter. 14 LaPier, Invisible Reality, 100–1. 15 Ibid., 107. Among the steady stream of outsiders in LaPier’s book were James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, Walter McClintock, Clark Wissler, Truman Michelson,

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Cornelius C. Uhlenbeck, and John C. Ewers. To these men could be added the less wellknown women visitors Mary Rinehart and Clare Sheridan. On Oxford anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood’s visit to the Kainai Reserve in 1925, see Brown and Peers, ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages.’ Following Sheridan’s visit, there was a steady influx of American anthropologists to Blackfoot country. Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Esther Goldfrank were on the Kainai Reserve in the summer of 1938. 16 Historian Alison Norman has found examples of British women who were “passionate about the rights of Indigenous people in Canada,” including Sarah Robertson Matheson and Mary Pamela Milne-Home, two elite women in Scotland who advocated for the rights of the Six Nations during and after the First World War. See Norman, “Six Nations Soldiers.” 17 On the relationships of Kainai women with suffrage activist Henrietta Muir Edwards, see Roome, “‘From One Whose Home.’” See also Cole, Haskins, and Paisley, Uncommon Ground. 18 My thanks to Laura Peers for providing this photograph, previously published in Brown and Peers, ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages.’ 19 “Wife of Chief Fred T. Feathers Dies, Cardston,” Lethbridge Herald, 26 October 1940, 14. Esto Tailfeathers died at the “Indian hospital” at Cardston “after a lingering illness.” She was forty-four. It was noted that she “spoke English fluently.” 20 “Talented Blood Indian Has Art Showing in Edmonton Museum,” Lethbridge Herald, 3 June 1950, 5. Gerald Tailfeathers (1925–75) became a well-known artist, his commissions including the Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Before 1962 he signed his art Gerald T. Feathers. L. James Dempsey, godson of Gerald Tailfeathers, in conversation with author, 5 March 2018. See also Dempsey, Tailfeathers, Indian Artist; and Nokomis, “Gerald Tailfeathers.” Thanks to Rick Tailfeathers for family history. 21 On 19 October 2017, I gave a talk on Sheridan at the Kainai High School organized by Dr Betty Bastien of the University of Calgary and Red Crow College. The audience of approximately eighty people was comprised of senior high school students, Red Crow College students, and community members, including Elders. A great deal of interest was expressed and knowledge shared during and after the talk. Relatives of people mentioned in the talk were present. Thanks to Dr Betty Bastien for organizing this event. For a model of community consultation and reconnecting international First Nations collections and First Nations communities, see Brown, First Nations; and for a model of the repatriation of historic photographs, including some taken of the same people known by Sheridan, see Brown and Peers, ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages.’ 22 Wilson Our Betrayed Wards. 23 Carter, “‘Your Great Mother.’” See also Carter and Nugent, eds, Mistress of Everything. 24 See Wilson, Our Betrayed Wards.

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25 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 238–43. 26 “Lord Tweedsmuir Honoured by Bloods: King’s Rep Becomes Chief Eagle Head in Ceremony,” Lethbridge Herald, 9 September 1936, 3. 27 Regular, Neighbours and Networks. 28 Goldfrank, Changing Configurations, 35. 29 Gooderham and Godsell, Northern Plains Tribes, vol. 2, 14. 30 Rico, Nature’s Noblemen, 45–82. 31 VTB, “Review of Clare Sheridan’s Nuda Veritas,” China Critic 7, 48 (1934): 1172. 32 “Moreton Frewen,” obituary, Winnipeg Free Press, 2 October 1929, 16. 33 Sheridan, “In Quest of the Red Indian.” 34 Leslie, Cousin Clare, 3, 42. 35 Clare Sheridan’s British Security Service file, 20, National Archives, Kew, England, kv2/1033. In this file, a typed note by Major Joseph Ball, dated 24 November 1925, states that Sheridan was free of debt for the first time in ten years and that she made no money from her journalism or sculpture yet appeared to be “comfortably off.” It was further noted that her private income was £200 per year. Ball was “strongly of the opinion Clare is in the pay of the Russians.” Security agents believed that she was valued as a source because of her ties to Churchill and that she was sent to French Algeria by the Russians. 36 “Mr. Churchill’s Cousin ‘Turns Arab,’” Daily Mail Atlantic Edition (London, uk), 24 July 1930, 5. 37 Dolan, “Clare Sheridan,” 39. 38 “Son of Clare Sheridan ‘Broke Curse,’ Then Died,” New York Times, 20 January 1937, 15. 39 “With Red Indians: Sculptress’ Resolve,” Auckland Star, 10 June 1937, 19. 40 Sheridan, Without End, 204. 41 Sheridan, To the Four Winds, 319. 42 The International Churchill Society disputes any such claim to Churchill’s alleged Native American ancestry. Snell, “Urban Myths.” 43 Sheridan, “In Quest of the Red Indian.” 44 Sturm, Becoming Indian, 85. 45 On Winold Reiss’s art school, see Stewart, “Winold Reiss.” 46 MacDonald, Where the Mountains Meet, 125–6. 47 The term “storytakers” is adopted from LaPier, Invisible Reality. 48 Smith, Reimagining Indians, 90. 49 Sheridan, Without End, 205–6. 50 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 97. 51 Ibid. 52 Smith, Reimagining Indians, 70–2. 53 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 94–5.

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54 Sheridan referred to the spouse of Chief Shot Both Sides as “Ancient Pipe Woman,” but in most other sources, she is identified as “Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman.” See Peers and Brown, ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages,’ 213. 55 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 82. 56 Ibid., 140. 57 Ibid., 91. 58 Sluman and Goodwill, John Tootoosis, 82. 59 “Lived among Arab Tribesmen,” Lethbridge Herald, 15 July 1937, 6. 60 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 135. 61 From 1897 until her death in 1919, Jennie Wells, from Toronto, taught at St Paul’s Anglican School – renamed St Paul’s Indian Residential School in 1925. She was fondly remembered, her female pupils known as “Miss Wells’s Girls.” See Hungry Wolf, Ways of My Grandmothers, 22. In 1924 Esto Tailfeathers was a member of and spokesperson for the Old Girls of St Paul’s, a group that raised funds for a memorial stained-glass window at St Paul’s Anglican Church in honour of Jennie Wells. “Blood Indian Class of 1898–1913 Mark Anniversary of Miss Wells, Famous Teacher,” Lethbridge Herald, 18 April 1936, 12. 62 Gooderham and Godsell, Northern Plains Tribes, vol. 2, 14. 63 Goldfrank, Changing Configurations, 49. 64 Ibid. 65 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 135. 66 Ibid., 136. 67 Ibid. 68 Sheridan provided the names, including in Blackfoot, of the children (ibid., 167–8) and wrote that there were nine. According to the obituary of Esto Tailfeathers, she was survived by six children: four sons and two daughters. And she had two grown adopted children. “Wife of Blood Chief Buried,” obituary, Lethbridge Herald, 23 October 1940, 11. 69 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 151. 70 Ibid., 159. 71 Ibid., 170. 72 Rosalyn LaPier, telephone conversation with author, 3 October 2019. 73 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 161. 74 Sheridan, “In Quest of the Red Indian.” 75 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 163. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 175. 78 Ibid., 165. 79 Ibid., 175–6. 80 Schweizer, Radicals on the Road, 13.

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81 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 240. 82 Ibid., 184. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 185. 85 Ibid., 191. 86 Ibid., 192. 87 Cited in Gooderham and Godsell, Northern Plains Tribes, vol. 2, 4. 88 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 196. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 196–7. 91 Ibid., 186. See also Wadsworth, “Child Marriage.” 92 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 257. 93 The pipe is at the Hastings Museum, along with other items from the Kainai. 94 Ibid., 224–31. 95 Ibid., 265. 96 Ibid., 256. 97 Ibid., 231. 98 Smith Bagan, “Blanket Coats of the Blackfoot,” 97. 99 Ibid., 1054. 100 Clare Sheridan to Norman Luxton, 26 September 1937, Archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Luxton Family Fonds. Thanks to head archivist Jennifer Rutkair for finding this correspondence. 101 Clapperton, “Naturalizing Race Relations.” 102 Sheridan Redskin Interlude, 217. 103 George H. Gooderham and Philip H. Godsell assume that the Mrs Black-Plume sculpted by Sheridan was Pretty Wolverine, the fourth wife of Charcoal, a man hanged in 1897 after he was found guilty of murder, but I think that it depicts a much younger woman and mother. Gooderham and Godsell, Northern Plains Tribes, vol. 2, 85. 104 Sheridan, Without End, 211–12. 105 Ibid., 209. 106 Sheridan, “In Quest of the Red Indian.” 107 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 209. 108 Ibid., 280. 109 Ibid., 187. 110 Ibid., 188. 111 Ibid., 189. 112 Sheridan, To the Four Winds, 314. 113 Ibid., 319.

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114 Cited in Taylor, Clare Sheridan, 15. 115 Cited in Dolan, “Clare Sheridan,” 42. 116 “She Lived with the Indians,” Daily Mail (London, uk), 20 November 1937, 8; “Scalps at Her Belt,” Daily Mail (London, uk), 19 November 1937, 11. 117 Smith, “‘There Is a Garden,’” 128. 118 Richard King, “With Silent Friends,” The Tatler, 20 July 1938, 104. 119 Sheridan, Without End, 205. 120 “Storran Gallery: Portrait and Landscape,” The Times (London, uk), 13 July 1938, 14. 121 “Book Lovers’ Club Re-Organized,” Cardston News (ab), 9 May 1939, 3. 122 “The Happy Traveller,” Saturday Review (London, uk), 16 July 1938, 34. 123 “Lessons from Redskins,” Argus (Melbourne, Australia), 10 September 1938, 16. 124 “America’s Indian Remnant: White Woman’s Pathetic Picture,” Telegraph (Brisbane, Australia), 27 August 1938, 15; Firmin McKinnon, “The Red Man and His Culture Doomed,” Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia), 20 August 1938, 6. 125 J.E. Pugh to R.A. Hoey, Superintendent of Welfare and Training, 30 September 1937, Library and Archives Canada, Records of the Department of Indian Affairs, rg10, vol. 7553, file 41, 103–1. Thanks to researcher Dr Heather Green. 126 Eric Brown, Director, National Gallery of Canada, to T.R.L. MacInnes, Indian Affairs Branch, 23 December 1937, Library and Archives Canada, Records of the Department of Indian Affairs, rg10, vol. 7553, file 41, 103–1. 127 Sheridan, Redskin Interlude, 169. 128 “Mrs. Tail Feathers Addresses Guild,” Lethbridge Herald, 18 June 1938, 20. 129 Margaret S. McDonald, “Alberta Rescues Vanishing Arts,” Lethbridge Herald, 29 June 1938, 16. 130 Ibid. 131 “Wife of Blood Chief Buried,” obituary, Lethbridge Herald, 23 October 1940, 11. 132 Ibid. 133 Cited in Taylor, Clare Sheridan, 15. 134 Taylor, “Indian Hobbyist Movement.” 135 Taylor, Clare Sheridan, 20. 136 Peers and Brown, Visiting with the Ancestors, 199.

9 Dolls, Women’s Art, and Indigenous Networks in the Borderlands of Northern North America, 1885–1945 katie pol lock

Dolls can evoke memories of childhood. Small in size, they are moved easily across space, finding a place in homes around the globe. A critical part of the souvenir trade in the northern borderlands, Indigenous artists of what are now Montana, Alberta, and Saskatchewan drew on this familiarity to create and sell region-specific dolls that were key to ensuring community and cultural survival. The final decade of the nineteenth century brought about profound change for the original residents of these northern Great Plains. Demarcated by an arbitrary political boundary between Canada and the United States, this Indigenous space was remade into a new type of political space with categories of belonging that challenged traditional communities and kinscapes.1 It was this transnational residence by Indigenous peoples that defied the presumed continental supremacy of these two nascent polities, creating a space where Indigenous residents could remain in place and maintain their borderland communities.2 Confined to Canadian reserves and American reservations with narrowing opportunities, these residents looked to an emerging capitalist market in order to ensure family and community continuity. Whereas many women turned to seasonal and wage labour, others adapted traditional skills to meet the demands of a rapidly growing settler population. The women of these communities, long familiar with trade networks and the non-Indigenous fetishization of Indigenous material culture, drew on their familiarity with new government categories to supplement family income as traditional

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9.1 Female wooden doll with moveable arms, carved by Joe Gopher, a Chippewa-Cree, and clothed by his wife, Sitting Pretty (Ochino), a Cree-Assiniboine, both of the Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, c. mid-twentieth century. Minnesota Historical Society, Jeannette O. and Harry D. Ayer Ojibwe Collection, 10000.1221.

economies failed. This chapter begins in 1885 just as the northern Great Plains were undergoing a period of profound political, social, and economic change. As non-Indigenous settlers poured across this landscape, Indigenous peoples found themselves forcibly removed from traditional spaces and confined to new places that represented but a fraction of their territories. Enforcing unwanted ethnic, racial, and national categories, both settler states began to divide Indigenous communities into “Canadian” and “American,” overwriting long-established kinscapes and networks that predate colonial incursions. Concluding this chapter in 1945 allows for a consideration of how individuals

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and communities challenged the very state policies designed to erase them from the land. Coinciding with the Progressive Era (1890–1920), the period of this study also witnessed a social and political movement that introduced settler-based initiatives that understood women’s art as a route to Indigenous self-sufficiency. The dynamic trade in dolls as souvenirs provides a unique lens through which we can consider the critical role of Indigenous women in this era of upheaval. To unveil the crucial role of these women, I draw on examples from three borderland communities that illustrate how familiarity with an eighteenthcentury global doll trade was modified for a specific Great Plains context at the turn of the twentieth century. Placed in a borderland framework, an analysis of a particular form of material culture in this region shows how this women’s work drew on longstanding kin and trade networks to challenge the newly arrived, and presumably uncontested, supremacy of two settler states in this diverse Indigenous landscape.

making a borderl and When Canada and the United States began drawing boundaries and remaking northern Great Plains social space, they fundamentally altered the lives of the Indigenous peoples that historically resided there (see map 5). Predicated on the presence of the now-marked and enforced 49th parallel, these borderlands were a dynamic and multilayered space, thick with meaning, significance, and intentionality.3 To facilitate non-Indigenous settlement and the extraction of the area’s natural resources, Canada’s North-West Mounted Police and the US Army had, by the 1870s, acted in tandem to redefine Indigenous access to this region. With the explicit aim of overwriting Indigenous use with an agricultural settler society, this strategy of policing the borderlands was one of many tools used by both governments to turn Indigenous territories into settler states. To resolve the territorial claims of the region’s original inhabitants, both settler states also adopted a policy of land cessions through treaties in exchange for reservations in the United States and reserves in Canada. Largely successful in confining Indigenous peoples to specific spaces separate from the growing settler population, these same policies also nationalized transnational communities by excluding individuals and families based on ideas of race and band membership.4 South of the 49th parallel, rapid territorial

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expansion and an explosion of non-Indigenous settlement culminated in President Ulysses S. Grant unilaterally confining the region’s diverse Indigenous peoples to the Great Northern Reservation, which was created in 1874 and included most of present-day Montana north of the Missouri River. Later agreements reduced this land base to what are known today as the Blackfeet, Fort Belknap, and Fort Peck Reservations. To the north, Canada’s decision not to establish reserves in the northern borderlands meant that those seeking a land base were forced to look south of the international border and to kinship ties with those now categorized as “American.”5 Carved out of this Indigenous space, the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations are two of the three communities used in this chapter to illustrate the crucial role of Indigenous women in the continuity of borderland communities (see map 6). This study’s third and final community, the Rocky Boy Reservation, was established for those who were denied a place on one of Montana’s other reservations yet still resided in traditional territories. Known as the “landless Indians,” members included several transnational groups: Nehiyaw (Cree) who left Canada after the Red River Resistance of 1885, Anishinaabe (Chippewa) displaced from the Turtle Mountain area of North Dakota, and many Metis families electing to self-identify as Indian.6 Joining prominent Anishinaabe leader Asiniiwin (Stone Child or Rocky Boy) and his followers, this ballooning community was met with hostility and calls to remove those whom many saw as “Canadian” Indigenous people from “American” territory.7 President Woodrow Wilson responded in 1916 by setting aside Fort Assiniboine at the Bear Paw Mountains for Asiniiwin’s band and the other “landless Indians.” Based on a limited understanding of the complex kinship ties and territorial claims that criss-crossed these borderlands, members of these three communities – Fort Belknap, Blackfeet, and Rocky Boy – were defined by outsider understandings that pigeonholed Indigenous peoples based on arbitrary racial and tribal categories. Of these three communities, Rocky Boy saw its membership shaped the most by these government policies and their ad hoc application at the local level. Metis and other Indigenous claims to multiple government categories – Indian, Euro-Canadian/American, and Metis – complicated the very boundaries established by both Canada and the United States.8 With the Blackfeet Reservation designated for the Aamsskáápipikani (South Piikani/Peigan), and the Nakoda (Assiniboine) and Ah-ah-nee-nin (Gros Ventre) settled at Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy emerged as an increasingly multiethnic community that defied these rigid racial and national categories.

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communities, spaces, economies As traditional economies failed in these three communities, women from this borderland space turned to the intersection of traditional practices with new capitalist structures to supplement family income. This undertaking sometimes involved joining male kin as wage labourers, whereas others continued to gather resources from the land and sold their surplus to the homesteads now dotting the landscape. As opportunities narrowed, some women were even observed by settlers “frequently search[ing] the town’s dump-ground … looking for cast-off articles they could use in their own camps.”9 Although these options were crucial in offsetting financial hardship after 1885, many Indigenous women turned to art and the well-established souvenir trade as a path to financial security. Finding themselves in a unique position that allowed them to respond to a rapidly changing plains economy, these women

9.2 Aamsskáápipikani (South Piikani/Peigan/Blackfeet) mother painting rawhide bag with daughter, Montana, 1908. Yale University Library, Walter McClintock Papers, wa mss S-1175.

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drew on networks and knowledge that predated the territorial enforcement of either settler state. An analysis of material culture allows us to focus on the critical role of these women in this active borderland space, whose contribution is largely overlooked in traditional narratives, which rely primarily on written sources. By contextualizing Indigenous women’s art as an explicit challenge to each settler state’s fracturing of kin and community, this object-driven approach understands souvenir art as evidence of complex social relationships that criss-crossed the Great Plains, continent, and globe.10 Much like women of the fur trade era, these women served as intermediaries, adapting Indigenous technique and design to settler form and function in order to create items in high demand. Here, context is critical. An expanding consumer culture, new ethnic categories, rigid gender roles, and concepts like nationality were navigated in tandem with object making and circulation. At the centre of this dynamic borderland space, women were actors “recogniz[ing] things of interest and value in the dominant culture, [and] modifying them to suit needs and tastes.”11 As Indigenous women developed their pre-existing networks to ensure economic and cultural survival, it was this flow of objects and materials in a growing settler-tourist trade that empowered them in a variety of ways. This emphasis on art created by Indigenous women also challenges an entrenched paradigm of authenticity that has marginalized these types of objects, their producers, and the contributions of a largely female economy that was critical to family and community stability.12 As Ruth Phillips notes, souvenirs – once overlooked because they disturbed stereotypical expectations of Indianness – are “commoditized objects, market-oriented arts,” produced predominantly by women who existed on the edges of acceptable, or mainstream, art.13 On the northern Great Plains, an expanding consumer culture replaced the trade in furs with a smaller but critical trade in art and souvenirs. Pairing pre-existing artistic practices with new and evolving settler demands, women created objects that outsiders prized as both “authentically Indian” and western North American.14 Transcending new settler-state boundaries, these items ended up in private homes and collections across the globe. Susan Berry and Sara Komarnisky discuss similar themes in chapters 11 and 12 of this volume and consider how Indigenous peoples and communities produced art and crafts in a diversity of settings, demonstrating creativity and persistence in equal measure.

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making art, mar keting cr aft : the genealo g y of indigenous d olls As both settler states formalized their territorial claims and categories of belonging, borderland Indigenous women remained rooted in the local while engaging with regional, transnational, and global networks.15 A cursory search of museum collections reveals the sheer volume of art produced by Indigenous women, illuminating their economic and aesthetic influence on the northern Great Plains. Transculturation among Indigenous peoples and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations also produced different results, with objects made in specific localities reflecting the experiences and connections of those who lived there.16 Revealing the ever-shifting multilayered space of the northern Great Plains, these objects are embedded in each woman’s connection to place and community. For this reason, the art created by these women needs to be placed within their community-specific context of local affiliations and economic situations, its manufacture being a direct response to the global demand for Indigenous cultural memorabilia.17 By the end of the eighteenth century, North American souvenirs and trophies had been displayed in Britain for over 200 years. Among the elite, these exotic items were placed in cabinets of curiosities, and for well-travelled military personnel, missionaries, and other representatives of empire, they evoked specific memories that represented adventure in the New World.18 As a physical declaration of conquest, these dolls and similar miniatures were integral to narratives of domination told throughout the British Empire well into the twentieth century. Emerging as a pillar of large public exhibitions that represented imperial power predicated on territorial possession, miniatures came to serve as a physical manifestation of that possession, whereby bodies of the colonized became objects – in this case, dolls – that could be possessed and tamed by empire. Also with roots in the eighteenth century, larger public displays and exhibitions in Britain and other imperial centres provided opportunities for both the upper class and the growing middle class to interact with other members and images of empire (see figure 9.3).19 Held in public spaces, attendance at these exhibitions grew from modest numbers to the millions who visited the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in 1851.20 As places where citizens of empire could learn about imperial issues, these exhibitions were crucial in shaping understanding of the “other,” and dolls and the bodies that they represented were featured prominently.21 Taken out of place, these dolls rarely had names

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or known attributions, so they remained anonymous as their context shifted from the northern Great Plains to representations of empire and conquest. A rise in ethnographic collecting coincided with an aesthetic shift at the turn of the century that saw dolls’ clothing deviate from distinct dress representing the characteristics of specific cultural groups to a pan-Indigenous dress that stereotyped a Plains style.22 Dolls were made and circulated across North America long before this colonial collecting. With a variety that reveals the diversity of the continent’s original inhabitants, dolls often reflect local materials and preferences while communicating cultural customs and norms.23 On the northern Great Plains, dolls served as teaching tools for young girls and boys, whereas others were spiritual in nature, sacred at all times, and kept out of sight and protected until needed.24 These early dolls were made of hide and other local resources,

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9.3 Opposite Canadian Pacific Steamships poster for the British Empire Exhibition, London, 1924. Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images.

9.4 Left Piikuni Blackfeet (South Piikani/Peigan/Blackfeet) doll, c. 1850. An early example of trade influence in doll construction, the facial features are whittled from a piece of birch. The doll’s cloth body is dressed in blue stroud that is adorned with tiny white beads to represent elk teeth and trimmed in popular red trade cloth and ribbon. National Museum of the American Indian, 23/4604.

gradually coming to incorporate European trade goods as they were introduced into Indigenous networks (see figure 9.4). Trade cloth, like woollen stroud from Gloucestershire, England, was used for all manner of clothing and doll making, as it was easier to acquire and required less labour. Also popular, seed beads were used to represent items like elk teeth, which carry a great deal of prestige among certain Plains groups. An excellent example of early Indigenous adaptation to new materials and the opportunities associated with them, these earlier dolls continued to serve very specific purposes and communicated cultural information within and between communities.

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Travelling along the same networks as the materials used in their construction, these dolls transitioned to a by-product of the early fur trade. An early example of adaptation and transculturation between Indigenous and nonIndigenous peoples, these dolls were viewed by traders and company officials as mementos that spoke of their time in the interior. Although the more intimate intracommunity dolls were unlikely to reach market, artisans recognized non-Indigenous interest and adapted, creating replicas that were then traded and circulated abroad. This acclimatization spoke to Indigenous artisans’ early and active participation in wider global markets. Throughout the late eighteenth century, dolls and various miniatures of everyday objects used by Indigenous peoples began to circulate in Europe, becoming appropriated collectables that appeared in curio cabinets and exhibitions.25 The demise of the fur trade and subsequent economic collapse saw Indigenous women shift their doll production from a by-product to a deliberately produced souvenir. These dolls were adapted and embellished to meet a growing consumer demand, often conforming to stereotypes that lacked clear cultural affiliation. As non-Indigenous settlement of the northern Great Plains increased, growing demand was met by Indigenous artisans who sold their art at train stations and in small prairie stores. As the region’s middle class grew and these dolls passed from collectables to souvenirs, dolls began to appear in larger coastal department stores before circulating overseas. Simultaneously, as ideas of scientific rationality solidified racial hierarchies, Indigenous peoples were framed in opposition to modernity, relegating them to a premodern era of settler-state formation.26 Implied in this framing was the widespread belief that, like the fur trade, Indigenous peoples were destined to disappear from the North American landscape. As concern grew over the rapid modernization of settler-state society, Indigenous peoples came to represent a purer state of Euro–North American society. Responding to these fears, Indigenous women incorporated this romanticization of the past into their doll production. Capable of evoking memories of childhood, their dolls closely conformed with non-Indigenous ideas of and preoccupations with the vanishing Indian.27 Increasingly shaped by these expectations and a vibrant middle-class tourist trade, the art of Indigenous women was purchased by several companies on the East Coast and then sold both domestically and abroad. In its magazine Doll Talk, the Kimports Company of Independence, Michigan, provided a platform through which consumers could purchase dolls from across the globe.28 To acquire highly coveted dolls from the Great Plains, company

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representatives were often found visiting tribal councils, church functions, and government-sponsored craft cooperatives. Many of these dolls could also be acquired at department stores in larger urban centres throughout the Great Plains. Mounting calls by the middle and upper classes for settler governments to address the fate of North America’s original residents played out in the Indian Reform Movement. This movement was driven primarily by upper-class settler women who believed that the self-sufficiency of North America’s Indigenous peoples could be found through craft. Supported by claims that the dolls they sold at home and abroad represented an “unforgettable segment of American history,” as attested by the Indian Industries League and the Women’s National Indian Association, these reformers wielded a heavy hand in determining the qualifications of authentic Indigenous art.29 In response to these calls for action, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1935 New Deal oversaw the creation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, which encouraged Indigenous peoples to produce art as a path to economic self-sufficiency.30 Drawing on practices long established in the Southwest, local organizations were quick to put this policy into practice across the northern Great Plains.

cultur al negotiat ion and borderl and d olls In response to these developments occurring at the turn of the century, Indigenous women from the Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy, and Blackfeet Reservations began to target their art at tourists as they passed through the borderlands. Reacting to growing tourism in 1895 and 1910 at Waterton and Glacier National Parks respectively, artisans continued to combine traditional practices and emerging trends associated with the shift in aesthetic between the Victorian Era and the Progressive Era.31 The results of these cultural negotiations found their way to diverse places across the Great Plains, continent, and globe. Still, local Indigenous artisans faced resistance from federal government officials who privileged a well-developed Indigenous art trade in the Southwest. Whereas Washington officials argued that there was insufficient demand to establish a similar market on the northern Great Plains, local officials like Superintendent F.A. Asbury of the Fort Peck Reservation argued that his community’s artists sold their art through local channels and on order, suggesting a production that remained out of sight of Washington officials. In fact, the visibility of borderland arts varied with the artistic renderings. During the

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First World War, some of the community’s women made leather shoulder patches for their male kin on which they faithfully beaded each unit’s insignia. One local woman’s designs became so popular that her son began selling them to other members of his unit while abroad.32 By the early 1930s, artisans in this study’s three communities were producing distinct art that rarely had to compete with the art of neighbouring communities. On the Blackfeet Reservation, artisans were known for their heavily beaded buckskin jackets. With fringe draped over the shoulders and across the front and back of the yoke, these jackets often had an elaborately detailed border design and were held closed with buttons hand-carved of elk antler. They were so popular by 1938 that Abercrombie & Fitch and other sporting goods shops in New York City were retailing jackets of this type.33 Rocky Boy makers were also deft at adapting horn and bone to meet modern demands. Most popular were their ashtrays made of hand-polished buffalo hoofs. Also popular were their polished rings of cow horn that added a Western touch to sport sweaters, jackets, and dresses. They also modified traditional ribbon work and added it to sportswear, belts, cuffs, blouses, and dresses.34 At Fort Belknap the “modern use of the rawhide for waste baskets and desk baskets” was so popular that they were often sold prior to reaching market on the Blackfeet Reservation.35 When redesigning its “Indian” rooms, the Noble Hotel in Wyoming purchased a large quantity of wastebaskets from Fort Belknap artisans, which it later advertised as having been “used in former days of … tribal life.”36 Inspired by developments among the Pueblo and Navajo in the 1920s, those with ties to the Indian Reform Movement began to organize this northern Great Plains Indigenous art at the grassroots level. Initially, this undertaking was part of the 1936 Works Progress Administration’s make-work initiative, with women on the Blackfeet Reservation appropriating old Civilian Conservation Corps clothing to produce patchwork quilts and rugs to sell to tourists at the national parks. When they approached the Glacier Park Curio Shop in June 1936 to sell their art, they were rebuffed because it failed to conform to the stereotypes of authentic Indigenous culture. Instead, it was suggested that if they “could just make something of buckskin with a few beads,” it would sell without difficulty.37 Undeterred, the women erected a tepee and put up signs that directed tourists to their craft tent, where they could buy quilts, rugs, and art inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps. When the first settler family entered, they asked for “Navajo Rugs. Have you

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any Navajo rugs?” Upon being shown the Aamsskáápipikani women’s elaborate hooked rugs with geometric designs, the tourists left, desiring only those items that spoke to a settler familiarity with a narrow range of the authentic, which they identified with Indigenous material culture of the Southwest.38 Making $31.50 that first day, the artists found that tourists were willing to pay for very specific items, so artistic production was adjusted to meet these demands. One year later, moccasins, beaded bags, and beaded buckskin dolls were sold on the 4 July weekend to much fanfare.39 In response, the Blackfeet community repurposed the old hospital and council chamber to serve as a community craft shop, building a secondary structure to capture tourist traffic on the highway at the entrance to Glacier National Park. In just two years, the souvenir trade at the park shifted from imported and non-Indigenous goods to locally produced Indigenous art.40 To meet a growing demand, community members from the three reservations were called on to gather their art, and the new craft shop in Browning, Montana, was flooded with bags, moccasins, miniature tepees, drums, and toy replicas from across northern Montana. During the summer of 1938, the shop made $400 in total, with 25 per cent paid to two young women who served as clerks and the remainder going to local artists. Closed during the winter months, the shop received orders amounting to over $200, and during the intervening season, members discussed marketing and production standards and looked “into old ways of making the fine Blackfeet crafts articles,” with community artisans insisting on “meticulous standards of authenticity and good workmanship.”41 To the east, both the Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy communities repurposed agency buildings to serve as their art and craft showrooms.42 At Rocky Boy several religious organizations began marketing the community’s art in New York and in catalogues as early as the 1920s, employing as many as sixty women and earning a total of $2,500 by 1943.43 Although the summer automobile tourist trade at Glacier National Park remained a critical source of revenue, Indigenous art from these borderlands was sold in departments stores on both coasts by the early 1940s. One government official at Rocky Boy noted that “the bead work in my opinion is the best I have seen. Articles made, however, are such as will meet demand of the modern market and thus are not intrinsically Indian. Evening bags, cigarette cases, coin purses, label ornaments are popular items.”44 This official denied Indigenous involvement with the modern, even as communities throughout the continent demonstrated their full engagement with consumer markets.

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At times drawing on a settler fear about the “vanishing Indian,” artisans adapted their artistic traditions to produce items desired locally, nationally, and globally. In 1942, with the creation of the federal Northern Plains Indians Arts and Crafts Association, the disparate art production on the Blackfeet, Fort Belknap, and Rocky Boy Reservations was brought together to form the Northern Montana Art Cooperative. When the Museum of the Plains Indian was opened in June 1941 in Browning, smaller communities and previously established cooperatives in these borderlands brought their art together into one enterprise.45 With the Indian Art and Craft Board serving as an advisor and informed by the wider Progressive Movement, the cooperative aimed to “develop retail and wholesale markets for Indian arts and crafts products of the various northern plains tribes and to contribute to the industrial prosperity of the Indian people.”46 Of the items produced and sold in Browning, hand-crafted dolls remained the most popular and varied in design between communities. Drawing on the long-familiar international doll trade, makers adapted their knowledge to a very specific post-1900 Great Plains context that catered primarily to the increasing numbers of middle-class automobile tourists. Differences were maintained to eliminate competition between communities, with the dolls that came out of the Fort Belknap Reservation made of buckskin, their “well shaped leather faces giving them a look of distinction.”47 Conforming to tropes of the Wild West, a doll named Galloper was described as a warrior with scalps decorating his suit, and another variously named Dah-Keh-Unto and Moh-Pe-Ha-Cagha was dressed in “traditional buckskin clothes.”48 One unnamed artisan was renowned for making dolls eighteen inches tall, with clothing and headdresses that were “authentically reproduced from the old tribal custom.”49 Sold through the cooperative, these two examples from Fort Belknap illuminate an aesthetic unique to this community. In figure 9.5 a Nakoda female doll appears in full leather dress, belt, leggings, and moccasins, all trimmed with beadwork. With her hair in braids, she also wears a beaded sash and earrings. Juanita Tucker, an artisan from the Fort Belknap community, made this doll, which stands over eleven inches tall. Still with its sales tag, we know that this doll was priced at $11.00 when she sold it through the cooperative. Its counterpart, the Nakoda male doll in figure 9.6, was also made by Juanita Tucker at approximately the same time. Standing seven and a half inches tall and selling for $8.75, this doll wears a white leather shirt, leggings, and moccasins trimmed with beadwork.50 His hair in braids and fastened with leather, he wears a beaded headband with a feather and holds

9.5 Left Nakoda female doll, made by Juanita Tucker of the Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana, c. mid-twentieth century. Minnesota Historical Society, Jeannette O. and Harry D. Ayer Ojibwe Collection, 10000.1208.

9.6 Right Nakoda male doll, made by Juanita Tucker of the Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana, c. mid-twentieth century. Minnesota Historical Society, Jeannette O. and Harry D. Ayer Ojibwe Collection, 10000.1217.

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a second feather in his right hand. Stuffed, both dolls represent but a sampling of the many dolls made by Tucker for the Montana cooperative. Too often, little is known about the Indigenous women who crafted these objects, but that is not the case with Juanita Left Hand Tucker, a renowned community artisan (see figure 9.7). Archival research shows us that she was born in 1896 to Richard Jones and Tok-wa-cin-ka-na, or Enemy Girl. She married Joseph Tucker, or Mini-Kata/Kills in the Water, and together they had several children.51 Juanita and her family illustrate the difficulty that settler-state officials had in confining Indigenous peoples to rigid ethnic categories in these borderlands. Juanita was variously identified as Stone Sioux, Half-blood, and Assiniboine between 1925 and 1945, and her husband, a farmer, was also categorized variably as Half-blood, Assiniboine, Cree, and Stone Sioux.52 This ethnic malleability is also reflected in the categories ascribed to their children, whose ethnicity was identified at different times as Assiniboine-Cree and Assiniboine. The movement of Juanita’s family between these categories highlights the complex multiethnic reality of these borderlands in the post-1885 period and the kinship connections that crisscrossed these northern spaces. To the west, reflecting the Aamsskáápipikani community’s emphasis on elaborately beaded jackets, the Niitsitapii doll in figure 9.8 stands out for its use of hide, glass beads, ermine tails, feathers, and paint. Made in 1935, it is described as wearing “full ceremonial costume” and is representative of the dolls made by women on the Blackfeet Reservation and later sold through the Northern Montana Art Cooperative. Although the collection history remains obscure, the doll reflects much of the earlier expectations of a settler-tourist trade that stereotyped Plains Indigenous culture. However, this doll provides a glimpse of a very specific Aamsskáápipikani material representation that met tourist demands for a stereotypically authentic Indigenous dress. Located on the border of Glacier National Park, this Aamsskáápipikani community was uniquely positioned, allowing its members to adapt quickly in order to produce objects that the tourist trade demanded. One example of a rich production, such dolls populated many tourist shops across the Great Plains. Unique among their contemporaries, the dolls originating from the Rocky Boy Reservation were made of different materials, resulting in a different aesthetic. Facing more financial pressures than their neighbours, artisans in this area of the northern borderlands made dolls that were hand-carved from wood and modelled after local characters like Jakup, a “half-breed interpreter

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9.7 Ken Blackbird, Juanita Tucker, Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana, February 1993. McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Ken Blackbird Collection, ms 426, P.426.02575.

with his hair cut short and wearing store pants.”53 Their dolls were also known for depicting a historical period dominated by “old Indians and white traders.”54 The men of Rocky Boy were responsible for carving the dolls and were renowned for their ability to invoke the likeliness of the local people on whom they drew for inspiration.55 Here, we see that although women dominated this art trade in Montana, the skills of their male kin proved invaluable.56 A popular image associated with the northern Great Plains and the fur trade era, long coats sewn from Hudson’s Bay Company wool cloth, often topped with a fur hat, adorned many of these dolls. An excellent example of this evocative artistry is the male wooden doll from the Rocky Boy Reservation in figure 9.9. Carved by Joe Gopher and clothed by his wife, Sitting

9.8 Above Niitsitapii male doll, made on the Blackfeet Reservation, Montana, c. 1935. Formerly in the collection of Dr and Mrs Otho C. Hudson, National Museum of the American Indian, 22/4780.

9.9 Right Male wooden doll with moveable arms in a winter outfit, carved by Joe Gopher, a Chippewa-Cree, and clothed by his wife, Sitting Pretty (Ochino), a Cree-Assiniboine, both of the Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, c. mid-twentieth century. Minnesota Historical Society, Jeannette O. and Harry D. Ayer Ojibwe Collection, 10000.1213.

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Pretty, the doll stands over ten inches tall and has moveable arms incorporated into its design. Sold for $7.50, this doll features leggings under a wool coat, reminiscent of the popular capote often associated with the Plains Metis of the Red River Valley. The capote features piping along the seams and is held closed at the waist with what may be interpreted as a sash. Discussed by Cynthia Cooper in chapter 3 of this volume, the capote remained a popular representation of Metis material culture well into the twentieth century and likely speaks to the significant Metis presence on the Rocky Boy Reservation. A quick look at Sitting Pretty’s background helps to illustrate this connection. Known by several names, including Pretty Gopher and Sitting Right, this artist was born in 1897 and was identified in several US censuses as either Cree, Assiniboine, or Chippewa. In 1917 she married Joe Gopher, or Chief Walking, himself known as Cree, Assiniboine, and French. The 1940 US census recorded that Joe was born in Montana and Sitting Pretty in Canada, speaking to this family’s movement through these northern borderlands. Further analysis also shows that both Sitting Pretty and Joe Gopher were not on the original Rocky Boy rolls, meaning that they arrived and gained entry to the community after it was established in 1916.57 Evidenced by this family’s multiple and porous ethnic categories, the Rocky Boy Reservation vividly reflects the complex ethnic reality of the northern Great Plains at the turn of the century. Fellow community member Mabel Raining Bird also exemplifies this complexity (see figure 9.10). Born in 1906, she is identified in government records as Cree-Assiniboine and her husband, Arthur Raining Bird, as Blackfoot-Cree. A further investigation into the lives of their children, who married members of the Fort Belknap Reservation, illuminates how borders between these categories and the northern Montana reservations remained porous well into the twentieth century. As Mabel Raining Bird and Sitting Pretty shared the maiden name Ochino/Akino, it is also possible that they shared a kinship tie.58 Carved by Arthur Raining Bird, the male wooden doll in figure 9.11 wears cloth and leather clothing designed by Mabel. This doll features a shirt and pants that were originally aqua in colour but have since faded to tan. This doll is also dressed in a vest, breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins made of leather, and it is accessorized with a collar and tie made of a small button and piece of red felt. With his hair in braids tied with red wool, the doll’s headdress is made of an undetermined material. This doll also aligns with the stereotypes most often associated with Indigenous dress and would have been popular among tourists.

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9.10 Left to right: Arthur Raining Bird, Barbara Raining Bird, Joseph Raining Bird, unknown girl, Pearl Whitford, Louis Raining Bird, and Mabel Raining Bird with unknown baby, Cree of the Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, 1956. Montana State University–Northern, fm-1-28.

Unique among the collection for reflecting the dress of local women at the time, the female wooden doll in figure 9.1 wears a headscarf and a knee-length dress printed with black and white dots. The doll also features a yellow shawl, red leather belt, tan stockings, white leather boots, and undershorts. This ten-inch doll sold for $7.50 and was carved with moveable arms by Joe Gopher and clothed by Sitting Pretty. Remarkable for not conforming to settler expectations of Indigenous dress, this doll is true to Rocky Boy artisans’ representation of contemporary community members. The shawl was widely used, especially by Metis women, its prominence increasing after 1885 as the community went through a profound period of change; the shawl held great cultural resonance.59 Consistent with a long history of using ready-made cotton, the inclusion of undershorts represents changing styles and aesthetics among modern North American women, among whom Indigenous women were active participants. Representing only a small sample of the dolls coming out of the Rocky Boy Reservation, these carved wooden dolls, which exhibit

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9.11 Male wooden doll with moveable arms, carved by Arthur Raining Bird and clothed by Mabel Raining Bird, a Chippewa-Cree of the Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, c. mid-twentieth century. Minnesota Historical Society, Jeannette O. and Harry D. Ayer Ojibwe Collection, 10000.1219.

both stereotypes and modern adaptations, were unique among their neighbours for their resemblance to residents, with their moveable arms carved of wood and often noted by officials as being distinct. It was these moveable arms that added a sensory component not found in other dolls, setting them apart in the northern Plains market. In sum, the totality of doll production from these three communities illuminates the diversity of doll production,

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which built on a pre-existing doll trade while adapting to meet demands of a settler society preoccupied with concerns over a rapidly modernizing North American society.

conclusion In each of its first two years of sales, members of the Northern Montana Art Cooperative made a combined $10,000, with community totals reflecting the differences in population and access to tourist markets. Artisans on the Blackfeet Reservation, at the centre of Montana’s Indigenous art production since the turn of the century, had a familiarity with and access to tourists and markets not as easily available to their Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy neighbours. This same familiarity meant access to art resources that their neighbours did not enjoy, with those at Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy using a larger percentage of their annual earnings to purchase the supplies needed to make the dolls most in demand by tourists. Nonetheless, these community members also challenged settler demands for their art and knowledge. Women on the Blackfeet Reservation initially refused to use quillwork in their designs because the proper preparation ceremonies had been lost over the previous century due to colonial processes. In response, community gatherings became a place where artisans could revisit traditional practices, as Louise Randall, Victor Pepion, and Alberta Racine were doing on the Blackfeet Reservation during the 1930s. Working with designs on robes, rocks, and other everyday items, this research in traditional Aamsskaááipikani designs was later adapted for the tourist trade and became quite popular at Glacier National Park.60 This knowledge recovery would prove critical as makers continued to reclaim cultural practices that both settler states tried to erase from communities. The long-held belief among tourists and government officials that the adaptations made by Indigenous women to their art somehow made their contributions less valuable is a disservice to Indigenous women’s critical contribution to community continuity in the borderlands at the end of the nineteenth century. Similar findings play out across the Global North, evidenced both in Susan Berry’s detailed analysis of hide coats and in Sara Komarnisky’s discussion of hospital-made Indigenous art in chapters 11 and 12 of this volume. Responding to changing trends since colonial contact, Indigenous women were often at the front of changing aesthetics and adapted quickly to meet new demands associated with a growing settler society. Although many took advantage of new economic opportunities, material evidence shows us a

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very distinct contribution that proved crucial for many families and communities after economic and social collapse in the late 1880s. As attempts to define and categorize northern Great Plains Indigenous peoples failed to grasp – and further complicated – the complex kinship and intercommunity connections, women ensured that the art produced for the growing tourist market remained unique to each community. The examples from these three communities illustrate women’s artistic contributions, showing how they adapted traditional practices to better market their art locally and across familiar global networks, even while using an art cooperative framework imposed by the American settler state. Ruth Phillips has demonstrated for northeastern Indigenous peoples that excluding souvenir art from historical inquiry silences the producers of these objects, whose engagement with a growing consumer culture became an explicit means of ensuring financial self-sufficiency and cultural survival.61 This chapter further extends the history of this practice after 1885, set within distinctive spaces and circumstances. Objects can act as primary source material through which we are able to consider themes and questions otherwise inaccessible – most critically, the artist-maker roles undertaken by Indigenous women following their confinement to reserves and reservations. Long familiar with and active participants in global trade, these women found new ways to engage with dominant systems while preserving their communities. Consumed largely by outsiders, these women’s labour was exchanged for cash and was critical to household income, furthering the social, economic, and political agendas of Indigenous families and communities in these northern borderlands. This analysis also challenges the stereotype of Indigenous culture as static and relegated to a premodern era. Actively navigating and challenging the very systems put in place to remove them from these borderlands, art as a commodity became a means of resisting settler-state erasure of Indigenous peoples from the northern Great Plains.

notes 1 Métis scholar Brenda Macdougall describes “kinscapes” as networks of family relationships that were knit together in a certain place and time. Macdougall, “Knowing Who You Are”; Macdougall, “Wahkootowin as Methodology.” 2 This chapter draws from my doctoral dissertation, which looks at how Metis families manipulated settler-state policies to maintain family and community in the borderlands of Canada and the United States. Pollock, “Staying in Place.”

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3 Rather than viewing these borderlands as one homogenous landscape, I propose that the northern Great Plains are composed of three types of space that intersect and interact: natural, political, and social. These borderlands are defined to the east and west by the Red River and Rocky Mountains and to the north and south by the South Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers. For further discussion, see ibid. 4 Philip Henry Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, “recognises the Sioux, Crows, South Blackfeet, and South Piegans to be our Indians,” whereas “[t]he Canadian Government recognises the North Piegans, Blood, North Blackfeet, Cree, Saulteaux [sic] and Assiniboines.” William T. Sherman, Commanding General of the US Army, to Robert Todd Lincoln, Secretary of War, 16 June 1882, National Archives, Washington, dc, rg1408, 1881, M689, roll 93. See also Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General 1881–1889, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1775–1928, National Archives, Washington, dc rg94, M689. 5 In Canada’s southern prairie provinces, questions over land title were settled between 1871 and 1877 under Treaties 1 to 7. 6 Broadly, the term “Metis” refers to people of mixed Indigenous and European descent, and in this chapter, its unaccented spelling refers specifically to families with ties to the original bison-hunting brigades out of the Red River Settlement that grew to include the bison-robe trade. 7 For detail of forced removals, see Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line; McCrady, Living with Strangers; and Pollock, “From Borderlands to Bordered Lands.” 8 A growing literature looks at the complex kinship ties that define these communities and at the connections between them. See Innes, Elder Brother; and Macdougall, One of the Family. 9 Thomas H. McKee, “A Boy in Bismarck: When Both Were Very Young,” March 1953, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Thomas McKee Collection. 10 Phillips, Trading Identities; Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together.” 11 Phillips, Trading Identities, xiii. 12 This chapter draws on ideas introduced by Lemire, Business of Everyday Life; and Ulrich, Age of Homespun. 13 Phillips, Trading Identities, x. 14 After 1900 dolls tended to wear fringed buckskins, beads, and feather bonnets, suggesting a universal type of Plains ceremonial dress. In response to a trend perpetuated by Hollywood and its popular Western genre, communities across North America began to produce costumes and souvenirs that reflected this settler-coveted pan-Indigenous stereotype. 15 Sophie White’s 2006 analysis shows how commercial activities can be used to expose the

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role of gender and social standing in the formation of broader economic and cultural frameworks. White, “‘A Baser Commerce.’” 16 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together”; Brasser, “In Search of Métis Art”; Duncan, “Metis and Production.” 17 “Indian Crafts,” Montana Historical Society Archives (mhsa), Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 18 Wonders, “Hunting Narratives.” 19 Hoffenbert, Empire on Display. 20 For a summary of nineteenth-century international exhibitions, see Adam Matthew Digital, World’s Fairs. 21 Stewart, On Longing. See also chapter 12 of this volume, where Sara Komarnisky discusses the anonymity of female artists in the making of Inuit dolls. 22 Companion to the Principal Places. 23 Cotherman, “Crandall Collection.” 24 Girls learned about childcare and garment construction and were provided an opportunity to hone artistic skills. Boys also had dolls that represented warriors on toy ponies meant to emulate the bison hunt during a popular camp game. Lenz, Small Spirits, 65. 25 Phillips, Trading Identities, 81. 26 O’Neill, “Rethinking Modernity”; Hutchinson, Indian Craze; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places. 27 Bennett and Kohl, Settling the Canadian-American West; Penney, North American Indian Art, 57–60; Willmott, “Lens of Science.” 28 Stewart, On Longing, 149. 29 Mathes, Women’s National Indian Association, 47. 30 This same policy cautioned that since women produced many of these objects, they might find themselves in the role of primary provider instead of men. Meyn, More Than Curiosities, 35. 31 This post-1885 era coincided with a shift between the Victorian Era and the rise of the Progressive Era. This shift manifested in the preservation of objects and images of the continent’s supposedly “vanishing Indians” and in the use of social capital to improve the human condition. At a time of rising criticism about economic inequality and rising class conflict, these measures were among a range of initiatives intended to solve societal problems associated with industrial development. 32 F.A. Asbury, Superintendent of Fort Peck Agency, Poplar, Montana, Office of Indian Affairs, US Department of the Interior, to Joseph Kinsey Howard, 6 January 1945, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 33 Mrs Jessie Donaldson Schultz, Community Worker at Blackfeet Agency, and Mrs Ethel B.

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Arnett, Director, Division of Education and Recreation, Works Progress Administration, “Blackfeet Crafts Workers Ready for Summer Season,” Indians at Work: A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service 5, no. 10, ed. Office of Indian Affairs (1938): 21–3, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 34 The Arapahos and Shoshones of the Wind River Reservation at Fort Washakie, Wyoming, were known for their jackets, jerkins, moccasins, and lapel ornaments. Carl L. Pearson, Superintendent of Rocky Boy Agency, Box Elder, Montana, to Mr Joseph Kinsey Howard, 10 November 1944, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 35 Rose K. Brandt, Superintendent of Indian Education, Field Office, Billings, Montana, Office of Indian Affairs, US Department of the Interior, to Mr Joseph Howard, 5 March 1945, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 36 Ibid. 37 Mrs Jessie Donaldson Schultz, Community Worker at Blackfeet Agency, “The Blackfeet Indian Craft Shop,” Indians at Work: A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service 4, no. 13, ed. Office of Indian Affairs (1937): 40–2, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Mrs Jessie Donaldson Schultz, Community Worker at Blackfeet Agency, and Mrs Ethel B. Arnett, Director, Division of Education and Recreation, Works Progress Administration, “Blackfeet Crafts Workers Ready for Summer Season,” Indians at Work: A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service 5, no. 10, ed. Office of Indian Affairs (1938): 21–3, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 41 Ibid. 42 “Northern Plains Indians Arts and Crafts Association,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 43 Meyn, More Than Curiosities, 34; “Indian Crafts,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16; “Northern Plains Indians Arts and Crafts Association,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15; Carl L. Pearson, Superintendent of Rocky Boy Agency, Box Elder, Montana, to Mr Joseph Kinsey Howard, 10 November 1944, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. In 1944 an Assiniboine wastebasket from Fort Assiniboine (Rocky Boy) sold for $13.00, and moccasins from Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy sold for $5.50 and $7.00 respectively. Northern Plains Indians Crafts Association, Browning, Montana, “Items on Loan, 18 December 1944,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 2, folder 15. 44 “Indian Crafts,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 45 A location near Glacier National Park in Browning, Montana, was selected for a publicly funded museum.

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46 Ibid. Initial membership included the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, ChippewaCree, and the Arapahos and Shoshones of the Wind River Reservation at Fort Washakie, Wyoming. Northern Plains Indians Crafts Association, Browning, Montana, “Items on Loan, 18 December 1944,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 2, folder 15. 47 Carl L. Pearson, Superintendent of Rocky Boy Agency, Box Elder, Montana, to Mr Joseph Kinsey Howard, 10 November 1944, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 48 Ibid. 49 Rose K. Brandt, Superintendent of Indian Education, Field Office, Billings, Montana, Office of Indian Affairs, US Department of the Interior, to Mr Joseph Howard, 5 March 1945, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 50 The head of the doll is made of hard, wrinkled, reddish-orange skin that curators speculate may be a dried apple. 51 Joseph’s parents were Wah-gra-o-money (Walking Thunder), identified as a Half-blood, and Hay-Zhatta (Forks of Horns), an Assiniboine. US Census Bureau, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, “Juanita [Left Hand] Tucker,” year 1929, roll M595_129, page 45, line 11, Fort Belknap Agency; and “Richard Jones” and “Enemy Girl,” year 1904, roll M595_127, page 25, line 14, Fort Belknap Agency, Ancestry.com. 52 US Census Bureau, 1920 United States Federal Census, “Enemy Girl,” Fort Belknap, Blaine, Montana, roll T625_967, page 5B, enumeration district 9, Ancestry.com; US Census Bureau, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, “Juanita [Left Hand] Tucker,” year 1933, roll M595_130, page 104, line 2, Fort Belknap Agency; “Joseph Tucker” and “Juanita [Left Hand] Tucker,” year 1936, roll M595_131, page 109, line 12, Fort Belknap Agency; “Joseph Tucker” and “Juanita Lefthand Tucker,” year 1925, roll M595_129, line 14, Fort Belknap Agency; and “Joseph Tucker,” year 1887, roll M595_151, page 2, line 5, Fort Peck Agency, Ancestry.com. 53 Carl L. Pearson, Superintendent of Rocky Boy Agency, Box Elder, Montana, to Mr Joseph Kinsey Howard, 10 November 1944, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 15. 54 Rose K. Brandt, Superintendent of Indian Education, Field Office, Billings, Montana, Office of Indian Affairs, US Department of the Interior, to Mr Joseph Howard, 5 March 1945, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder. 55 Ibid. 56 Northern Plains Indians Crafts Association, Browning, Montana, “Items on Loan, 18 December 1944,” mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 2, folder 15. 57 US Census Bureau, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, “Chief Walking,” year 1925, roll M595_426, page 5, line 15, Rocky Boy Agency; “Joe Gopher” and “Pretty (Sitting Right),” year 1926, roll M595_426, page 9, line 4, Rocky Boy Agency; “Joe Gopher” and “Pretty

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(Sitting Right),” year 1928, roll M595_426, page 11, line 15, Rocky Boy Agency; and “Joseph Gopher” and “Sitting Pretty (Ochino),” year 1932, roll M595_426, page 18, line 9, Rocky Boy Agency, Ancestry.com; US Census Bureau, 1930 United States Federal Census, “Joe Gopher” and “Sitting Pretty,” Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Hill, Montana, page 2A, enumeration district 0019, Ancestry.com; US Census Bureau, 1940 United States Federal Census, “Joseph Gopher,” Havre, Hill, Montana, roll m-t0627-02221, page 1B, enumeration district 21-20, Ancestry.com. 58 US Census Bureau, 1930 United States Federal Census, “Ochino,” Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Hill, Montana, page 4B, enumeration district 0019, Ancestry.com; US Census Bureau, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, “Arthur Raining Bird” and “Mabel ‘Offino’ Raining Bird,” year 1932, roll M595_426, page 30, line 7, Rocky Boy Agency; and “Arthur Raining Bird” and “Mabel (Ochino) Raining Bird,” year 1933, roll M595_426, page 33, line 12, Rocky Boy Agency, Ancestry.com; Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, Montana State Marriage Records, 1943–1988, “Arthur Raining Bird and Mabel Ochino Family,” roll 90, certificates 80 06101 to 80 08346; roll 38, certificates 60 010001 to 60 260024; and roll 32, certificates 57 160174 to 57 460094. 59 Sherry Farrell Racette details how Metis women’s dress changed after 1885 to reflect new political, social, and economic circumstances, often manifesting in more sombre dress choices. Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together.” 60 Community members worked with Elders in order to learn how to properly prepare the quills. Mrs Jessie Donaldson Schultz, Community Worker at Blackfeet Agency, and Mrs Ethel B. Arnett, Director, Division of Education and Recreation, Works Progress Administration, “Blackfeet Crafts Workers Ready for Summer Season,” Indians at Work: A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service 5, no. 10, ed. Office of Indian Affairs (1938): 21–3, mhsa, Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-54, box 1, folder 16. 61 Phillips, Trading Identities.

10 Dew Claw Bags, Indigenous Women, and Material Culture in History and Practice j udy hal f

i n t ro d u c t i o n Judy Half was an important and integral member of the Object Lives research team and, like many collaborators, worked within significant constraints to contribute to this project and this volume. This project has not been wedded to solely formal academic reporting, as can be seen on our website: www. objectlives.com. We recognize the immense value of different sources of knowledge and knowledge keepers. Decolonizing the academy opens the door for initiatives of many kinds, including a chapter of this type, which presents an interview with Judy Half edited for this volume. She is a nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) knowledge keeper of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, located northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, and her knowledge is based on this place and its people, but with implications well beyond this locale.

interv iew Beverly Lemire (bl): I am very happy to have this opportunity to talk with you Judy about dew claw bags (see figure 10.1). Most of the objects that our group has studied are ones that carry some written history framing at least part of the context for the objects and their creation, the creators, and the movement of these goods. But that is not the case for dew claw bags. You

10.1 Dew claw bag from the Northeast Woodlands, possibly Anishinaabe or Haudenosaunee, collected 1953. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1954.9.22.

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wrote to me that there are no written histories of these important things. Is the unwritten history a place to begin to introduce these objects to our readers? Judy Half (jh): Yes. It is very vital to begin with the communities, to be able to access the meaning and the purpose of these bags and how they were used in ceremony. Back to the question about the unwritten history, many things need to have taken place after the reserve period and during the time when government policies outlawed ceremony.1 For me, knowing the purpose of the dew claw bag and having watched my mom make them as a youth, I understand that those of us who are interested in this type of research, where objects have no written histories, must be able to go back to communities in order to access those materials and that knowledge. bl: Let’s begin by explaining the components of dew claw bags. We have two pictures of dew claw bags in front of us. Clearly, the deer is a very important part of this because it is the deer’s dew claw that is attached to this bag. Can you say anything about the animal, the animal representation, and the animal spirit that is part of this object? jh: The ceremonial dew claw bags from my community’s perspective were called âpiscimôsis – deer bag. The deer is important because it was vital to people’s survival, their subsistence. This dependence followed the decline in buffalo during the 1880s and the near extinction of the buffalo, which caused people to implement more deer hunting within subsistence patterns. In the context of âpiscimôsis, the use and the making of the bag represent the way that a woman would have kept the bag away from the ground. Elevation of ceremonial objects is a key component of their maintenance. The dew claws within the bag’s formation would have provided an elevation off the ground. And the string would have added that extra bit of support to be able to hang a bag. I actually have a really nice story, and stories, from my older sister, who talked about how she remembered my grandmother Adeline’s bag. In her case, Adeline was a ceremonialist and a midwife, but she kept her ceremonial stuff under the bed. A dew claw bag could have been placed in such a way as to keep it from touching the ground (see figure 10.2). bl: The dew claws are on the ground lifting it up. Let me pause for a moment. I made an error when we first started this conversation because I did not

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10.2 Dew claw bag of the Plains Cree Nehiyaw, 1939. Canadian Museum of History, V-A-120, D2004-28158.

invite you to describe your community. I should have done that from the beginning. Can you share the name and location of your community? jh: No problem. The community I come from is called the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. It’s a community just 127 kilometres northeast of Edmonton in the area of Treaty 6 (see map 4). It is also a community of forced amalgamation. There are four different communities with four different experiences that make up the community today. bl: Did they come from vastly distant areas or were they proximate to each other when they were pushed together? jh: The band of my great-grandfather, Little Hunter, lived around Sounding Lake. This is a story told by the Onion Lake people. His band also dispersed

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to what is now Saddle Lake and to other communities east of Saddle Lake. These are historical accounts that I am researching today. bl: And how far is that from Sounding Lake? jh: From Onion Lake to Sounding Lake, it would be about two hours. They were moved when they were building the railway. Originally, Onion Lake sat in the path of the original railway survey. bl: So an amalgamation of different people. jh: The three other members – Pakan’s Band, which is north of Saddle Lake, Wasatnow’s Band, and Blue Quill’s Band – are within that vicinity. Blue Quill’s Band would have occupied the entire area of St Paul, which is about thirty kilometres east of Saddle Lake. Wasatnow was moved from north Edmonton to live there because he had a smaller band. Other bands joined, including some of Enoch’s Band and Papaschase’s Band. Today, Pakan’s Band has its own reserve and political autonomy, which was initially held under Henry Bird Steinhauer, who opened the first Protestant church at Whitefish Lake in 1864.2 bl: So there was dislocation and, at the same time, a holding tight to ceremonial bags in some communities, especially with the decline of the buffalo in the late nineteenth century. jh: There is another component, too. In our community, there were at least three different churches, one for each band area. There were disputes around the reserve, and there was no discussion on its formation after the churches arrived and during the residential school period. What happened was that Saddle Lake became the most assimilated, getting a piece of land that became the Saddle Lake District, whereas the three others that were most resistant stayed within this amalgamated district to be subjugated and monitored by the churches and the Indian agents at the time. bl: Your auntie was a ceremonialist. jh: Two of my aunties were ceremonialists on my dad’s side, younger sisters who lived away from the family because of marriage and who maintained a connection with Little Hunter’s practices. The ones on my mom’s side knew a lot of the practices, but the church affected different families on different levels.

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bl: You mentioned to me just a few minutes ago the fact that women ceremonialists are also midwives. I see the connection to life there. jh: This tradition of giving the bag followed the ancestral lines of the woman. My grandmother’s grandmother had given the bag to the eldest daughter. Her grandmother had given the bag to her eldest daughter from the line of Chief Onchaminahos (Little Hunter). Chief Onchaminahos was part of the Chicken Dance Society. The female he married would have been a female Chicken Dance holder. In today’s Chicken Dance ceremonies, there are particular women who are permitted to dance with the men in the Chicken Dance ceremonies. These women are called to participate and are given their roles in the women’s part of society. These women sit outside on the right side of the lodge that is constructed for the event. They administer the participation of women and children in the Chicken Dance. I have pictures of my grandmother and grandfather in their regalia for the Chicken Dance. There are several Chicken Dance Societies within this region, which extends to Maskwacis south of Edmonton, to Joseph Big Head’s Band, or the Big Island Lake First Nation, northeast of the Saskatchewan border, and to the Frog Lake and Onion Lake First Nations northeast of Edmonton. More research is needed to map this genealogy and society (see map 4). bl: Can you explain to me what the Chicken Dance ceremony entails and its significance? jh: The Chicken Dance Society plays an important role in policing ceremonies leading to the Sun Dance. Different events take place in the summer before the Sun Dance, and they all have to happen in a certain sequence and in a certain manner. So the Chicken Dance Society polices and organizes the sequence of events before the Sun Dance. These gathering are validations, historical markers of events, that enable society to regulate the way that people hunt, harvest (economize), socialize, and politicize. Various activities are associated with this event, including naming. So women and children participate when the child is given a name. I have also seen it used for healing. At the centre is a tree of life. I’ve seen members bring in a lot of ribbon and cloth before the start of the dance, both before the naming and for healing a member. The Chicken Dance radiated – drawing people from many different places. Men who were running the Sun Dance in their communities would come to have a discussion about the event, as they did a lot of preparation for the Sun Dance. So they used venues like the

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Chicken Dance to establish that they were following the protocols leading to the Sun Dance ceremony. The Chicken Dance ceremony, prior to 1888, reflected a form of governance. It is ceremonial in a sense today in that it is a place for people to come and heal. At the same time, it is a place of regeneration. In Cree culture, there are certain ceremonies that follow one another. In the wintertime, you had Round Dance ceremonies, which were held for the people who had passed on. The women would have been more prominent because they carried the bundles of the deceased on their backs. Today, it is more a feast and a remembrance of those bundles. Next comes the preparation for the Sun Dance. There are particular ceremonies that take place before and after the Sun Dance. The Sun Dance for me is not clear because it is not really studied in our culture; a lot of ceremonies were not studied. The Sun Dance would have represented the relationship that people had with the buffalo. The buffalo played an important role in people’s survival. It tied them to the natural laws, and it tied them to the giving of the animal to the human beings, and out of respect you provide a ceremony. Incorporated in that ceremony is the healing. And then there is the relationship between the buffalo and the thunderbird – and nobody has done the research to be able to give a full history. That is the research that I will be doing. When you go back to and deep within the natural laws, the creator’s laws, you are going back deep in time to where there is so much power that the power has the ability to heal people. By participating, people are able to heal, but also embedded within the ceremony is the aspect of material culture. bl: It was sacred. jh: Back to the Chicken Dance Societies, they were held by men. But in some ways they are associated with smoking pipe ceremonies. This is research that I plan to do in my doctoral program, and I plan to use my findings to provide a greater perspective, to see what these societies were and where women fit within them because these societies tie them to the landscape and to some of those sacred aspects of the landscape – thunderbird and snake, for example. Each of these animals is embedded within those natural laws. When people follow natural laws, these laws radiate their experiences, showing them what they are supposed to do, which is reflected also in human laws. And that’s incorporated within the material objects. You see that within your bags, within your bundles, within your pipes, within your berry-picking practices, within your childbearing practices, within your drums and drumsticks.

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bl: The material objects are integrated into all of these things that reflect continuity, authority, wisdom, and respect for both the natural world and those working within it. jh: Those are the reasons why these bundles require a certain way to use them, a certain preparation, a certain management. bl: A ritual. A spiritual ritual, which is common to all spiritual practices. A spiritual ritual where you give enormous respect not only to the making of things like dew claw bags and many others that we know of, like pipes, but also to those who hold the responsibility of caring for them. Now I see your aunties in a much richer light. jh: They followed a lot of the ceremony. They were pipe holders; they belonged to the women’s part of society. There were remnants of the way that they practised this belonging to the women’s part of society. In the context of my aunties’ and grandmothers’ use of these bags, they would have held medicines. bl: Sorry to interrupt, the bags themselves would have held medicines? jh: Yes, and they would have held the smaller types of pipes that the women smoked. bl: Can you describe those to me? jh: I have a picture that I can show you. These pipes are four or five inches long. I have a photo of the one from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Most women’s pipes were a lot smaller than men’s pipes. The stem would have been about three inches (see figure 10.3). bl: And what were they made of? jh: They were made out of wood. Some of the bowls were made out of stone. The smaller pipes, the older pipes, would have been an entire pipe that didn’t need to be disconnected. These are pipes that are really ancient, and again back to this, no research has been done on women’s material objects. There are so many questions to be answered. For example, women in Utah were using the same types of pipes that women in Saddle Lake were using. What were the connections? 10.3 Opposite Woman’s pipe of the Maskwacis, c. 1950. Glenbow Museum, ap 207 A-B.

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bl: There were deep and long and extensive geographic connections across the continent. jh: Yes. When I think about it, I always go back to this idea of where is the research? bl: Sometimes we need to step across academic disciplines that have been inserted and look at archaeological findings. jh: The program that I am enrolled in is both archaeology and anthropology. It is combining the two disciplines and seeing what those findings are and seeing how archaeological findings relate to epistemological history and interpretations. bl: That’s very powerful. So your aunties would make and use these dew claw bags. They would be passed down through generations? jh: Yes, both my late Auntie Louisa and my late Auntie Putty – Elizabeth. This is a story told by some of my older cousins when I interviewed them for my master of arts project. They shared with me some information that made so much sense about their roles within the family. When I asked my cousins why they didn’t carry so much of the responsibility like their moms would have done – both my Auntie Louisa and Aunt Putty – they explained that the mother of my aunties had divided the roles and had given them to the aunties. Within each child, the parents saw certain gifts. One was a shape shifter; and one did the bloodletting, my Auntie Putty. bl: Was she a midwife too? jh: More my grandmother. Because my Auntie Louisa was the oldest one, her husband was given the gift of a buffalo headdress. My Auntie Louisa did bloodletting on the veins of the arms, which was explained to me by my late eldest cousin, Bella. And my Auntie Putty did bloodletting on the temple. They did bloodletting using different parts of the body. I witnessed a lot of times when Auntie Putty did bloodletting on my mom’s temples. My mom would have a migraine, and my Auntie Putty would release blood to give her relief – letting blood flow that was dangerous. It required the expertise of the surgical process and the masking of it. bl: And that is ceremonial? jh: It is for women. There are certain activities and preparations that take place between the people requesting the bloodletting. Because my mother was

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a sister-in-law who had married their youngest brother, there was a certain relationship in allowing ceremony to take place without so much protocol. bl: The sense of health – physical and spiritual – is integrated within certain key objects, many of which, for women, would be held in the dew claw bag. jh: One of their greatest challenges was that the Catholic religion was so embedded in the way that they should behave and in the way that they should practise their daily livelihood; it really affected their traditional practices. Some of the stories I heard through the interviews with some of my older relatives were about ways that they practised ceremony underground. But at the same time, young women and girls of that generation weren’t allowed to see these ceremonies because the government’s Indian agents were in the community monitoring and asking children questions. The parents couldn’t share with their children because they didn’t know what the outcome of l etting their children participate would be. bl: It was a huge risk and they didn’t want their children to feel immense guilt if their parents got into trouble for practising traditional ceremonies and spirituality? jh: One of my cousins said as children that they peeked under the tepee to see what was going on and to catch a glimpse of some of the ceremony that was going on inside the tepee. bl: They would have wanted to participate. That was a very difficult situation to be in – trying to continue against such policing. jh: Back to the idea of practising ceremony underground, in the summertime – and you see this with the log cabins after the tepee period – a lot of log cabins, including my mom’s, which still stands, had a cellar. A lot of people were practising in the cellars. Allen Sapp’s paintings portray many activities that take place inside the cabin and outside it.3 bl: No windows. jh: No windows in the cellar; cellars are underground. bl: I can see that it would be the perfect space. You would bring people together and things together in this seasonal series of ceremonies. Do you have any stories from your aunties or others about how they felt when they were first allowed to practise, when they saw their female relatives practising,

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or did they just take it for granted that they had always been given the opportunity to practise ceremonies? jh: In the 1930s the ceremonies were open to a broader audience. My Auntie Louisa and her husband, Sam Marie, had gone to Germany. So there were different groups of Cree people going to Germany to practise culture while giving public performances. At the same time, because it was outlawed at that time in Canada, they were using the idea of public performance to be able to do a ceremony. A good example is Big Bear’s son who formed the Rocky Boy Band. He pushed to have our Sun Dance as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Havre, Montana. The local town opposed this when people caught on that the Cree were doing something real, that they were practising the Sun Dance ceremony under this canopy of a Wild West show (for an Edmonton example of Indigenous participation in the Wild West show, see figure 10.4). bl: When we look at old posters that show Native Americans involved in the Sun Dance ceremony as part of the Wild West show, we can see it a couple of ways. On the one hand, some people may have said, “Oh no, in a simple way, they are being exploited by the owner of the show.” But on the other hand, as

10.4 Indigenous performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Edmonton, 1914. Provincial Archives of Alberta, PR2000.1304.0001.

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you say, they got to perform their spiritual ceremonies in ways that they never would have been able to otherwise – in ways that were more difficult. jh: My mom told me a couple of years back about my dad having to drive a wagon for my parents. They had a certain way of travelling down to Montana. We did travel to Montana; we have relatives down there through the band of Big Bear’s son, who travelled to live on the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana. They would go to visit relatives. When they travelled there, she would bring her medicines, and she would hide them under her skirt. Already, they had those check stops happening at the border, policing Indigenous movement. bl: Katie Pollock, in her recent doctoral work, writes about different Metis communities on both sides of the US-Canada border and about how Rocky Boy became one of those important centres. jh: A hub. bl: She makes reference to networks, but you’re adding another element to this, talking about your family members driving a wagon down from Saddle Lake. This is very interesting material. jh: They weren’t just driving there. It was planned in such a way that they made stops at certain places in different areas (see maps 4 and 6). When they travelled west, they met with relatives and people aligned with the community, including Kutenai (Kootenay) Indians; they had relationships with them that were vital to securing some of the medicine and vital to some of the activities that would have taken place during the Sun Dance and all these other ceremonies. That part of networking involved revisiting a family. Travel would also include hunting in the Rockies for sheep and moose; as children, we would have to sit in the back of the truck with the animal that my dad had shot. It also included visits to relatives at Smallboy’s Camp, of the Rocky Mountain House Band, and they would travel southwest and continue through to the badlands and into Montana. These are the words my late father would use to describe the landscape. These words coincided with the type of snake knowledge that my dad had about the landscape – about rattlers and boa constrictors. He would use the landscape term “coulee” in the context of “the badlands.” It was so powerful when he mentioned it, like it was a part of his ancient memory and story. Because the Crow Indians, who had maintained southern Alberta prior to the Indian Act, had taken the Half family to live at what is now the Crow Agency, they became the Crow Cree of southern Montana.

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bl: I have read just a little bit of the work of Nancy J. Turner, who is an ethnobotanist. One of the things I brought to class one day was a map that she had sketched outlining the Indigenous networks of exchange of botanic materials, which included, of course, both sides of the Rocky Mountains as well as the West Coast. Yours is another powerful example of these living networks. Getting the right herbs and medicines also demonstrates this long rich tradition that your family was working so hard to continue. jh: When we talk about networks and medicines that are associated with the dew claw bag, we are talking about the materials, the views, and the plants used as a part of a medicine bag. bl: We began with a bag most often made out of deer skin and decorated in various ways but with the deer’s dew claw typically on the bottom to raise it up. But what was inside that bag presents a history that is just as enormously rich. jh: Inside that bag, through the senses, you get an impression of the medicines used. And through knowledge of the bag’s use, such as the purpose of holding a pipe, you get an impression of the things that you would have found in a bag. Each woman had a particular bag, and each bag was named differently in some cases. These bags have a universal name, but they were used differently. Some of the women’s bags would have been smaller, and the men’s bags would have been larger. So the women’s bags would have held things related to what they were good at. bl: Their area of power, their area of knowledge, their area of authority. I think you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that women would carry this in the Chicken Dance when they were dancing with men? jh: Yes, and in the sweat lodge. My nohkom and nimosôm on my dad’s side … bl: Your grandmother? jh: Yes. My grandmother and grandfather. They ran a sweat lodge for every time they did a healing ceremony. bl: Was that risky? jh: It was. But my late cousin, the oldest cousin on my dad’s side, called the sweat lodge “a transportable sweat lodge.” It was something that they could take down. Back to that idea of risky, they had to adapt a certain practice in order not to be caught.

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bl: The chain remains unbroken. I’m fascinated and blown away. I love the connection of the dew claw bags to women’s role as midwives and to women’s role in medicine and medical knowledge because that, too, is something that would come down through generations, being taught by your grandmother if you were the one who was assigned to learn about plants and to learn about medicines. jh: There are a lot of things that happen inside the dew claw bag that become part of an individual’s story. The bag that belonged to my Auntie Louisa – it was given to the Royal Alberta Museum in the 1970s – she held it for three generations, or four generations, from Little Hunter’s wife to her generation. bl: That would be before 1900? jh: Yes, 1850. bl: Does your family get to visit the bag? jh: Not really because they were not aware of these things. A lot of women from the reserve in the 1960s were leaving, and you have to consider the other events taking place. In the case of my older cousins, who were closest to our grandparents, they were leaving as a result of the residential school or because women still had arranged marriages as a child. They left for different reasons and became disconnected. bl: The politics of the 1960s were a huge disruption; in some ways, it was like the decline of the buffalo. We have heard a lot about the Sixties Scoop recently in the press, as well as about residential schools.4 jh: A lot of that older generation who were impacted by the church tried to keep their children within that circle by arranging the marriages. My mom and dad were married after she came out of residential school, so she was sixteen years old. My dad’s mom was married at the age of twelve. They were married at young ages. And at that time, too, the people in the Treaty 6 area were being disenfranchised. So the desire to maintain your identity and your place within the reserve made the parents act to keep the child within the reserve. bl: That was the best that they could do. I just want to go back to one of the points you made a few minutes ago. You talked about your aunt and uncle who went to Germany. Now we know that Germans developed a fascination with Native Americans and things like the Wild West shows in Montana and

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other places, like at the Calgary Stampede. Do you know how often they went to Germany? jh: They went there after the First or Second World War. I forget the date. They went and got stuck over there. Somehow they contacted people within the band to get them home. bl: That might be a whole other piece of research! jh: But they transitioned into becoming members of one of the dance troupes that would come out in the 1960s and 1970s. bl: Yes, and there had been dance troupes before that from different Indigenous groups across North America since the mid-nineteenth century, as well as athletes who would go and show what stuff they were made of. I wonder what they would have brought with them. Probably not their most precious things on those trips, unlike the trip to Rocky Boy, where they would have brought their most precious things. jh: At the same time, they were really limited. The fact that my auntie had to hide medicine crossing the border to Rocky Boy meant that she had to show that she wasn’t practising ceremony at a medicinal level. bl: Just an innocent Native American woman going to visit her relatives. jh: In some journals that I’ve read – and this is part of the research that I’m going to include within my studies – they talk about the fact that a lot of people were following the buffalo, and these big herds eventually moved south of the Canadian border. By following the buffalo, they were following a ceremony that was deeply embedded and associated with the buffalo. bl: Down into Montana and even farther west, I think. We know that dew claw bags began to change a little bit in the twentieth century. I don’t know what date, but they began to be made as art – as a craft for sale. jh: I remember in 1973 and 1975 watching my mom make the bags. We didn’t ask a lot of questions around that. bl: It was that late? jh: Yes, but she was also making the moose hide jackets for people wanting to buy items for their own particular use.

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bl: I find it very interesting that the dew claw bags began to be sold only that comparatively late, as if they were the last kind of good to be made for commercial sale – probably because of the spiritual weight that they held – the last thing that the women were willing to make to sell as a tourist item. jh: Not just to sell to tourists but to different community members as well. bl: That is very different from making art for tourists. jh: I know with the dew claw bags, she made some for people from Maskwacis south of Edmonton. The uses of the dew claw bag persisted among Indigenous communities. bl: But that is an essential sharing? That is a blessing? jh: Yes, but jackets and other items like that, they were still tourist items, made to sell and for survival. bl: In a way, the dew claw bag didn’t really become a sort of souvenir or something of that sort. The few we see in museum collections were collected from people who gave them, or the bags were taken from them. jh: They did become a purse for the people wanting something unique. bl: Laura Peers was interested in your thoughts on what they were used for after being sold. You said they were used as handbags and offered your thoughts on women’s work in producing such items. Laura sent me some of the questions she wanted to ask you. So we’ve talked about the making of dew claw bags in that they are ceremonial, but she said that there are some in collections that seem to have been made for sale. We talked about that a little bit. Is there anything else you want to add on this question? jh: One of my cousins on my dad’s side stated that they would place their berries in there. They were a container for berries. bl: So they would be used as a container, and you could tell someone who wanted to buy it that you could use it for all these things. And then, as with other things, they got integrated into the purchasing community that bought it. We had an opportunity to see a pretty spectacular dew claw bag at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (see figure 10.1). There’s not much in terms of the description, except for the thimbles that were put on it and the meanings attached to copper. Do you think that was made for sale? Or had that been for someone’s ceremony?

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jh: It would have been for someone’s ceremony. It was between a purse and something that a man would have worn within a certain type of dance. bl: That meaning is very different from the meaning of the traditional dew claw bag. There are a lot of jingles on it – thimbles and other jingles. jh: Most women’s dew claw bags were much smaller than the men’s. bl: And that is more the size of the bandolier bag or the fire bag. That makes it unlike other traditional dew claw bags, a few of which we saw at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. jh: The difference is going to be the fringe; a lot of the woman’s dew claw bags carry the fringe up top. But fringe is also a trait, and each bag became itemized with the fringe as a signature. The fringe can be one inch to several inches long. My mom used one-inch fringe on moccasins and gauntlets as well. bl: The fringe is in different sections on the bag at the Glenbow Museum and much less decorated than the dew claw bag at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is rather spectacular. And as you showed us when we visited the collection, it sure makes a sound when you’re dancing. jh: In the 1970s, with the orders for certain items, the emphasis was on how the purchaser wanted the bag to look. So, there again, you see a difference in style. bl: It was a made-to-order dew claw bag. jh: Similar to the making of gauntlets and other things that were made to order. bl: They were made maybe for retail or maybe for particular people who had certain styles that they wanted, and the makers were skilled enough to be able to turn their hand to this range of styles. One of the things that strikes me is how varied the different objects are that our team members have examined and how varied the different contexts are in which these things were made. In chapter 12 of this volume, Sara Komarnisky looks at tuberculosis hospitals where Native Americans were interned and yet made art and craft work; in chapter 9, Katie Pollock looks at Metis settlements along both sides of the border where communities also made art and craft for sale; and you now describe how dew claw bags were made by independent makers in different

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communities. I find it really significant that there is such a range of creative production in such varied institutional and geographical circumstances. What do you think it says about the makers? jh: When people are making their material – their clothing – or things to sell, they are making them for a particular use. That is true for my mom when she does beadwork, or even for me when I get asked to make a pair of moccasins, or even for my brother, who makes really good moccasins, so people were asking him to make them because they wanted their deceased to go to the after world in moccasins. bl: So it’s ceremonial? jh: Yes. And that still takes place. We get asked a lot to make moccasins. When I get asked by my nephew or others who dance, it is purely for dancing purposes. They carry that ceremonial purpose because ceremony happens within the pow wow and dance. When my mom made them, she made them for the pow wow, but she also made them for ceremony. So she was making them at different levels for different purposes. Carrying on tradition is an important part of how you spend time. But you’re following a certain order, from when you make clothing to when you berry pick to when you prepare materials. My mother has always taught me that during the winter season is when you try to get the most beadwork done because you really don’t have time when you’re going to collect berries and do all the other ceremonies. bl: So the making takes place within a seasonal calendar, but it also reinforces the ancestral season of knowing. This is the case even if it is in a tuberculosis hospital, as Sara Komarnisky describes. If people have been pushed into a new community, craft and art reinforce culture. They demonstrate culture. jh: Yes, they do. But you can assume that people who become institutionalized like at a tuberculosis hospital or in the residential school might forget the ceremonial meanings of what they do and what they are making. For example, when my mom was making embroidered gauntlets and hide jackets, she was working with a lot of orders; in making items that became more popular, she had to set aside making things that were much more meaningful ceremonially, like dew claw bags. bl: So there are different ways of making: there is making ceremonial goods with different protocols and meanings, and then there is filling orders. jh: Yes, yes. And at that same time, in the 1970s, museums were still collecting

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from Indigenous communities, and they were a part of the process that included residential schools, so there were a lot of events that took place that influenced why and how people made things and for what purpose. bl: And one of the purposes was making a living to preserve their communities and culture. jh: Yes. And with my mom and others like her, in the 1930s, when families were making houses, it was communal to make houses after the era of the tepee. The banks were charging a 200 per cent interest rate on mortgages, and that type of pressure to try to buy a house and conform to society – it challenges people. And so, the same thing with my mom, these women – makers and embroiderers – became almost the providers for families. bl: Yes, the providers; critical roles were taken up by women. Can we change focus and go back to the question of museums? I want to ask a little bit about the roles played by museums. They are part of the colonial apparatus but maybe also part of the reconciliation apparatus. Ruth Phillips, a leading exponent of the important history of Indigenous arts, has published a book calling for the Indigenization of Canadian museums.5 Can you comment on how you see that as important or what elements you see in that process? jh: It is kind of threefold. You have to ask what type of museum, first of all. You have your provincial, municipal, and First Nations museums. Within your First Nations museum, you still have to Indigenize because a part of Indigenizing is decolonizing how we are taught to understand how we came to be in our own landscape. That same thing happens within a provincial museum and within a municipal museum. It is important because it reflects ownership: who owns the artifact and who can talk about it. In the 1980s, even with the rise of different disciplines like Native studies, there was still a lot of this paternalistic interpretation of culture, particularly in museums. It still happens today when you have a man trying to explain the material culture of a woman. There is not enough diversity in cultural institutions. Part of Indigenizing is to implement a diverse way of Indigenizing in order to address what the objects are and how they should be interpreted. Another part of Indigenizing, for example, is that we have bundles containing our deceased in the museum that probably need to be repatriated. So part of Indigenizing is to have those types of discussions and dialogues.

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bl: You suggest that conversations need to happen that include a wide range of knowledge keepers. I asked you before we started recording this conversation whether I could describe you as a knowledge keeper. jh: I think you can describe me that way because of the part of the family that I come from. When my Auntie Louisa and my Auntie Putty were given a certain role because they were good at it, because they were seen by the grandparents and the parents to have special attributes, they had to be able to heal. Those same types of roles that we have to play and keep in the community are passed down to us today, to this generation. Not many knowledge keepers remain, you know, because of our past, the colonial past, and the impact that it has had on communities such as mine. Indigenization is part of this whole cultural revitalization, but it is greater than that. It is bringing the knowledge, bringing that historical perspective, into the limelight. bl: We need to criticize the old colonial views, tease them out to see where they are hiding and embedded, and give light to the revitalization of traditional knowledge while also recognizing changes in traditional practices. jh: I have started. Sylvia McAdam talks about revitalizing nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) law.6 She talks about some of the traditional practices and laws that are being revitalized and maintained within Indigenous societies in Saskatchewan. Part of that reflects the importance of women in these societies. Part of that reflects talking about the impact of a colonial system on our communities. Nobody knows about our communities’ forced amalgamation at Saddle Lake and the impact that it had. Nobody talks about why the Little Hunter community was moved to Saddle Lake when a lot of the vital practices in the area of Sounding Lake were so important to cultural practice, as they continue to be today. Even for myself, when I say “Indigenizing,” I have to talk about the impact of that history and how it caused some community members to hide in the much more northern areas in order to be able to practise some of their culture. It is a part of that whole idea of networking. And I think that’s really important to understand with regard to the women’s part of society. And, to do that, I have to go to Joseph Big Head’s Band, where some of Little Hunter’s Band had moved, to be able to understand another aspect of what the dew claw bag meant to the women’s smoking societies. bl: The dew claw bag seems to be at the core – at the heart – of understanding the wide range of women’s roles in Indigenous communities in northern North America, wouldn’t you say?

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jh: Yes, because these smoking societies were matriarchal; they followed the ancestral line of the women. That goes back to governance. If you want a good understanding of governance, you have to sway away from what is patriarchal. So part of Indigenizing also includes the fact that we have to implement these matriarchal views, which aren’t necessarily feminist views. bl: We have to acknowledge the roles of women. The many governing roles of women in spirituality and health intersected. After this conversation, I look at the dew bag now and think of it as a beating heart. jh: The work that I did with drumstick study and drums regarding some of the other stories – the origin stories of certain objects – I find that I probably would have found the same type of story with the dew claw bag because it is a carrier of certain items; it’s a carrier of your pipe. At its core, that item, what it carries, is connected to creation. It has a story associated with it. And that story is a creation story. Older dew claw bags had the characteristic of four hooves that served a purpose on the bag. The characteristics of the bag changed when it became commodified as a purse; there is a Cree word for the purse and a Cree word for the dew claw bag, which is much more ceremonial. Items that are ceremonial will have a creation story or an origin story associated with them, linked to the purpose of the bag. Drumsticks were eventually transferred to the men. But the women kept the dew claw bag; a woman was a holder of her own profession. I use these words to indicate that she had a gift, that she had a purpose to serve on behalf of the people, and the dew claw bag confirmed this status. Items like that have creation stories that tell us how they were created and how they were used in our culture. And I use that word “creation” because the drumstick and drum did come into being at creation – as did the dew claw bag. Back to the drum and drumstick, that is a really nice story that is an Onion Lake story but also a community story because each community carries a drum. There are certain laws associated with each drum and drumstick and with the table that carried the drums. In traditional Treaty Six communities, certain male members of a community carry the knowledge of creation stories regarding the drum and stick. The creation stories of this form are held by four members of a community. Drums and sticks are maintained individually or collectively. In this particular case, the community drum and its stand represent a shared way of carrying the knowledge systems that are gifted to the selected members. Each member has the right to tell the creation story associated with the drum and stick. However, community creation stories require collaboration with the community and the utmost respect for accessing

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sacred stories such as this one. Similarly, the same thing would happen with women’s items. But because women were barred from participating in ceremonies and left out of this picture, that tradition and certain individual characteristics of the bags will require more in-deep research to fully understand. bl: And deep knowledge and deep respect. jh: When I talk about having to go north of Cold Lake to get an understanding of how the dew claw bag is related to the women’s smoking pipe, I’m talking about an unwritten history that invites people to research much more about this object. bl: Yes, and this research requires recognizing that this object has central importance to the history of this place but also wider influence. Thank you very much, Judy. This has been wonderful. jh: You’re welcome.

notes 1 In 1876 the government of Canada enacted the Indian Act, giving the government and its agents wide-ranging powers over Indigenous communities, including (but not limited to) forced relocation to reserve lands, as well as the imposition of pass laws restricting movement of Indigenous peoples on the Prairies in Canada. Only in 1996 did the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recognize this legislative history as “repressive.” Milloy, Indian Act Colonialism. 2 Sieciechowicz, “Steinhauer, Henry Bird.” 3 For a collection of Allen Sapp’s paintings, see https://www.allensapp.com/collections.html. 4 Compulsory residential schooling for Indigenous children was enforced throughout Canada, a federal policy intended to assimilate Native people into mainstream EuroAmerican culture, a process termed “cultural genocide” by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in its final report. The Sixties Scoop involved the seizure of Indigenous children from their parents, later adopted or fostered by non-Indigenous families, further breaking connections between this large cohort of children and their Indigenous communities and heritage. Chartrand, Logan, and Daniels, Métis History and Experience; Indigenous Education Coalition, Day at Indian Residential Schools; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth; Kestler-D’Amours, “‘Mixed Feelings’”; Perkel, “Feds to Announce Payout.” 5 Phillips, Museum Pieces. 6 McAdam, Nationhood Interrupted.

11 Inscribing the North West Hide Jackets and Colonial Surveyors susan berry

In this chapter, I consider four hide garments – a coat and three jackets – collected in northwestern Canada during the years 1882 to 1911. They are made of moose and caribou hide and embellished with dyed porcupine quills, embroidery thread, glass beads, ribbon, and wool fabric. The jacket in figure 11.1 exemplifies these works. We do not know the names of the Indigenous women who made them, but these garments all come from the region encompassing Tucho (Great Slave Lake), Dehcho (Mackenzie River), Nácháhdeh (Liard River), and Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi (Athabasca River) (see map 7). I have been drawn to these garments since I began working at the Royal Alberta Museum. Their vibrant colours, complex designs, and impeccable artistry are stunning. At the same time, I wondered about the stories behind them. The museum’s accession records note that one was collected by the first representative of the Dominion government to visit the region. Another was won in a poker game. These bits of information hint at the complex circumstances of the garments’ creation and circulation as southerners visited the North in new contexts. All four garments were collected by men who came to the North West as participants in initiatives aimed at bringing dramatic changes to the region. Two were surveyors, a third worked as a clerk with the Dominion Lands Office, and the fourth was engaged in an international scientific research program. At the time, most Canadians considered the North West a remote place. The fur trade had long been the dominant financial enterprise in the region,

11.1 Man’s caribou hide jacket with porcupine quillwork, soutache, silk ribbon, and brass buttons, Dene, c. 1880–1910. Royal Alberta Museum, H89.117.1.

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and it would remain so for years to come. But Canada’s purchase of the North West from the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) in 1870,1 just three years after Canadian Confederation, had spurred new interest in the region’s economic potential. Authorities in Ottawa wanted to know what assets – other than furbearing animals – the North West held and how their commercial development might contribute to the national economy. As Rob Shields observes, the newly acquired territories were viewed as “a resource-rich colony” to be developed “for the benefit of all Canadians.”2 Recording the nature and scope of the colony’s natural resources was the first step in the development process. Involved in the fur trade to varying degrees, most Dene, Cree, and Métis people in the North West engaged in a mixed economy that combined seasonal trapping with sustainable hunting, fishing, and harvesting practices. These practices were rooted in relationships nurtured with the natural world, with kinfolk, and with the spirit world. Incorporation into Canada brought Indigenous peoples up against a new political power whose vision of the future was at fundamental odds with their own values and aspirations. The jackets and coat that I discuss here were created within this context of incipient colonialism. The men who acquired them were agents of this process. Did they purchase hide garments as special souvenirs of a time and place that they were working to remake? And what about the women who made these beautiful garments? Did they do so purely as a commercial venture, or was there more at stake? What understandings and aspirations did these garments embody for each party?

i n s c r i p t i o n s a n d k n ow l e d g e t r a d i t i o n s Bruno Latour’s theory of inscriptions is helpful for thinking about the garments and the circumstances in which they were made and acquired.3 Inscriptions, as Latour describes them, are flat or printed images. A map charting the islands in a river, a diagram depicting the layers of rock in an exposed riverbank, a graph plotting the hourly movement of the clouds – each is a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional phenomenon. Through inscriptions, phenomena that are distant from one another in time and space can be apprehended synoptically. They can be reproduced and disseminated, and their scale can be adjusted to achieve “optical consistency” with other inscriptions. Working with inscriptions, knowledge producers can create connections between otherwise isolated phenomena and construct globalized pictures.4

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The specific objectives of the four men who acquired the garments varied, as did the circumstances behind their acquisition of an embroidered hide jacket or coat. But each was engaged in the work of knowledge production through inscription. Each likewise was involved in the colonial project of incorporating the North West into a larger entity, be it the Canadian state or a global knowledge network. Inscriptions of the type that Latour describes produce a particular kind of knowledge, valorized in Western society as scientifically grounded. There are alternative types of inscriptions, however, and multiple ways of knowing the world. David Turnbull addresses this when he contrasts scientific knowledge systems, characterized by a drive to assemble “universal homogenous information,” with other traditions that make space for “local assemblages of knowledge.”5 Where scientific knowledge is expressed in inscriptions and representations, these alternative knowledge systems incorporate elements such as art, ceremony, and storytelling. Of course, jackets carry inscriptions of their own, although not of the two-dimensional type that Latour describes. The slow, careful scraping of hair from a moose hide, the golden tone created by smoking a hide over smouldering spruce punk, stitches made with sinew and silk embroidery floss, and geometric designs woven with porcupine quills are all inscriptions in their own right. They are rooted in an alternative knowledge tradition that encompasses family relationships, oral tradition, and spiritual relationships with animals, plants, wind, and water. My reading of these inscriptions is guided by conversations with Ekti Margaret Cardinal, Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses, and Roy Salopree.6 Cardinal and Moses are artists who work in a variety of traditional mediums, and both have taught traditional Indigenous arts at colleges in northern Alberta. Their expertise enabled me to better understand the skills, materials, and techniques involved in creating the jackets. Salopree is a visual artist and cultural knowledge holder from Meander River in northern Alberta. For Salopree, maintaining a respectful relationship with the land is integral to Dene culture and spirituality. His art expresses this awareness. I also draw on Elmer Ghostkeeper’s discussion of the concept of “spirit gifting” and how relationships of giving and receiving are “incorporated into every activity of livelihood.”7 Whether hunting a moose, gathering berries, or training a horse, Ghostkeeper explains, Métis engage in a relationship of reciprocal gift exchange with animals and plants. Salopree’s and Ghostkeeper’s frames of reference underscore the importance of spiritual connections in creative endeavours.

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In thinking about the jackets and coat both in terms of their significance for creator and collector and in terms of the colonial context in which they circulated, I therefore consider both kinds of inscriptions and the knowledge traditions with which they are linked. As Turnbull puts it, “we must recogni[ze] alternative knowledge spaces, sites of resistance and … the need to create interstitial spaces if we want differing knowledge traditions to be able to work together.”8

Wind and Water The first of these garments, a moose hide coat with embroidered beading and fringes wrapped in porcupine quills (see figure 11.2), was acquired at Nishi’ko, or Old Fort Rae, in 1882–83 by Henry P. Dawson, a captain in the British Royal Artillery. Dawson headed a four-man expedition charged with making daily records of meteorological and magnetic observations over a twelve-month period. The work was part of the International Polar Year, a scientific project headquartered in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that established recording stations at twelve locations around – or in the case of Nishi’ko, near – the Arctic Circle.9 The Hudson’s Bay Company had built Nishi’ko in 1852 on an island on the northern arm of Tucho. The 1881 Canadian census recorded twenty-four residents, at least half of whom were Métis. But the post also served some 600 or 700 Indigenous hunters, trappers, and their families. Tlicho (Dogrib), Deh Gáh Got’įę (Slavey), Yellowknife, and Denesułine hunters all traded there. The post’s primary business was provisioning the fur trade. Located close to the winter range of barren-ground caribou and muskoxen, Nishi’ko provided “all the deer and caribou meat required” for the voyageur brigades of the Mackenzie River district.10 From 1 September 1882 to 31 August 1883, Dawson and his assistants undertook intensive scientific observations and measurements.11 Atmospheric pressure and air temperature, water vapour and relative humidity, wind speed and direction, cloud volume, type and direction of movement, and degrees of magnetic variation were all recorded on an hourly basis; soil temperature and the amount and type of precipitation were recorded at lengthier intervals. Twice a month, on set “term days,” the magnetic instruments were read every five minutes and a declinometer every twenty seconds over the course of an hour. These observations were synchronized with records made at the other Arctic stations. With graphs plotting patterns of magnetic declination and tables recording the shapes of the aurora, project participants attempted to

11.2 Man or boy’s moose hide coat, front, with stroud cloth, chintz, silk, glass beads, and porcupine quills, Deh Gáh Got’įę, c. 1882. Royal Alberta Museum, H98.90.3.

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fix on paper the ever-changing air pressure and wind movements, humidity and temperature, and dancing northern lights. Wind and water were powerful forces with which people at Nishi’ko were intimately familiar. In Tlicho worldview, wind and water are living entities imbued with spirit. They hold the power to help or harm humans. When travelling on the land, people place tobacco offerings at each body of water that they encounter, asking for safe travel before they cross. When travelling on the river, they offer tobacco to the spirit of the river and ask for its protection. Wind, too, is approached with respect. Sacred sites known as nįhts’į dawhokǫ` (“where the wind sits”) are home to dangerous whirlwinds, and travellers take care to steer clear of them.12 The woman who tanned the hide for this coat would have been attuned to the effects of wind, air moisture, and temperature on the tanning process. A strong wind, for example, may result in uneven exposure to smoke, turning some parts of the hide darker than others. It is best to smoke a hide on a crisp, chilly day with low humidity; too much moisture in the air will delay the smoking process.13 The choice of wood for the fire over which a hide is smoked determines the colour that will emerge. Here, the hide’s rich golden tone shows that it was smoked over smouldering spruce root punk. The colour’s consistency testifies to the care taken in handling the hide. Had it been scraped unevenly, with some spots left thicker than others, patches of discolouration would have appeared when it was smoked. The same elements whose fluctuations Dawson and his men recorded so meticulously were all present in the tanning of the hide from which the coat was made. The coat belongs to a style of clothing that Judy Thompson identifies as emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Dehcho region. She characterizes it as “perhaps the most interesting nineteenth-century development in Athapaskan clothing fashions” for the way that it integrated materials, tailoring techniques, and design elements from both local and European fashion traditions.14 The style, which is most closely associated with Deh Gáh Got’įę communities, was clearly influenced by the military-style “Captains coats” gifted to leading Dene hunters and trappers by European traders beginning in the 1780s. Those outfits featured red or blue woollen coats sporting epaulets, deep regimental cuffs, and stand-up collars trimmed with braid. Dawson’s status as a captain in the British Royal Artillery adds another dimension to this process of intercultural exchange. The hbc clerk in charge at Nishi’ko, William Cornwallis King, reported that the captain and his fellow expedition members dressed in full military uniform for church service each

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Sunday and conducted military drills complete with bugle calls.15 In so doing, they emphasized their status as “the Queen’s men” and Dawson’s role as commander. As the first Crown representative to set foot in Nishi’ko, Dawson possessed considerable diplomatic lustre. Perhaps, as Ekti Margaret Cardinal suggests, the coat was made for him as a presentation piece. Formal gifting of this sort was an established means of alliance building in both Deh Gáh Got’įę and British society. Presenting the captain with a beautifully embellished moose hide coat trimmed in the Royal Artillery’s own scarlet and dark blue,16 cut with a fitted waist, broad chest, and curved seams that bespoke military attire, would have been a suitable gesture. Sadly, the historical record does not speak to the circumstances in which Dawson acquired the coat, and suggestions of political alliance building through gifting remain speculative. It is equally plausible that a local woman made the coat to sell to Dawson, either at his request or on her own initiative. In any event, the military touches speak to a sustained cross-cultural dialogue. Here is a garment derived originally from British military dress, reinterpreted in an Indigenous clothing tradition, updated to incorporate changing European fashion ideas, and acquired by a British officer. Like a European frock coat, this coat is tight-fitting with a flared skirt, stand-up collar, and deep cuffs. The sleeve seams do not correspond with the back seams but are staggered (see figure 11.3). This construction takes pressure off the point where the sleeve and back seams would otherwise meet and is consistent with the prevailing style of British men’s coats in the mid to late nineteenth century. Also consistent with European styling are the tight fit through the trunk and the small armholes, which pull the arms back, encouraging the wearer to stand upright. Beaded embroidery on the lapels further accentuates the broad chest. Seams are an important element here, both in construction and embellishment. All the seaming is done with sinew, whereas linen thread is used for the applique work and for stitching on fabric. Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses observes that Indigenous tailors often use sinew for a hide garment’s major seams because it is stronger than linen thread and will better stand the test of time. The seams are reinforced with red and black wool piping. The piping adds strength but may also have spiritual significance. Thompson notes that Dene garments earlier in the century often outlined seams, hems, and opening edges with lines of red ochre, most likely as spiritual protection. These openings and joinings were points of particular vulnerability for the wearer, presenting opportunities for wet, wind, and potentially malevolent elements

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11.3 Man or boy’s moose hide coat, back, Deh Gáh Got’įę, c. 1882. Royal Alberta Museum, H98.90.3.

to work their way inside.17 The red piping may thus be a modern interpretation of the older ochred lines. The narrow bands of red soutache sewn around the coat’s hem, just above the fringing, and along the garment’s front opening are likely of this same tradition. In chapter 2 of this volume, Laura Peers addresses similar issues of cross-cultural influences in Indigenous-made garments, where the garments provide windows into complex cultural exchanges. The coat’s lapels, with their floral beadwork, are its most striking design zones. The beads are strung with sinew and stitched down with linen thread. Floral motifs were popular in the North West, and the women of Nishi’ko had ample opportunity to experiment with motifs inspired by designs from diverse sources. Asian and European cotton print fabrics with dainty floral patterns were imported in large quantities by the hbc. The Grey Nuns who taught at the Sacred Heart Mission School, established at Zhahtí Kóé (Fort Providence) in 1867, were another source of information about floral designs. They emphasized sewing and needlework in their curriculum and worked

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with French embroidery patterns that featured floral motifs. The great mobility of people involved in the fur trade also meant that people at Nishi’ko were in frequent contact with individuals and objects from other places. Charlotte Flett King, the Cree-Métis wife of the Nishi’ko clerk, is one example. Since her marriage in 1875, she had lived at Fort Chipewyan, Fort Vermilion, and Nishi’ko. She would live in Thɛbachagɛ (Fort Smith), Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Pelly, and Moose Lake before the decade was out.18 Their husbands’ postings gave women like King opportunities to exchange ideas and techniques with women of diverse backgrounds and life experiences. The floral designs that northern women embroidered on clothing, pouches, and other textiles may have been influenced by globalized floriated patterns accessed via European traders, but their appeal transcended appreciation of their decorative qualities. Plants are respected for their life-sustaining gifts. They are an important source of food, not only for humans but also for moose and caribou, and many possess medicinal properties. Like moose, wind, water, and other living beings, they have spirit and are approached with respect. When gathering mint, rat root, or other medicinal plants, for example, people offer the plant a pinch of tobacco in exchange for the gift that it provides. Plants are present in ceremony, too. At the Dene Tha’ fire offering, Elders place moose grease, followed by tobacco leaves, in the fire as offerings to the higher power.19 In so doing, they ask for spiritual blessing. Designs sewn on cloth flags that are raised at the Dene Tha’ Tea Dance often depict a flower or leaf, symbols that came to a prophet in a dream. Spruce boughs laid inside the Tea Dance arbour further represent connection with the land. After fire offerings are made, people join the Tea Dance circle. As they move counter-clockwise around the circle, the dancers connect with Mother Earth; a prayer is made strong each time a dancer’s foot touches the ground. Roy Salopree explains, “You see the clouds dancing for us to enjoy, and the leaves on the trees dancing. We are dancing, too.” Embroidering images of leaves and flowers on a hide coat was not just an attractive embellishment; it honoured spiritual connections.

Tracking and Mapping A second garment, a jacket made of caribou rather than moose hide, features elements that suggest movement and travel (see figure 11.1). Lightweight and warm, caribou hide is ideal for wear when travelling in winter; historic accounts of the men who drove dog teams, hauled freight in winter, and ran

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great distances over the snow generally reference caribou hide clothing.20 These accounts, however, describe the longer coat, or capote, made of caribou hide rather than the shorter jacket.21 Caribou hide jackets such as this one, with the hair removed and a simple tie closure at the neck, were made for wear in summer and fall. The jacket shows signs of wear. The left sleeve is stiff from exposure to water, and the collar and cuffs have light staining. Wear at the cuffs was probably caused by rubbing against mitts or gauntlets. Abrasion on the left shoulder indicates that a pouch with a shoulder strap was worn over the jacket. Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses points out that a pouch worn diagonally across the body would have helped to close the jacket front. The jacket was made to be worn by a body in action. The loose fit maximizes freedom of movement, and the sway of the fringes when the wearer is in motion emphasizes movement as an aesthetic element.22 Specific design elements enhance this sense of movement. Lengths of hand-stitched soutache in seven colours create a sinuous pattern running down the jacket’s front plackets. The plackets themselves are trimmed with decorative “teeth” cut into the hide that accentuate the pattern’s curves. Across each shoulder, winding lines of soutache frame a band of woven porcupine quills dyed red, black, and green.23 Graceful fringes wrapped in dyed porcupine quills fall from the shoulders, yoke, and sleeves and run down the side seams.24 Like the plackets, the scallop-shaped hem is edged with “teeth” cut by hand with a knife. All these elements animate the jacket in a way that respects the spirit and life force of the animal that gifted itself to the hunter. Movement is a constant element in Dene worldview. Roy Salopree explains that “movement is a part of life and a part of the language.” Many concepts are expressed in terms of process, of moving toward something rather than arriving somewhere. “Ka’ o’ju,” for example, means “working towards something good.” The way that people work to create something good is no less important than the final result. The two are inseparable parts of a holistic process. Ka’ o’ju can apply to the process of creating clothing, too; it is a part of how garments are created, understood, and worn. The jacket was acquired by Robert Bell, a Geological Survey of Canada (gsc) geologist, likely while conducting survey work. Most of Bell’s work with the gsc concentrated on northern Ontario and Quebec, but he led two geological surveys in the North West, the first in the Kai’till’dehseh/ Mistahisipi (Athabasca River) basin in 188225 and the second on Des Nedhé (Slave River) and the eastern shoreline of Tucho in 1899. Bell also travelled

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to the Fort Chipewyan area in 1911, following his retirement, apparently as a private consultant for a mining company.26 He almost certainly acquired the jacket shown here on one of these three trips.27 It is of exceptional quality, beautifully designed, and expertly sewn. Each summer, Bell and his gsc colleagues conducted field surveys in northern and western Canada. This work had a broad scope and underlying political purpose. Geological information was of primary concern, but the surveyors were also tasked with gathering and assessing information on soils, forests, waterpower, transportation routes, human settlements, and fish and game. They summarized their findings in annual reports and in maps that inventoried the nation’s physical assets. The surveys were a tool that enabled Canadian administrators to define the limits of agricultural settlement and to assess the potential for industrial development. Thus Bell’s 1882 survey report described at length the petroleum deposits along the Kai’till’dehseh/ Mistahisipi and Clearwater Rivers and speculated on how their economic potential might be realized. On his 1899 survey, Bell detoured inland to investigate reports of galena, zincblende, and silver at a site southwest of Deninu K’ue (Fort Resolution).28 Bell’s map of his Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi survey reveals his method of travel and the kind of knowledge that he generated (see map 8). He favoured a technique called track surveying, which involved “economical, hasty reconnaissances that could only give accurate data regarding the narrow strips of territory adjoining the routes actually travelled.”29 The accumulation of data from multiple track surveys, however, began to create an “optically consistent” and administratively useful picture of Canada. Through their maps, gsc surveyors made “of the nation a single geological specimen that could be understood as a legible and logical whole.”30 They also supplied a valuable reference for capitalist investors. Bell’s track survey map offered little insight into the Athabasca region as a whole, but it accomplished the important task of identifying where economic resources were located and how they could be accessed.31 Both jacket and map convey a sense of journey, but it was journey conceived of and enacted in different ways. The jacket inscribes journey as a process, an unfolding pattern of movement undertaken by people and animals. The effect is of flow, of movement interspersed with points of repose, or of a looping back before continuing; a hunter may travel in much the same way when tracking an animal. Bell’s map inscribes a specific route taken at a given moment in time. It shows a purposeful trajectory undertaken at a

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consistent pace, as Bell relied on a steady speed of travel to measure distance, and it marks a route that could be linked by coordinates of longitude and latitude into a globalized schemata. There is much that Bell’s maps did not capture, from Indigenous settlements and trade routes to linkages with places of spiritual significance. Similarly, although his travels were made possible by the knowledge and labour of local Indigenous men, he barely noted their presence in his reports and never mentioned their names.32 He focused instead on documenting natural resources that could contribute to future agricultural and industrial development. A map that Bell prepared for the Canadian Senate’s 1884 Mackenzie Basin report is in line with this colonial project (see map 9). Delineating the northern limits of arable, pasture, and forested lands in Canada, it clearly conveys the idea that great natural wealth lay in this “undeveloped” region. This same perspective likely informed Bell’s assembly of a private collection of First Nations objects. The Royal Alberta Museum purchased his jacket in 1989 as part of a larger collection of twenty Indigenous objects that he had acquired over the years from the northern Plains and Hudson Bay regions as well as the North West. Bell also collected First Nations oral traditions, compiled lists of First Nations place names (some of which he incorporated into his maps), and published several oral traditions in professional journals. In addition, he put together personal collections of mounted Canadian mammals, bird specimens, and archaeological materials.33 The objects and specimens that he assembled speak of a broadly defined interest rather than a sustained focus on a particular cultural tradition or animal species. The theme that links objects, specimens, legends, and place names was that they were all from northern Canada. Much as the gsc’s track survey maps composed a picture of the national territory when assembled en masse, Bell’s eclectic collection constituted a personal inventory of the nation’s diverse resources. Bell may have enjoyed collecting First Nations objects and oral traditions, but his vision for the North West left little space for First Nations and their land-based way of life. In an 1898 letter to Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton following the discovery of gold in the Yukon, Bell wrote that “the western part of the Dominion is about to attract a great mining population, such as we have never had before and the government must, of course, be desirous of inducing the better element of this population to remain permanently in the country, so that capital may follow and other industries spring up.”34 For Robert Bell, the future of the North West did not lie with First Nations and

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their hunting, trapping, and trade economy. A caribou hide jacket might evoke the freedom and beauty of the North West, but it did not point to a prosperous future. It was a cultural artifact suited to his collection of uniquely northern Canadian assets.

Being a Good Relative When William Henry (Harry) Turton arrived in Grouard in 1908, the settlement at the western end of Lesser Slave Lake was on the cusp of a boom. As the terminus for steamship traffic from Kapâwinihk (Athabasca Landing) and the point of departure for overland trails to Peace River country, Grouard was strategically placed at the nexus of regional development. Politicians had speculated for years about the region’s agricultural potential; now the colonial project of remaking the local landscape was well underway. Baseline surveys had recently been completed, and township outline surveys were underway that would allow the delineation of sections and quarter sections. When the Dominion Lands Branch opened a Lands Office at Grouard in 1909 – the first in northern Alberta – Turton signed on as clerk.35 For the next four years, as surveyors plotted quarter sections and settlers filed homestead claims and patent applications, Turton inscribed on paper the nuts and bolts of colonial expansion. While living in Grouard, Turton acquired a moose hide jacket trimmed with marten fur and adorned with bands of loom-woven porcupine quills (see figure 11.4). The quillwork is spectacular: four distinct geometric patterns, on front bands, shoulders, back yoke, pocket flaps, and cuffs, are realized in twelve colours. Long, wide fringes of single thickness are sewn into the shoulder and yoke seams and wrapped with quills dyed red and purple. Shorter, unwrapped fringing cascades down the side seams. The garment’s lower edge has been folded, pinched, and cut, either with scissors or a knife, creating a pinking effect. Slight wear on the fur-trimmed collar and light soiling on the lower sleeves and hem indicate that the jacket was worn but not often. The quality of the garment suggests that it likely cost more than a Lands Office clerk’s salary would cover.36 But Turton did not purchase it: he won it in a poker game. When Turton donated the jacket to the Royal Alberta Museum in 1970, he added only that it had “come from the Mackenzie River area.”37 The jacket is a virtuoso piece. The investment of so much care in its creation speaks of pleasure in creating something beautiful. It is also consonant

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11.4 Man’s moose hide jacket with porcupine quillwork and marten fur, Dene or Dene-Métis, c. 1908. Royal Alberta Museum, H70.166.1.

with the attitude of respect for the moose that infuses each step in a jacket’s creation, from the hunter’s offering to the animal as part of spirit gifting to the jacket’s embellishment with luxurious fringing and exuberant quillwork. But there is clearly an economic dimension at work, too. Details of the jacket’s cut, materials, and embellishment strongly suggest that it had been made for sale. The jacket is of a style called “hunting frock,” popular in the North West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.38 The cut, with its boxy T-shape, offers maximum flexibility. It is not custom-fitted, like Dawson’s coat, and thus could be worn by people of varying shapes and sizes – an important consideration if making clothing for an unknown customer. The looser fit was in keeping, too, with trends in European menswear, particularly the Norfolk jacket. Introduced in the 1860s, this woollen jacket was originally designed for English gentlemen of leisure to wear for “outdoor and sporting

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pursuits, specifically hunting.”39 It was widely accepted in Britain as casual wear by the 1890s, was worn throughout the empire, and would have been a familiar style of garment in the Canadian North West. Euro-Canadian outsiders like Turton could readily transfer the Norfolk jacket’s association with hunting to the hide jackets made by Indigenous women in northwestern Canada. There are also clear parallels with the buckskin jacket of the American West, popularized as the quintessential garment of the frontier and “symbol of the American spirit” by Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, and other public figures of the late nineteenth century.40 There may have been few tourists in the Dehcho region at this time, but the men who worked the northern rivers as pilots, crew, trackers, and freighters transported objects made by family members to sell in Edmonton and Winnipeg. The growing numbers of free traders operating in the North provided another marketing opportunity. And there was an increasing volume of traffic from government officials and mineral prospectors. Steamship travel, combined with the completion of rail lines to Edmonton and improvements on the trail linking the city with Kapâwinihk, made northern travel routes increasingly accessible to outsiders. Viewing the Turton jacket as a garment made for sale helps us to read some of its inscriptions. Quillwork, for example, was often seen by outsiders as a more “authentic” medium than beadwork or silk embroidery. Not only did it involve natural materials, but the geometric patterns created with quills were considered meaningful in a way that floral designs were not. Louise Rourke, English wife of the hbc clerk at Fort Chipewyan, articulated this viewpoint when she complained that missionaries allow a very feeble expression of the European influence in art to replace the original work belonging to the country. The strange signs and symbols, the different designs and colours used in the old days had a real significance, which is now practically lost to us … Now the patterns – even where original work is carried on at all – have become mixed and distorted … [W]omen prefer to embroider bunches of flowers, knots of ribbon, and other conventional and rather silly little designs taught to them by the missionaries, rather than to carry on the traditions of their ancestors.41 Geometric designs were seen as authentically Indigenous, traditional, and imbued with meaning, even if Rourke believed that this meaning was “now practically lost to us.”

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The sense that something precious and unique was on the brink of disappearing would only have added to the allure of a jacket ornamented with porcupine quills. Agnes Deans Cameron’s report that Echaot’įe Kúé (Fort Liard) was one of the few places in the North West where people still worked with porcupine quills aligns with this sense of quilled jackets as an increasingly rare commodity (see sidebar 6).42 The near absence of European materials,43 at a date when they were readily available and incorporated into everyday wear, likewise suggests that a deliberate decision was made to create a garment that would look “traditional” to the outsider’s eye. Ekti Margaret Cardinal estimates that it might have taken a full year to make this jacket, including time spent hunting the moose, tanning the hide, and preparing materials. If, as she suggests, more than one woman worked on it, however, it could have been completed in less time.44 By working collectively – tanning hides, dyeing porcupine quills, cutting and sewing pattern pieces, snipping the hem, wrapping the fringe with quills, and weaving colourful quillwork bands – several women could produce multiple jackets for sale or trade over the course of the winter. The long winter months, when women came together to drink tea, share stories, and work on their sewing, offered opportunities for such informal gatherings. The hbc clerk at Fort Simpson wrote in the post’s journal that fur returns from Echaot’įe Kúé were poor in 1908, the year that Cameron visited the North West.45 This fact would have made income earned through the sale of the jackets important to local families. Thinking of the jacket as a collaborative project casts light on how its different components may have been assembled. The quilled panels could have been prepared independently of the jacket, woven to a length commonly employed in men’s hunting jackets, then sewn on as the jacket was being pieced together. On the front panels, pocket flaps, sleeve cuffs, and front shoulder panels, both ends of the quilled panel are folded under and stitched down on top of the hide, allowing for minor adjustments to fit a finished garment. Adjustments could also be made by increasing or decreasing the space between the bottom of the panel and the garment’s hem. This process of assembling the garment components would allow for independent preparation of the various elements, an important factor if different individuals were responsible for different parts of the process. Creating jackets for a commercial market in a region where the fur trade had long dominated the picture meant navigating one’s way through a new set of circumstances. But people did so within a framework that respected

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core cultural and spiritual values. The protocols of sharing and mutual responsibility were foundational. Brenda Macdougall’s discussion of the concept of wahkootowin as practised by Métis communities in northwestern Saskatchewan is helpful here. She describes wahkootowin as a worldview that privileges “relatedness to land, people (living, ancestral, and those to come), the spirit world, and creatures inhabiting the space.” It is “an inclusive, holistic philosophy predicated upon one real stricture – being a good relative.”46 Harold Balsillie, son of Marie and James Balsillie (see sidebar 6), spoke to this concept when he recalled that “if someone killed a moose, the meat was divided through the town. They never asked for money for the meat.” Marie Balsillie’s nephew Alfred Fabien echoed this when he explained that “[i]f someone killed a moose they would share the meat and all the women would share the work of making the moosehide.”47 This process seems to have been at work in the creation and marketing of the Turton jacket. Its production was a collaborative effort, involving hunter, hide tanner, tailor, quillworker, and the broker who took it to market. A single individual may have fulfilled several of these roles but not all of them. By working together to make jackets for sale, women asserted the values of wahkootowin and were good relatives. The chapters in this volume by Sarah Carter, Katie Pollock, and Sara Komarnisky reflect on the various contexts in which Indigenous peoples used the commercial making of crafts to sustain individuals and communities. These histories illuminate the creative energies employed under increasingly challenging conditions.

Lady Sportsmen and Nature’s Bounty The final jacket considered here dates to 1910–11 and was purchased by the Royal Alberta Museum in 1994 from Ewan Caldwell (see figure 11.5). His father, William, commissioned this garment while participating in an “exploratory expedition” active between 1908 and 1911 in northeastern Alberta and northwestern Saskatchewan. Ewan Caldwell told the museum that “some time about 1910 I believe my father contracted with a Cree woman of Fort Smith or Fort Chipewyan to create a leather jacket … as a gift for his fiancée back East.”48 William Caldwell had another hide jacket made for himself at the same time.49 Caldwell was in Alberta as part of a small expedition funded by the Railways and Swamp Lands Branch of the Department of the Interior. Headed by civil engineer Frank Crean, the expedition was charged with evaluating

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agricultural possibilities, timber and mineral resources, and the potential for water power development in the “New Northwest” – the boreal forest of northern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Adopting the moniker “the New Northwest Exploration Company,” the party moved out from the main waterways, which were now well mapped, to explore the interior.50 The expedition’s reports, illustrated with photographs of gardens at trading posts and mission settlements, painted an unrealistic picture of the region’s farming potential. Crean went so far as to estimate that 50 per cent of the land was suitable for mixed farming; the rest could be developed for mineral wealth or lumber. There was a lot of muskeg, but it could be drained; Crean wrote that draining the muskeg would “well repay the expenditure.”51 He advocated a level of human intervention that would completely remake the northern landscape. Made of moose hide, the jacket is fitted with a central back seam, set-in sleeves, a stand-up collar, and turned-back cuffs. It has three patch pockets and four hook and eye closures. The front plackets, back yoke, pocket flaps, and cuffs are all embroidered in silk floss with cheerful three-lobed flowers in shades of red, blue, and purple. The embroidery technique is buttonhole stitch and a variation on chain stitch. Flat fringes made of caribou hide fall from the shoulder and armhole seams. Ekti Margaret Cardinal points out that caribou hide is thinner and more pliable than moose hide and frays less easily, desirable qualities for fringing on a lady’s jacket. She also notes that the fringe is lighter in colour than the body of the jacket. The colour contrast, probably produced by smoking the moose and caribou hides over fires made from the wood of different trees, helps the fringe to stand out as a decorative element. The seams were stitched on a sewing machine, as was stitching on the pockets. Most of the women living at Thɛbachagɛ (Fort Smith) and Fort Chipewyan would have been adept at needlework and comfortable working with sewing machines. The Holy Angels Boarding School at Fort Chipewyan emphasized sewing skills for female pupils; the school’s 1905 annual report noted that “silk work is not neglected, as [the students] have a great taste for embroidery, crocheting and all kinds of needlework.”52 The woman who made the jacket was clearly familiar with Euro-Canadian women’s fashion. European dress – blouses, long skirts, and woolen shawls – had become everyday wear in the North West, and set-in sleeves and a tailored fit were standard fashion elements. Although hide jackets are not an Indigenous woman’s garment, the woman who made this item readily incorporated elements of contemporary women’s fashion into a hide jacket for a Euro-Canadian customer.

11.5 Woman’s moose hide jacket with silk embroidery floss and hook and eye closures, Cree or Métis, c. 1910. Royal Alberta Museum, H94.52.1.

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A tailored hide jacket fit well with the growing market for women’s outdoor wear. British clothiers began to produce outdoor wear for women in the 1870s, capitalizing on the shooting, hunting, and fishing parties made fashionable by society elites’ autumn sojourns in the Scottish Highlands.53 By the 1890s, country walking dress, “mannish” and tailored, had made its way to urban centres. Ladies’ sporting jackets were usually in “autumn tints,” such as brown and grey, and tweed was the fabric of choice. Tanned moose hide would easily match wool for warmth and water resistance, and its rich brown colour perfectly fit an autumnal palette. Caldwell’s fiancée, Elsie Gillies, would not have looked out of place wearing this jacket while walking in the Ontario countryside. There is evidence that she did so: museum staff found several pine needles in one of the pockets. Large pockets were a key feature of the sporting look. The Ladies Field issue of 30 September 1905 showed a “[s]mart little Norfolk jacket, with real pockets, made double the size of those usually provided for ladies.”54 The Caldwell jacket also features large pockets, although the technique employed in making them suggests a lack of familiarity with this element of Euro-Canadian women’s wear. Machine stitching runs across the embroidered motifs in several spots, the pockets’ placement is asymmetrical, with the pocket on the lower left sitting higher than the pocket on the lower right, and the edges were finished with pinking rather than folded under. Ekti Margaret Cardinal characterizes the pockets as “an afterthought” and notes that they are a European touch; Cree people would have used pouches. Their presence on the jacket, however, creates three additional surfaces for embroidered embellishment. The growing popularity of ladies’ sportswear coincided with articles and ads geared toward women that began appearing in hunting journals in the 1890s, part of a campaign to promote hunting as a recreational activity. Andrea Smalley argues that women’s participation in sport hunting helped to “elevate” hunting from a means of subsistence to a genteel pastime.55 As an 1894 Forest and Stream editorial put it, “as a civilized people we are no longer in any degree dependent for our sustenance upon the resources and methods of primitive man.”56 The role of hunting in contemporary society was not to put food on the table but to provide a release from the stresses of daily life and enable city dwellers to experience “the wonderful pleasures of the outdoor life.”57 Agnes Deans Cameron’s reference to hide jackets as “huntingcoats” relates directly to this discourse (see sidebar 6).58 The garments discussed here are not likely to have been worn on hunting excursions, but their embellishments, their incorporation of fashionable details, and the

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adaptation to women’s wear are all in keeping with the conceptualization of hunting as a leisure time amusement. A parallel discourse was unfolding at the same time about the responsibility of “civilized people” to protect animal species from overhunting. In a 1901 letter to Inspector of Indian Agencies and Reserves J.A. Markle, Robert Bell endorsed the federal government’s imposition of closed hunting seasons on wood bison in the Fort Chipewyan area: “I found an unaccountable desire among nearly all classes to kill the animals. Not only the Indians, half breeds, Hudson’s Bay Company men and ‘free traders,’ but the gold-seekers from the United States and elsewhere, as well as other strangers in the country, are looking eagerly forward to going after their proposed victims the moment the then existing close[d] season should expire.” It was time for “thoughtful men” to “take alarm and … endeavour by concerted means to save the remaining species which are on the edge of extinction.”59 In Bell’s perspective, hunting was not a sustainable practice. The anticipated influx of settlers into the North West would place pressure on game animal populations. So, too, would the development of forest and muskeg for industrial purposes. It was up to the federal government to protect game through closed seasons and other regulatory measures. In this scenario, First Nations had no greater claims to game animals than did “strangers in the country.” The conservationist’s perspective differed from the sport hunter’s in obvious ways, but both defined hunting as a peripheral activity that was not central to the nation’s economy. And neither saw First Nations as having rights that superseded those of other interested parties. William Caldwell’s boss, Frank Crean, shared the sport hunter’s dismissive attitude. He reported that First Nations were not exploiting the region’s potential and complained that the absence of local demand for agricultural produce prevented people from carrying on “even experimental work.”60 “The result of Nature’s bounteousness,” he wrote, “is that the native content with Nature’s provision grows nothing. He kills the moose for its hide.”61 Like Caldwell, Crean commissioned hide clothing for his personal use, making his complaint about people killing a moose for its hide rich with irony.62 But his comment is also telling for its wilful ignorance of Indigenous knowledge systems and the place that hunting has within them. Hunting has never been a simple matter of living off of “Nature’s bounteousness.” Indigenous hunters have a deeply informed knowledge of animals and the environment. They know at which time of day a moose feeds and when it rests. Studying an animal’s tracks, they learn how large and how old

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the animal is, how fast it is travelling, and whether it is feeding as it moves. They read patterns of wind movement and adjust their own movements accordingly. People also enhance hunting success through sustainable practices such as rotational harvesting of fur trapping areas and, in the past, controlled burning.63 Hunting has a profoundly spiritual dimension, too. People give thanks to an animal’s spirit for the gift of its life and for the food that it provides. Moose fat, or grease, is the first offering made in a Dene fire-offering ceremony. People use as much of the animal as they can and dispose of its remains respectfully, burying bones by the roots of a tree or placing them gently in a clean place on the land and covering them with spruce boughs. Respect extends to the animal’s hide. Using a moose’s brains to tan its hide, a tanner puts the animal’s soul into the hide. The care and skill that a woman then invests in creating a hide jacket likewise express respect for the animal. This respect is fundamental to spirit gifting and affirms the spiritual relationships that connect humans with the “other-than-human beings that inhabit a place.”64 As Roy Salopree explains, “if you respect the Moose, the Moose will respect you back.” Indigenous hunting came under direct attack during the years that Bell, Crean, and Caldwell were working in the North West. Closed seasons on certain game animals and a ban on bush fires were implemented even before Treaty 8 was signed in 1899.65 When First Nations met with treaty commissioners to negotiate terms, they insisted on the unimpeded right to hunt and fish. No issue was more pivotal: at Fort Chipewyan, Cree and Denesułine leaders identified “complete freedom to fish, complete freedom to hunt, and complete freedom to trap” as conditions to be met before they would agree to the treaty.66 The commissioners responded with assurances that the treaty “would not lead to any forced interference with their mode of life.”67 Even so, the government imposed a closed season on moose in the Fort Chipewyan area the very next year. Police visited camps, confiscated meat and hides, and arrested the responsible parties.68 A growing web of regulations circumscribed Indigenous peoples’ lives and undermined their control over their lands. The jacket that a woman of Thɛbachagɛ or Fort Chipewyan made for William Caldwell’s fiancée brings together materials, fashion ideas, and sewing techniques from local Indigenous and European knowledge systems. At the same time, it embodies a growing tension between these systems. Beautifully tanned hide and exuberant floral embroidery celebrate the moose and plants with whom humans share a spiritual, life-sustaining relationship. They express an assemblage of knowledge that encompasses hunting, hide tanning,

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sewing with hides, and silk thread embroidery. Yet the jacket was commissioned by a man actively engaged in the production of an alternative knowledge base that threatened Indigenous livelihoods. In pursuit of a colonial agenda, William Caldwell joined his boss, Frank Crean, in proposing actions that would remake the landscape, destroy natural habitats, and close off access to game animals. Some of these actions were never taken: the northern muskeg remains largely in place. But others, such as the imposition of hunting regulations, were enacted. The jacket itself thus embodies some of the conflicting interests and aspirations that encountered one another in northwestern Canada during these years of colonial expansion.

conclusion Sophie White writes of how the “malleability and instability of objects of exchange and of the meanings imputed to [them]” are particularly evident in consumer objects that travel across cultural boundaries.69 As they enter new cultural contexts, these objects often acquire different meanings. This process was at work in the creation, sale, and subsequent movements of the four garments whose object lives I have discussed. The men who acquired these jackets came to the North West to produce knowledge about the territory for inclusion in a universal knowledge network. Taking the measure of the land – and the skies – with scientific instrumentation and inscribing their observations on paper, Bell, Caldwell, and their colleagues redefined the land in terms of what it could become and the profits that could be made. The hide garments that they acquired in the course of their work might well be read from their perspective as justifying Canada’s colonial project. As Frank Crean so clearly articulated, moose hunting not only failed to contribute to a national economy; it impeded desirable economic development. A hide jacket, no matter how beautiful, represented contentment with living off “Nature’s bounteousness” rather than a commitment to harnessing that bounty to “productive” ends. From another perspective, however, creating hide garments – and selling them to agents of colonial change – affirmed important Indigenous values. As revealed by their inscriptions, the jackets and coat discussed in this chapter embody respect, spirit gifting, and wahkootowin. They attest to connections with the land, and they affirm the right to hunt and trap. The jackets represent an alternative knowledge tradition and its life-sustaining powers.

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acknowledgments I thank my Object Lives colleagues for insightful comments on early presentations of the work discussed in this chapter. Special thanks to Sara Komarnisky for advice and support during the writing process, to Natalie Charette for assistance with image acquisition and manuscript review, and to Ekti Margaret Cardinal, Emma Knight, Ruth McConnell, Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses, Julia Petrov, Roy Salopree, and Anthony Worman for sharing their insights into the objects discussed in this chapter.

notes 1 The 1870 purchase encompassed territories known at the time as the North-Western Territory and Rupert’s Land. The North-Western Territory included the present-day Northwest Territories, Yukon, and northern Alberta as well as portions of present-day northern Saskatchewan, northern British Columbia, and Nunavut. Rupert’s Land included lands farther south and east in the Hudson Bay drainage system. These two fur-rich territories had been the mainstay of the northern fur trade for more than 100 years. At the time of the massive land transfer, the places discussed in this chapter were all located in the North-Western Territory. Both Rupert’s Land (excluding the tiny province of Manitoba) and the North-Western Territory became part of the newly named North-West Territories upon entry into confederation. With the creation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905, those sites mentioned here that were located south of the 60th parallel fell within Alberta’s provincial borders. 2 Shields, Places on the Margin, 198. Initial government efforts were aimed at compiling preliminary information, an inventory of sorts, on territorial resources. It would then be up to private industry to furnish the capital investment necessary to “unlock the resource wealth of the young Dominion.” Waiser, “Government Explorer in Canada,” 414. 3 Latour, “Visualization and Cognition.” 4 Ibid., 8, 32. 5 Turnbull, “Reframing Science,” 560, 557. 6 Cardinal, of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, is a gifted artist with decades of experience creating and teaching Indigenous clothing and design, fibre arts, and traditional skills, including beading, horse hair wrapping, quillwork, hide tanning, fish scale art, and caribou hair tufting. For a fuller biography, see kamahkmaryhill.com/about/33-margaretsbiography-full-version. Moses, a Métis artist and cultural arts instructor from Lac Ste Anne, Alberta, is a highly accomplished hide tanner, beader, and embroiderer. She has dedicated herself to carrying on traditional Indigenous arts traditions through her own work and through teaching others. Salopree, a member of the Dene Tha’ Nation, is an acclaimed painter and sculptor and a member of the Royal Alberta Museum’s Indigenous Advisory Panel.

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7 Ghostkeeper, Spirit Gifting, 58, 81. 8 Turnbull, “Reframing Science,” 557. 9 Nishi’ko’s relative proximity to the Magnetic North Pole, high geomagnetic activity recorded during earlier investigations, and infrastructural support supplied by the Hudson’s Bay Company all contributed to its selection as the site for a recording station. The Royal Society of London was the primary sponsor of the Nishi’ko expedition, but the Dominion government contributed $4,000 in the hope that it would lead to improvements in marine navigation and weather forecasting. See Barr, Expeditions; Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic; and Tammiksaar, Sukhova, and Lüdecke, “International Polar Year.” 10 King and Weekes, Trader King, 95. See also Dawson, Observations, vii. 11 These men were Royal Horse Artillery sergeants J. English and F. Cooksley and Royal Artillery gunner C. Wedenby. Dawson, Observations, vii. 12 Andrews, Zoe, and Herter, “Dogrib Sacred Sites,” 308. 13 Baillargeon, North American Aboriginal Hide Tanning, 23, 104. 14 The style features closely fitted garments of smoked moose or caribou hide ornamented with quill-wrapped fringes and carefully selected European trade materials. The garments have deep cuffs, stand-up collars, and front openings with a decorative overlay. Contrasting swatches of red and dark-coloured stroud, cut into a distinctive pattern, are outlined with white “seed” beads. Thompson, Women’s Work, 30. 15 King and Weekes, Trader King, 131. 16 See Carman, Royal Artillery. 17 Thompson, Women’s Work, 69. 18 William Cornwallis King, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Biographical Sheets, https:// www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/biographical/k/king_william-cornwallis.pdf. 19 Moose grease is the principal offering and is made first. Two Elders approach the fire and offer a prayer before pouring the grease into the fire. They then move around the fire clockwise in a circle, stopping to pray at each of the four cardinal directions. Two other ceremonialists then come forward to offer a prayer and place tobacco offerings in the fire. They, too, move around the circle, praying at each cardinal direction. For an account of a Dene Tha’ Tea Dance, or Prophet Dance, held at Chateh in 1986, which followed the pattern of a Tea Dance that I attended in Bushe River in 2015, see Goulet, Ways of Knowing, 223. 20 Among those accounts describing caribou hide clothing made for winter wear are Russell, Explorations in the Far North; and Whitney, On Snow-Shoes. 21 Winter clothing involved double layers of hide garments, both retaining the fur. The under garment was worn with the fur side against the body to trap heat, whereas the outer layer was worn with the fur side out to slough off moisture. See Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art; and “Degh eh: Caribou Hair Coat.”

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22 Ekti Margaret Cardinal notes that fringe has a practical dimension, too, helping to repel insects and diverting rainwater so that it does not pool along seams or edges, where it can promote rot. 23 The work is very fine, with seven to nine folds per quill. The thinness of the quills indicates that they came from the side of the animal’s belly, where the finest quills are located. Melissa-Jo Belcourt Moses believes that a minimum of two porcupines would have been required to make the quilled shoulder bands. 24 These quills are slightly thicker than those in the woven panels and probably came from the animal’s side near the back. 25 The survey investigated the Lac La Biche River north from Lac La Biche Settlement to its juncture with Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi (Athabasca River), followed Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi north to Lake Athabasca, returned upriver as far as the Clearwater River, and then travelled east to Lac La Loche. The final leg of the survey ran south through Ile-a-laCrosse and Green Lake in northwestern Saskatchewan. Bell, Report on Part of the Basin. 26 See Scrimgeour, Dr. Robert Bell; and Scrimgeour, District of Athabaska. 27 It seems likely that Bell either purchased the jacket directly from its original owner or bought it ready-made at one of the fur trade posts that he visited, most likely Fort Chipewyan or Fort Resolution. Both are close to the caribou hunting grounds. It is unlikely that Bell commissioned the jacket, given the short length of time that he spent in any one place while surveying, although he might have done so and had it shipped out when it was ready. 28 The site was developed in the 1950s as the Pine Point open-pit lead and zinc mine. After visiting it and examining assays by a mining company representative, Bell concluded that the site, like the rest of the region, held little promise for the near future. Dawson, Summary Report, 108–9. 29 Zaslow, Opening of the Canadian North, 86. Bell’s track surveys followed watercourses wherever possible. Open water afforded a more expansive view than did exploratory lines cut through stands of forest, and rock exposure was much better on riverbeds and lakeshores than in the woods. Then, too, a survey crew could cover a greater distance by water each day than when trekking across land. Carrying supplies in their canoes, they saved time by not having to return to a base of operations to resupply. 30 Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory,” 22. 31 River navigation was key to accessing the petroleum reserves and other “economic minerals” that Bell recorded. His 1882 map makes careful note of the many islands and sandbars that might impede river travel. 32 In 1882 Bell hired Métis men at Lac La Biche to man the expedition’s canoes, pilot them through rough waters on the Athabasca’s middle reaches, and portage around dangerous rapids. These men doubtless supplied the French place names appearing on Bell’s 1882

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map. In 1899, although relying on non-Indigenous men to paddle his canoes and assist him in the field, Bell hired experienced Métis guide John MacDonald to take his party downriver from Kapâwinihk (Athabasca Landing) to Fort McMurray. Farther on, at Thɛbachagɛ (Fort Smith), he hired twenty-one-year-old Willie Brown to guide the party in the Tucho area. See Bell, Report on Part of the Basin; Geological Survey of Canada, Summary Report, 104; and Memo of vouchers for field expenses, 1899, Library and Archives Canada (lac), Robert Bell Fonds, mg29, series B15, vol. 40, file 18-4D, gsc Financial List of Vouchers 1878–1901. 33 For an extensive collection of Bell’s articles, lectures, and reports, see lac, Robert Bell Fonds, mg29, series B15. 34 Robert Bell to Clifford Sifton, 15 January 1898, lac, Robert Bell Fonds, mg29, series B15, vol. 1, file 14. 35 When Turton donated his jacket to the Royal Alberta Museum, he said that he had come to Grouard from Ontario in 1908. He provided the Provincial Archives of Alberta the same date when donating photographs there. It is unclear what his duties for the Lands Branch were before the Grouard Lands Office opened in 1909, although there may have been paper filings to make before the office officially opened. 36 Ornamentation on jackets more than doubled their price. Frank Russell reported that at Fort McPherson in 1893, a “plain mooseskin hunting shirt” was valued at “four skins” and a hunting shirt “ornamented with fringe, ribbon and quills” at ten. Specific prices may have varied over time and from one locale to another, but the difference in cost between “plain” and “ornamented” jackets no doubt remained significant. Russell, Explorations in the Far North, 137–8. 37 Royal Alberta Museum, W.H. Turton Collection, acc. file H70.166. 38 Caspar Whitney wrote of “guncoats” embellished with porcupine quillwork when he travelled in the Athabasca and Tucho regions on a big-game hunting trip in 1894–95, and Frank Russell described “hunting frocks” as “common” among Cree, Dene, and Métis men in the North West in 1892–94. Whitney, On Snow-Shoes, 61; Russell, Explorations in the Far North, 169. 39 “Norfolk Jacket.” 40 Baumgartner, What Clothes Reveal, 72. The hunting jackets of the North West share several features with the Western buckskin jacket, including length, fit, and extensive use of fringing as a design element. 41 Rourke, Land of the Frozen Tide, 147–8. 42 Cameron, New North, 146. 43 The pockets are lined with plain brown cotton fabric and sewn with linen thread. Neither of these touches is visible on the jacket’s exterior. The aniline dyes with which the quills have been coloured are another European element.

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44 hbc factor Bernard Rogan Ross estimated in 1862 that “a skillful operative” wove about 2.5 inches of belt length in a day, with a complete belt – typically 25 to 30 inches long – requiring about two weeks’ worth of work. The combined length of quilled panels on the Turton jacket is 141 inches. This would work out to fifty-six and a half days of quill weaving if done at the speed that Ross quoted. See Hail and Duncan, Out of the North, 144. 45 The entry for 7 July reads in part, “Furs appear to be very scarce up that way this year.” Fort Simpson Post Journal 1904–18, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Simpson (Mackenzie River) Post Journals, B.200/a/42. 46 Macdougall, One of the Family, 3, 83. 47 Both cited in Beaulieu, ed., That’s the Way We Lived, 47, 10. 48 Ewan Caldwell to Patricia McCormack, 10 February 1993, Royal Alberta Museum, Ewan Caldwell Collection, acc. file H94.52. It would have taken time to make this jacket – about three months, by Ekti Margaret Cardinal’s estimate. This makes Ttthembatthie (Smith’s Landing), where the expedition spent the winter of 1910–11 and where Caldwell appears in the 1911 Canadian census, another potential community of origin. 49 Ibid. 50 Beale, “Travels in Northern Alberta”; Crean, New Northwest Exploration; Waiser, New Northwest. 51 Crean, New Northwest Exploration, 56. 52 Thompson, Women’s Work, 43. 53 Taylor, “‘To attract the attention of fish.’” 54 Ibid., 99. 55 Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen,’” 367. 56 Cited in ibid., 369. 57 Ibid., 373. 58 Cameron, New North, 287. 59 Geological Survey of Canada Letterbook, 1898–1903, lac, Robert Bell Fonds, mg29, series B15, vol. 41, file 3, gsc Financial, 408–11. 60 Crean, New Northwest Exploration, 57. 61 Ibid., 36. 62 “I have had to purchase buckskin clothes to travel in,” Crean reported during his first winter in the North West. The following year, while staying over at Portage La Loche, Crean commissioned “fancy work” for his fiancée from hbc manager John Groat’s wife. Frank J.P. Crean to Robert Young, 9 December 1908, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Frank Crean Fonds, BF26, file 147.3, 4; Waiser, “Government Explorer in Canada,” 23. 63 Indigenous people used managed bush fires to replace old undergrowth vegetation with new, more nutritious growth. The fires created a landscape of mixed open and forested land that supported populations of game animals such as moose and wood bison. Cald-

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well observed the effectiveness of this practice, albeit without understanding what he was seeing, when he accompanied an unidentified local guide and Constable W.A. Johnson of the North-West Mounted Police on a winter patrol. His report to Crean described prairie patches and rich grasslands west of Des Nedhé: “Small stretches of prairie land and sloughs were crossed in many places. Game appeared to be very plentiful. Fresh moose traces were seen as a rule every day.” Caldwell seems to have been unaware of the connections between the small stretches of prairie land, the abundance of game – what Crean had termed “Nature’s bounteousness” – and First Nations’ controlled burning. W.R. Caldwell to Frank J.P. Crean, 9 February 1911, lac, rg85, vol. 665, file 3911, part 2. 64 Altamirano-Jiménez and Parker, “Mapping, Knowledge, and Gender,” 89. 65 The first Game Preservation Act for the unorganized portions of the North-West Territories came into force on 1 January 1896. It included an immediate ban on hunting wood bison until 1 January 1900 and imposed a closed season on several other species of game animals. 66 Fumoleau, As Long As This Land, 77. 67 Laird, Ross, and McKenna, Report of Commissioners, 6. 68 McCormack, Fort Chipewyan, 183–4. 69 White, Wild Frenchmen, 17.

sidebar six Jackets in Circulation susan be rry

One traveller’s experience offers insights into how hunting jackets like Lands Office clerk Harry Turton’s moved in the region’s developing market economy. In 1908, the year that Turton arrived in Grouard, Alberta, journalist Agnes Deans Cameron and her niece, Jessie Cameron Brown, travelled on the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) steamship Mackenzie River across Tucho (Great Slave Lake) and down Dehcho (Mackenzie River). The trip was fodder for a future public lecture series and a travel narrative that appeared in Cameron’s The New North: An Account of a Woman’s 1908 Journey through Canada to the Arctic (1909). During a short stopover at Fort Simpson, Cameron posed for a photo wearing a hide jacket that closely resembles the Turton jacket (see figure S6.1). It is not the same jacket; the one she wears has three pockets, whereas the Turton jacket has only two. In her travel account, Cameron wrote of “the lynx-paw robes, moose-skin hunting-coats, and other spoils that we are bringing out to civilisation.”1

It seems likely that the two women purchased their hunting jackets at Fort Simpson, where Cameron was photographed wearing an embellished hide jacket. While stopped over at the post, Cameron recorded the arrival of hbc boat crews bringing quilled objects to sell: “From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from Fort Liard, the Hudson’s Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr. Brabant at Simpson.2 They brought their wives and babies with them, brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupinequill work, Fort Liard being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes. Tomorrow they will start back.”3 The hbc’s Fort Simpson post journal complements Cameron’s account: 5 July 1908: “Boniface Laferté & crew arrived from Nelson last night.”4 7 July 1908: “Mr. Balsillie and family arrived from Liard with the Boat.5 Furs appear to be very scarce up that way this year.” 10 July 1908: “The New Steamer S.S.

S6.1 Agnes Deans Cameron, Fort Simpson, 1908. Royal bc Museums and Archives, F-08820.

McKenzie River pulled in this morning about 9 a.m. and caused some considerable excitement … The Steamer left again at 9 p.m. this evening for below.” Passengers included “Miss Cameron and Miss Brown.”6 Madeleine Laferté and Marie Balsillie (see figure S6.2) may have been involved in the creation of some of the quilled ob-

jects sold to the ship’s passengers. It is also possible that Laferté and/or Balsillie were simply transporting quillwork on behalf of others. No matter the specific scenario, the gathering together of people from various communities to greet the arrival of the steamship presented a prime opportunity to market beautiful quillwork.7 In her photo, Cameron also held a hide gun case, likewise embellished with bands of woven quillwork. It probably came

S6.2 Hal Woolaston, J.A.R. Balsillie and Family, 1924. University of Alberta Archives, Louis Auguste Romanet Fonds, 1972-81-7-1-9-717.

with the jacket from Echaot’įe Kúé (Fort Liard) or Tthek’eneh Kúe (Fort Nelson). Cameron’s acquisition of the gun case along with the jacket underscores how tourists and sportsmen perceived a link between embroidered hide goods and hunting. It is preposterous to think of wearing a jacket with such elaborate quillwork while hunting in the bush; the damage sustained from brushing against tree branches and exposure to snow and rain would be far too great. The absence of buttons or another method of closing the jacket further signals its impracticality for sustained wear on the land. The jackets, then, were deliberately made to be read

as signifiers of hunting, wilderness, and adventures in nature – all that was not “civilization” – but they were not made for active outdoor wear. It is possible that Cameron was the source of Turton’s jacket. The William Henry and Edwin Henry Turton Fonds at the Provincial Archives of Alberta include a photo postcard showing Cameron, her niece, and several local Euro-Canadian women. The photo was taken when Cameron stopped at Grouard on her way back from Dehcho. Turton wrote on the back, “Agnes Dean Campbell [sic], authoress who went thro’ this country two years ago. A great Poker sharp.”8 Was Cameron or her niece the poker player from whom Turton won his jacket? (This would mean either that Cameron came south with two jackets, losing one at poker, or that Brown staked and lost her

jacket.) If so, the Cameron connection offers a good explanation of how this jacket made its way from the Mackenzie River to a poker game at Grouard. At the very least, the strong similarity between Turton’s jacket and the one that Cameron wore at Fort Simpson suggests that they are from the same area, if not the same community.

pated in needlework classes taught by the nuns. James A.R. Balsillie, Hudson’s Bay Company, Biographical Sheets, https:// www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/bio graphical/b/balsillie_james.pdf; Beaulieu, ed., That’s the Way We Lived, 102. 6 Fort Simpson Post Journal 1904–18, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, B.200/a/42. 7 The arrival of the first steamer of the season was a major event at fur trade posts throughout the region. In 1928 Louise

notes

Rourke wrote that people knew of its ar-

1 Cameron, New North, 287.

rival “hours, sometimes days,” in advance

2 Angus Brabant was the Hudson’s Bay

and that the day of arrival “is like a Bank

Company’s manager for the Mackenzie River district. MacFarlane, “Angus Brabant.”

Holiday.” Rourke, Land of the Frozen Tide, 246. 8 Provincial Archives of Alberta, William

3 Cameron, New North, 146.

Henry and Edwin Henry Turton Fonds,

4 Boniface Laferté, born in the Red River

acc. pr1090, file A17927.

Settlement, had worked on boat crews in the Mackenzie River district since at least 1881. His wife, Madeleine, was widely known as an expert needlework artist and is credited with creating the contemporary art of moose hair tufting. See Malbeuf, “apihkêw”; Thompson, From the Land, 72; and Madeleine Laferte, scrip claim, Library and Archives Canada, rg15-D-II-8-c, vol. 1353, container C-14979. 5 James Balsillie, originally from the Red River Settlement, had been working for the hbc in the Mackenzie River district since 1895. His wife, Marie, was a member of the Dene-Métis Fabien family of Deninu K’ue (Fort Resolution). She had attended mission school, probably at Zhahtí Kóé (Fort Providence), where she would have partici-

12 From the Sanatorium to the Museum and Beyond The Circulation of Art and Craft Made by Indigenous Patients at Tuberculosis Hospitals sara kom arnisky

This chapter analyzes the circulation of art and craft made by Indigenous patients at tuberculosis (tb) hospitals, now in museum storage rooms far away in time and space from the contexts in which they were made: a carving of a soapstone bird, smooth and heavy, signed on the bottom by its maker; a band of beadwork, each tiny bead vibrant and perfectly placed; and two dolls dressed in winter clothing with fantastic details, all sewn with tiny stitches. Tuberculosis was a leading cause of death worldwide in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but improved living conditions, public health initiatives, and medical treatment led to vastly reduced mortality from the disease among the white, European-descended settler population in North America. However, tb reached epidemic status in Indigenous communities in Canada in the mid-twentieth century: tb was endemic to Indian residential schools, living conditions on reservations were often poor, and the federal government neglected to provide adequate healthcare for Indigenous peoples until the postwar era.1 From the 1940s to the 1960s, Inuit, First Nations, and sometimes Métis people in Canada with tb were sent to sanatoria for treatment. Once they were well enough, some patients participated in occupational therapy programs, producing a diverse range of art and craft.2 Many examples of this work have become part of museum collections, and others are held in private collections. Across the border in the United States, Indigenous patients with tb were also engaged in making handicrafts while in hospital.

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12.1 James Tegeapak, soapstone bird in a trap, made at the Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, c. 1955. Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Hilary Stewart Collection, 3100/24.

This art, including the context of its creation in hospitals and the process of its collection and display in museums or private collections, has not been systematically documented. Nor has it been understood in its social context. Indeed, in Soapstone and Seed Beads, a publication documenting the collection of art and craft from the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton, the authors write, “[I]t is likely there are artifacts produced in similar circumstances in public and private collections across Canada but not identified as the craft production of Native patients.”3 There are multiple potential explanations for the lack of scholarly interest to date. Like tourist art, hospital art was considered less “authentic” and therefore unworthy of scholarly or collector interest.4 These pieces make up relatively small parts of museum collections, with the exception of the large collections at the Royal Alberta

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Museum and the Hamilton Art Gallery. Published histories of “Indian Hospitals” usually rely on textual records and miss the material record completely;5 and time spent in tb hospitals usually appears as a small anecdote in the biography of established artists, if at all.6 Finally, the context of their production also requires reckoning with uncomfortable truths about colonial history in general and segregated healthcare for Indigenous patients specifically. This chapter helps to repair this omission by analyzing the circulation of three objects, each made in a tb hospital by an Indigenous patient and each currently in a museum collection: a soapstone carving made by James Tegeapak at the Charles Camsell Hospital and now at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; handmade dolls made by an unknown person at the Parc Savard Hospital in Quebec City and now at the McCord Museum in Montreal; and a beaded belt made at the Ah-GwahChing sanatorium in Walker, Minnesota, and now at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford (see map 10). These pieces of art provide insight into both the “regime of care” at tb hospitals and the “therapeutic encounter” within the intersubjective space of the hospital occupational therapy, or handicrafts, program. I show how the regime of care at tb hospitals is linked to settler colonial processes of displacement, dispossession, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples.7 At the same time, I extend the concept of therapeutic encounter to draw attention to the complex and unequal social space of these tb hospitals, places that gathered people from across cultures of health and healing.8 The term “gathered” is too politically neutral; for some patients and their families, better words might include “seized” or “incarcerated.” But the art and craft created at these hospitals were products of encounter, or what anthropologists Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel describe as “everyday engagements across difference.”9 By viewing each of these pieces of art as a living object and carefully tracing its circulation, I situate this art within unequal encounters at the hospital and beyond, taking into account the diversity of people brought together in the hospital; the links between art, medicine, and government in managing and creating knowledge about Indigenous peoples; and the more personal nature of art given by patients as gifts to doctors, nurses, or family members. Historian Mary Jane McCallum has written about how health and medicine are implicated in the ongoing Canadian settler colonial project, and I extend her argument to show how the circulation of art and craft made by Indigenous patients at tb hospitals extends the colonial project far beyond

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the hospital. Systems of health and medicine, art, and museums are together co-implicated in the long and continuing project of colonization and the building of white settler nations in the United States and Canada.10 Indeed, museums and hospitals were both involved in managing and producing knowledge about Indigenous peoples through institutional and professional networks that transcended borders. Even though these institutions collected and documented vast amounts of information intended to understand and ultimately govern Indigenous peoples as members of expanding nation-states, artwork is often left anonymous. For the Indigenous patients themselves, however, making art linked them to families, communities, tradition, and home places. It was a critical means by which Indigenous patients shaped the social space of the hospital. I draw on archival and museum research, on interviews with former staff, patients, and their family members, and on public history initiatives in Edmonton to understand and share this legacy. This methodology and form of analysis are my own but draw on my training and expertise in multisited ethnography, on my scholarship about object biography and material culture, on my commitment to engaged and public scholarship, and on the collaborative Object Lives project.11 This study provides insight into the connections between handicrafts programs and other institutions (like museums), the assumptions of administrators of hospitals and occupational therapy programs about what constituted notions of “productive citizenship,” and the restorative value of creative work in tb hospital occupational therapy programs. I also address how Indigenous labour and expertise in the arts contributed to expanding museum collections in North America and beyond and, importantly, how through art and craft production Indigenous patients created new relationships while working to maintain connections to home, tradition, and family while far away in hospital. Hospital art and craft continue to circulate, to resonate, and to entangle lives and histories. The therapeutic encounter therefore extends beyond the hospital and refuses to remain in the past.

te geapak’s bird The first piece of hospital art that I consider is a soapstone carving of a bird, currently at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (see figure 12.1). It was made by Inuk patient James Tegeapak while he was institutionalized at the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton for eleven years from 1952 to 1963. I do not know how Tegeapak described this carving or his experiences

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in the hospital. Perhaps it evoked a scene from a home and a way of life that he hoped to recover. When I look at this carving of wood and soapstone and string, I see a goose or a duck lured into a trap, carved by a man confined to hospital for over a decade, far from his family, community, and culture. Looking at this carving in circulation means documenting and analyzing the social context of its production in hospital, as well as its movement from hospital to private collection to museum. Such an analysis provides insight into the links between hospital and museum, as well as between settler and Indigenous social relations beginning in postwar Canada and extending through time. After decades of inaction, the federal government finally acted on the growing tb epidemic among Indigenous peoples and made hospitals available for tb treatment in the era after the Second World War.12 Maureen Lux calls this an “aggressive postwar expansion” of the Indian Health Service, which signalled the Canadian state’s changing relationship with Indigenous nations.13 This system supplanted the influence of Christian missionaries and replaced it with expert and objective medical authority; it potentially offered another path to assimilation; and it fulfilled a moral imperative to provide healthcare to all Canadians. At the same time, many First Nations interpreted these hospitals as the state’s recognition of its legal and treaty responsibility for Indigenous healthcare.14 By the 1950s tuberculosis was an epidemic among Inuit, and treatment involved evacuation to southern hospitals. Between 1953 and 1964, approximately 8,600 Inuit patients were institutionalized in southern sanatoria in places like Hamilton, Toronto, Moose Factory, Quebec City, and Edmonton.15 The legacy of these hospitals is therefore profound: patients from every Inuit family or community,16 as well as generations of First Nations and Métis people, had been treated in these hospitals by the time of their closure. By 1960 there were twenty-two “Indian hospitals” in Canada, with more than 2,200 beds for the treatment of First Nations and Inuit people.17 The Camsell Hospital was one of these hospitals. It was the largest hospital in the system at the time, and it has been well documented and researched from non-Indigenous perspectives.18 In 1946 the facility was formally transferred to the Department of National Health and Welfare in order to become a tb treatment facility and hospital for First Nations and Inuit patients.19 It was named the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital after a geologist and deputy minister of mines and resources who was born and raised in northern Canada.20 The hospital treated First Nations, Inuit, and sometimes Métis peoples from a huge northwestern geography, including the areas of Treaties

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6, 7, 8, and 11 as well as the entire western Arctic. This area today encompasses Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut, and parts of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The social composition of the hospital included non-Indigenous doctors and nurses, some Indigenous staff, as well as patients from many Indigenous nations from across a vast region: Inuit, Inuvialuit, Dene, Cree, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, Stoney Nakoda, Dinjii Zhuh (Gwich’in), and Métis. Like similar institutions, the Camsell Hospital had an occupational therapy program, which was established in 1946, the year it became an “Indian hospital.” Making art and craft was thus an integral part of the regime of care from the very start. It aimed to help patients to keep their treatment schedules – and to “keep busy” during the long months and even years in hospital. Patients carved in wood and stone; they beaded, painted, and tooled leather; they sewed clothing, blankets, dolls, and moccasins; and they knit, crocheted, and made many other things. Some even made photo albums out of old X-rays.21 Viewing the hospital’s occupational therapy program through the concept of “therapeutic encounter” encourages me to ask: what was therapeutic and for whom? From a staff perspective, the therapeutic value of handicrafts was that their production helped patients to keep active during convalescence over the long months and years of the “rest cure.”22 Before the 1950s, treatment for tuberculosis depended on good nutrition, sunlight, fresh air, and rest. Even once effective chemotherapy and surgery became standard parts of treatment for tb, bed rest remained essential. Very sick patients were totally confined to their beds, whereas patients recovering from their disease but not well enough to go home could leave their beds and even the hospital for short periods of time. These “routines” meant that patient movement and activity were closely monitored and controlled. Having something to do was therefore essential to keeping patients compliant. Tegeapak’s bird was one of many carvings that he made at the Camsell Hospital, which number at least 608.23 I located twelve of his works in museums – nine at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton,24 one at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife,25 and two at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, including the bird pictured in figure 12.1.26 Tegeapak carved the bird from soapstone, and it is sitting over two tiny eggs, glued into place. He made the trap from wooden stakes and string and attached the entire piece to a rough soapstone base with glue and pegs. The base of the bird is covered in paper and marked with a stamp in black ink that says “Eskimo Craft Charles Camsell Hospital Edmonton,” below which

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is the artist’s name, J. Tegeapak, written in green ink, followed by $2.00 and T-194, written in pencil (see figure 12.2). That letter-number combination was a tracking number assigned to craftwork. Tegeapak made this sculpture sometime before 7 March 1956, when it was entered into the carving instructor’s ledger as a “goose? in snare” with the number T-194.27 Inuit had long been artists, but the 1950s marked the dawning of appreciation for Inuit art among southerners. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Canadian government partnered with the Canadian Handicrafts Guild and the Hudson’s Bay Company to explicitly encourage carving as a source of income for Inuit.28 This meant that white southerners living and working in Arctic communities encouraged Inuit to make art and craft for sale within settler markets, purchased work for sale in southern Canada, and trained others to carry on the work after their departure.29 As a result, Inuit art and craft increasingly entered settler Canadian markets and galleries.

12.2 James Tegeapak, soapstone bird in a trap, bottom detail, c. 1955. Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Hilary Stewart Collection, 3100/24.

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As this system of production was established in northern communities, it was mirrored in hospitals like the Camsell Hospital. When Tegeapak carved this bird, two men were involved with administering a carving program at the hospital: Douglas Lord and Harold Pfeiffer. From 1950 to 1952, Douglas Lord was in Kugluktuk working as the community’s first federal government welfare teacher.30 He worked to develop the production and marketing of carvings (including soapstone) and other crafts.31 He encouraged the carving of animal, bird, and human likenesses, stressing accuracy of form and detail, and he used financial incentives to develop a “high standard of quality.”32 He also negotiated the sale of a number of pieces from Kugluktuk in what is now Nunavut for a teaching collection at the University of Alberta.33 Lord and his family later moved south, and he started working at the Camsell Hospital in 1953 as a teacher and carving instructor. Harold Pfeiffer was a Canadian artist and another mediator and facilitator of crafts production. He worked in a variety of institutional contexts, from the military to McGill University, before joining the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources.34 Pfeiffer clearly saw hospitals as key sites of Indigenous production of art and craft, and he worked to encourage this output at both the Parc Savard Hospital in Quebec City and the Camsell Hospital in Edmonton.35 Pfeiffer recalled that when he arrived at the hospital, a few Inuit men were carving already. He “got some of them painting and doing pen and ink drawings, some of which were really good. [He] also had a few of them making macramé belts and leather belts and even some finger weaving of ties and sashes.”36 Pfeiffer listed Tegeapak as one patient he particularly remembered, and he acknowledged that Tegeapak had turned out “remarkably fine work quite often.” Pfeiffer “provided the tools and supplies and encouraged them” but did not think it wise to “inflict the Whitemans [sic] ideas on them. They had their own culture and used it.”37 As detailed in Harold Pfeiffer’s ledger,38 Tegeapak made forty-four carvings of wood, stone, and horn between October 1955 and June 1956. He carved caribou, igluit,39 sealers, dog teams, birds, fish, and other animals and scenes of life on the land. Over the same period, he received supplies for carving and for other forms of art and craft – embroidery cotton, buckles, and beads – approximately seventy dollars in cash, personal items such as envelopes, stamps, and cigarettes or tobacco, and film developing. He also asked for items that may have been gifts to others, such as a pendant and a dress. Consistent with the commercial focus of the “handicrafts experiment” in the Canadian Arctic, selling handicrafts at southern hospitals was envisioned

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as a way for patients to earn money not only during their hospital stay but also upon their return home. Indeed, to fully recover from tb or at least be “rehabilitated,” patients were expected to change their lifestyles to match white settler Canadian ideals.40 Anthropologist Lisa Stevenson has written about tb hospitals as being part of a social experiment created to transform Inuit into Canadian citizens.41 Certainly, patients at the Camsell Hospital were encouraged to train for new professions, and the hospital established programs to facilitate this undertaking. Grace Adam, a former occupational therapist at the Camsell Hospital, emphasized that she did not believe in having patients do crafts that they could not sell.42 To her, all art and craft had to be productive or practical, a way to create “productive citizens” out of hospital inmates. Carvings, beadwork, dolls, and other items made for sale fit into settler expectations of what was “allowably Indigenous.”43 Patients thus made items that were sold through the occupational therapy department and later by the hospital gift shop. The occupational therapy department was a retail space at the same time that it was a clinical space – where the handicraft supervisor, dressed in a crisp white uniform, attended to the range of objects for sale: dolls, embroidered goods, pennants, and so on (see figure 12.3). At first, customers were staff members and their friends, but later, people who lived nearby or those who participated in service clubs purchased items.44 Advertising was by word of mouth and by people’s exposure to the art during visits to the hospital. One of the handicrafts instructors remembered taking pieces to individual’s homes to sell them and returning to the hospital with special requests for the patients.45 According to Elva Taylor, a former director of nursing, “the hospital was the only source of crafts around here.”46 Staff later worked to expand markets and find other venues to sell patients’ work. Art and craft from the hospital won prizes at the Edmonton Exhibition and at the Calgary Stampede and were sold in Banff, Vancouver, and even Geneva, Switzerland. Patients also filled custom orders for specific goods.47 The money from sales did not go directly to the artists, however, but supported the purchase of supplies for the occupational therapy department, with patients receiving only a portion of the income.48 Southern hospitals thus made Indigenous art and craft, including Inuit soapstone and wood carvings, available to consumers in southern Canada at an accessible price and in a convenient location. In both northern communities and southern hospitals, then, a system of production was set in place, overseen by southern specialists who built networks of producers in different locales. In the North, this creative work

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12.3 Miss H. Hopkins, handicraft supervisor, in the Occupational Therapy Office, Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, 1953. Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital History Committee Records, PR1991.0383.0217.

was touted by administrators as a way to earn money without the strict discipline of wage labour in a time of change from local subsistence and the fur trade to a commercial economy.49 There is a parallel to work made in the hospital, where carvings and other art and craft were made for combined therapeutic and commercial purposes, not an aesthetic one. In both cases, carving was considered a way to provide income for Inuit both within the hospital and upon their return home after treatment. However, as described above, hospital artwork had to be produced for sale based on settler expectations and preferences, and patients received only a portion of the income from the sale of their work. Even though many Inuit patients created art while convalescing, hospital art and handicraft are not included in typical histories of Inuit art.50 What explains this omission? One possibility is that the arts establishment never expected art and craft made at the hospital to reach the level of fine art. Heather Igloliorte has written about James Houston’s instructional manual Sunuyuksuk: Eskimo Handicrafts (1951), which was intended to encourage

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Inuit to make goods that were marketable in southern Canada. Houston eventually realized the shortcomings of the souvenir trade and instead worked to position Inuit artistic production as art, something that did not happen in the hospitals.51 Not having the imprimatur of the art dealer meant that hospital patients were deemed “amateurs” and that their work was not valued in the same way. Insisting on the “usefulness” of the art is also a knock against it, as this focus emphasizes that it was not created as art but was produced as therapy. This perceived difference overlooks the factory character of Inuit art production in the North, something occluded by the positioning of northern art at the time as a “newly discovered but ancient Inuit art form [that] was formerly part of ritual life and revealed the spiritual nature of their animist world.”52 Art and craft made at the hospital may also have been considered “less authentic,” as they were made in an intercultural space that brought Indigenous peoples into a medicalized and colonial system of art and craft production.53 Ruth Phillips, however, has demonstrated that art produced outside a normative studio situation, as with tourist art, is no less “authentic,” arguing that tourist and souvenir art is important for understanding Indigenous visual and material traditions.54 Because of the links between carving initiatives in northern communities and southern hospitals, however, I argue that hospitals were nonetheless important sites of production of art and craft and that they offer insight into value creation processes in the history of Inuit art.55 Tegeapak’s bird was purchased by Hilary Stewart, a well-known author and illustrator of First Nations culture of the Northwest Coast.56 The bird was an addition to other soapstone carvings that she held in her private collection, which was bequeathed to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver.57 The circulation of Tegeapak’s bird from the hospital carving program to the museum thus depended on the establishment of a medicalized system of production: the bird was created within a therapeutic context and purchased from the hospital. Creating art is also linked to territory, to tradition, and to family. Heather Igloliorte writes about how Inuit art appeals to a Western audience at the same time that it acts as an expression of cultural knowledge and cultural resilience.58 I have learned from the work of Cree and Cree-Métis scholars and artists, such as Tara Kappo, Dawn Marie Marchand, and Lana Whiskeyjack, that within other traditions creating art is therapeutic in ways that are not understood by Western medicine.59 Indigenous patients in hospital would have made things not only to “keep busy” but also to connect to songs,

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stories, laws, and relationships with the human and beyond human. Staff at the Camsell Hospital ultimately had to recognize these therapeutic aspects of art: they encouraged patients to design and create their own patterns and to expand and improvise on their own ideas.60 Many patients came to the hospital already knowing how to make things, and they shared techniques, accessed materials, sold items, or gave art and craft as gifts through their own networks both inside and outside the hospital. Patients also made things to connect with each other. They built and maintained relationships within and outside the hospital, some of which are captured in the Camsell Arrow, the hospital newsletter.61 For example, James Tegeapak shared space at the hospital with other prolific carvers whose hospital art can be found in museum collections in western Canada. These men were described as always carving: “Willie Padmialuk and James Tigiapak [sic] are always busy with kayaks and dog teams. They make them so good too.”62 Patients also learned to make art and handicrafts from each other. Informally, I have heard of Indigenous women from different nations learning different styles of beadwork from one another while at the Camsell Hospital. First Nations men took up soapstone carving after seeing the work of Inuit patients there.63 Importantly, patients also taught their instructors, who learned hide-tanning techniques, porcupine quill embroidery, beadwork techniques and patterns, and parka patterns. The instructors then taught these skills to other patients.64 The occupational therapy department became a place to gather and visit, unlike other more regimented areas of the hospital, where schedules were strict and patients were separated by age and gender. It became a social space for establishing and maintaining relationships.65 In these ways, Indigenous patients shaped the social space of the hospital within a bureaucratically administered and racially segregated health system. Within and in spite of the hospital, patients made art linked to home, family, songs, stories, and laws.

ba n d o f b e a dwor k Tegeapak’s bird gestures to the larger colonial system within which Indigenous art and craft figure. These networks and systems engulfed Canada and extended beyond. Consider a band of beadwork made by an Anishinaabe patient at the Ah-Gwah-Ching tb sanatorium in Minnesota during the 1930s. The slim band was loom-woven of grey thread and seed beads with a repeating pattern of purple and yellow pointed figures and diamonds on a black

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background (see figure 12.4). The superintendent of the sanatorium gave the beaded band to Beatrice Blackwood of the Pitt Rivers Museum when she visited on a collecting trip in 1939. This belt is currently part of the permanent collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Ah-Gwah-Ching sanatorium was established by the State of Minnesota in 1907. At first, it served only non-Indigenous patients; however, a fire in 1935 at the “Indian Sanatorium” in Onigum brought patients across a frozen Leech Lake to the state sanatorium in Walker, Minnesota.66 The E Building was then constructed to house Indigenous patients. In the United States, as in Canada, the federal government was responsible for health services for Indigenous patients. Like in Canada, Indigenous patients were kept separate from white patients.67 And, finally, as at Canadian “Indian hospitals,” occupational therapy was part of the regime of care.68 During the time when the Indigenous patients arrived at the sanatorium, Martha Emig was the occupational therapist (1934–47), joined by her sister, Magdalena Emig, in 1938.69 Under the direction of the Emig sisters, the department “grew to be one of the finest departments in the state.” Patients were instructed in many kinds of handiwork, including “dressmaking, weaving, knitting, needlework, hand painting … wood carving, leather[work], book binding, rug weaving, and beadwork.”70 In a 1941 issue of the hospital magazine, The Moccasin, Martha Emig wrote that “the objects sought by occupational therapy are: to arouse interest, courage, and confidence; to exercise mind and body in healthy activity; to overcome disability; and to re-establish capacity for industrial and social usefulness.”71 Goals such as “re-establish[ing] capacity for industrial and social usefulness” and “developing a normal attitude”72 were similar to the assimilative goals of the Camsell Hospital, which sought not only to cure patients of disease but also to shape them into appropriately productive “good citizens” who fit the ideals of the settler state. In the E Building, Indigenous patients made a range of handicrafts. Women most often engaged in sewing, beadwork, knitting, and needlework, whereas men took up woodwork and leatherwork, divisions that were gendered according to Western precepts.73 In 1941, for example, patients in the E Building turned their hands to knitting, sewing, weaving, embroidery, beadwork, needlework, carving, cut work, applique, cross-stitch, wood carving, and crochet, as well as making rag rugs, picture frames, bracelets, tiny moccasins, doll clothing, pillow tops, scarves, toy animals, chairs, and Christmas cards. Patients also made woven beadwork like the band of beadwork at the Pitt Rivers Museum and other small sewn and beaded objects.74 The region was

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12.4 Band of beadwork made at the Ah-Gwah-Ching sanitorium, Walker, Minnesota, 1939. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1938.36.1715.

known as a place to buy Indigenous handicrafts, and apparently Highway 200 was known as the “handicrafts highway” in the postwar era.75 As Katie Pollock shows in chapter 9 of this volume, regional Indigenous tourist art was a vital feature of many communities. The handicrafts made by Indigenous patients at Ah-Gwah-Ching fit into this geography. And like at the Camsell Hospital, the occupational therapy program at Ah-Gwah-Ching was a gendered and racialized site of therapeutic encounter. But sanatoria were not only places of healing; they were also places of control and assimilation. As discussed here, handicraft programs endeavoured to make “productive citizens” of their Indigenous patients. But patients were also confined to their beds, required to adhere to strict bed rest, and forbidden to go home once admitted to hospital. At Ah-Gwah-Ching, patients were even locked up. As a former staff member at the sanatorium remembered, if the Indigenous patients “had a date to go ricing or to a pow-wow, they would just take off.”76 This tendency led to the creation of “lock-up areas in the basement of the Indian building where these recalcitrant patients were locked up so they could not escape.” According to a former guard at the hospital jail, “the prisoners had crafts like the rest – they made beaded belts, etc.” But patients resisted this confinement, too, and on ward E II, the girls would “break the windows by throwing the sewing machine through it, then they’d get out.”77

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Patients at Ah-Gwah-Ching, therefore, not only made space for themselves and maintained their own customs but also actively resisted administrative systems and frustrated hospital staff by defying the strict hospital regime. Within the space of the hospital, then, patients resisted their confinement and maintained their traditions. The band of beadwork in figure 12.4 supports this assertion. According to anthropologist Laura Peers, this band of beadwork is “typically Ojibwe.”78 It can therefore be understood as a characteristic Anishinaabe manufacture, the kind of thing made to be part of pow wow costumes and dance costumes or sold as a tourist item.79 Earlier in the century, Frances Densmore documented beadwork that had geometric designs and was made on a loom by Anishinaabe people in the same region of Minnesota.80 These designs showed cultural continuity with older Anishinaabe artwork in birch bark and quill, while demonstrating the creative capacity of beaders to use new materials and designs resulting from contact, trade, and exchange with white people. Ah-Gwah-Ching was also a space of therapeutic encounter between Indigenous peoples of different nations and non-Indigenous peoples. The hospital drew Indigenous patients, likely Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe, from across a regional geography encompassing Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota.81 It was primarily staffed by non-Indigenous people who also cared for non-Indigenous patients in other wards. The band of beadwork, then, was made within a space of encounter within a hospital setting where patients worked to create space for themselves within a strict and assimilative hospital regime. The band of beadwork, however, did not become part of pow wow regalia. It was instead taken very far away. The accession book entry at the Pitt Rivers Museum reads, “1939, October. From the Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota, usa … Band of modern bead-work for comparison with older work. Made by patients at the sanatorium, Walker, Minnesota, and given to B.B. by the Superintendent of the Occupational Therapy Department, July 20, 1939.”82 The tag attached to the item provides similar information but no information about the artist (see figure 12.5). Beatrice Blackwood’s visit to the hospital was part of a larger collecting trip in the United States and Mexico. In her field notes, she describes the trip from Minneapolis–Saint Paul to Walker, during which she stopped at a trading post to meet a trader who had a “small collection of really old Indian things” and “a large collection of modern things, mostly junk.” She purchased some “rather good beadwork and a model cradle” as well as some “stencils and tooth work.”83 When Blackwood and her party arrived in Walker, they asked for Dr Herbert A. Burns – the hospital superinten-

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12.5 Band of beadwork made at the Ah-Gwah-Ching sanitorium, Walker, Minnesota, detail of object tag, 1939. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1938.36.1715.

dent – at his home. He took them “down to the ‘occupational therapy’ dept. presided over by Miss Emig where Indian patients are encouraged to do handi-crafts. The old finger weaving which used to be done … is now done on a frame [with] a needle! These are for sale – but Dr. Burns’ collection of old bags, [which] are really good, is not, however he said if he did want to sell at any time he’d let me know.”84 Note that Burns himself collected Anishinaabe art, including beautifully beaded bandolier bags.85 With Burns and his wife, Blackwood also went to Park Rapids to a shop that looked “as if it were full of tourist junk, but the owner … produced some good old Chippewa things which I bought on Dr. Burns’ recommendation.”86 The movement of the beaded belt from sanatorium to museum thus hinged on its status as a gift from Burns to Beatrice Blackwood, representative of and collector for the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Gifts produce social

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relationships, and in this case, the gift of a beaded belt produced a connection between institutions, or those acting on behalf of institutions: the Ah-GwahChing sanatorium and the Pitt Rivers Museum.87 Both of these institutions and their staff collected and curated information about Indigenous peoples. For Burns, Anishinaabe patients at the hospital were “a human experiment in immunology as well as epidemiology which we can ill afford to ignore.”88 Blackwood continually assessed things as “good” if they were old, traditional, and appropriate for the museum or as “junk” if they were modern tourist items.89 For her, trading posts, personal collections, and hospitals all figured as places to find pieces and to create knowledge about Anishinaabe people and art.90 And, indeed, Blackwood was interested in the belt as an example of “modern” work to compare and contrast with older “traditional” beadwork at the museum.91 Both institutions – hospital and museum – were linked in their goal to produce knowledge about Indigenous peoples. And they also became linked through the material gift of the band of beadwork. Art and craft made at hospitals therefore circulated as institutional gifts,92 indicative of relationships between institutions like hospitals, museums, and government departments. The band of beadwork, a gift from sanatorium to museum, remains at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the space where the Ah-Gwah-Ching sanatorium stood is now an empty field. Although the hospital is gone, the band of beadwork and other objects from the sanatorium leave a material trace of the hospital and of the relationships made within and beyond its walls.

cloth d olls Personal gifts between individuals give insight into the complex interpersonal space of the hospital and position this art within social relationships. But Beatrice Blackwood failed to identify the person who made the beaded belt. In fact, many of the pieces made by Indigenous patients and now in museums collections are anonymous, their makers unnamed. Artists like James Tegeapak often wrote or scratched their name into the base of carvings, but with other pieces like beadwork or sewing, once the original tag is lost, it becomes much more difficult to know the maker. In my experience, carvings made in hospitals are much more likely to have an artist’s name attached to them, written or scratched into the stone or wood. But the makers of dolls, beadwork, and other sewn goods are more difficult to identify.93 For example,

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at the Royal Alberta Museum, only 228 of the 444 pieces from the Camsell Hospital, or 51 per cent, have been assigned to an artist.94 Other museums and private collections include beadwork or dolls, but these objects typically do not have an artist’s name attached to them. Consider the two dolls at the McCord Museum in Montreal shown in figures 12.6 and 12.7. Each of these hand-sewn dolls has a cloth body and clothing, leather boots, fur trim, and beadwork. One has an interesting beaded circle on its parka. These dolls were made at the Parc Savard Hospital in Quebec City sometime in the mid-1950s. This hospital operated within the same federal government system as the Camsell Hospital and shared many similarities, such as crumbling infrastructure, repurposing of federal facilities into an “Indian hospital,” dislocation of patients from their families, homes, and traditional territories for treatment, and the inclusion of an occupational therapy, or handicraft, program as part of the regime of care. In 1952 James and Alma Houston of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal gave two weeks of instruction to eighty-eight Inuit patients at the Parc Savard Hospital in “carving, knitting, and elementary subjects.”95 James Houston was a notable promoter of Inuit art and introduced printmaking to Inuit communities in the late 1950s. Again, and as argued earlier, the establishment of a system of artistic production involved not only northern communities but southern hospitals as well. Houston, Lord, and Pfeiffer – the same actors were involved across these sites. Inuit have a long history of making dolls and small figures, which later became popular collector and tourist items.96 And dolls were also made by Inuit hospital patients; similar cloth dolls were made by patients at the Charles Camsell Hospital and the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario. But we do not know who made these particular dolls. Anonymity is a pervasive aspect of this work. In part, this is the result of the Western artistic hierarchy of valuation that shaped these art production systems. This hierarchy is both racialized and gendered, being tightly bound to white European economic and social structures and biased toward the work of men. Throughout the 1960s, traditional Indigenous arts were positioned in the category of handicraft, being regarded as made by producers, not artists.97 In contrast to highly valued carving on stone and wood done by men, artistic work using textiles was seen as essentially female and domestic and less worthy of much notice or any systematic recording or indelible notation of the name of the maker.98 Sherry Farrell Racette writes that the recognition of Indigenous

12.6 Male doll dressed in the central Arctic or eastern Arctic style with cotton cloth, cotton thread, hide, fur, glass beads, and pigment, made by an Inuit patient at the Parc Savard Hospital, Quebec City, c. 1950–55. McCord Museum, Dr Walter Pfeiffer Collection Files, M976.102.13.

12.7 Female doll dressed in the central Arctic or eastern Arctic style with cotton cloth, cotton thread, hide, fur, and glass beads, made by an Inuit patient at the Parc Savard Hospital, Quebec City, c. 1950–55. McCord Museum, Dr Walter Pfeiffer Collection Files, M976.102.14.

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women as artists more broadly is challenged not only by the category into which their work falls but also by their presence in museum collections with little or no provenance: “The conventional museum strategy has been to organize collections and exhibitions into regional categories or ‘culture areas’ … [T]hese persistent generic identifications, combined with a lack of specific information, effectively erase the human maker … [M]any, and possibly the majority, of objects in museum collections are the products of women’s artistry and creative work.”99 At “Indian hospitals,” women patients sewed leather and cloth and did embroidery and beadwork. Most of the pieces they made, many of which are now in museum and private collections, are also anonymous. But we also do not know what happened to some of the people who went to hospitals like Parc Savard and Camsell and never came home. Perhaps the anonymity of the art and the lack of information given to families about their loved ones are results of the same colonial process. Lisa Stevenson writes about “anonymous care” in tb and suicide epidemics in Canada’s North.100 Anonymous care refers to a regime where accurate statistics are kept about how many people were treated at tb sanatoria and how many lived or died from the disease. But this accounting system shows indifference to the identity of individuals and their unique position in webs of social relationships. Stevenson writes, “Who an individual Inuit was – her life story and familial connectedness – no longer mattered.”101 Instead, Inuit interacted with the state as solitary individuals identified by a unique disc number.102 The beaded circle on the McCord Museum doll in figure 12.6 is poignant in this regard, being reminiscent in shape of the government-issued discs assigned to Inuit people for numeric identification in order to facilitate administration.103 Hospital artwork can also signify a form of anonymous care, as so much of this work is not linked to the person who made it. Overall, this disregard for the individual who made the artwork illustrates the state focus on identification numbers instead of names, on rates of disease or death instead of the complex social conditions that led to them, and on the amount of money garnered from sales of art and craft rather than on keeping careful track of who made what. As Farrell Racette writes about the pervasive anonymity of Indigenous women’s art in museum collections, “with such a radical erasure of individual identities, the difficulties of constructing the most basic biographical information on Aboriginal women artists can be significant.”104 Because of processes designed to strip Indigenous patients of their identities, there are great gaps in the life stories of these objects and their makers.

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For hospital artwork, undoing this regime of anonymous care means retracing the link between the human-made object and the life history and familial connectedness of the person who produced it. This process reveals the links between people and the things that they made, as well as artists’ links to those who handled their work. It is sometimes possible to resituate these links in the complex relationships that were made and unmade in hospitals, thereby reconnecting this art to the entangled lives and social relationships of the therapeutic encounter. We can begin the process of retracing these linkages by looking at the context in which the dolls were created and who was involved. This undertaking can connect places, peoples, and institutions. For example, the two anonymous dolls at the McCord Museum are part of a larger collection of art made by patients at Parc Savard Hospital and donated to the museum by Dr Walter Pfeiffer. Walter Pfeiffer and Harold Pfeiffer were brothers, and both were involved in the administration and care of Indigenous patients, Walter as a physician and Harold as an artist and art instructor. In addition to these two dolls, the Pfeiffer collection contains fifteen carvings. Made of wood and other materials, these carvings are of northern animals, men in kayaks, and dog teams with sleds.105 Some appear unfinished. Most of the carvings are attributed to artists, with names written on the bottom of the carvings, and there is a handwritten note with documentation from Walter Pfeiffer about the artists of the carvings.106 But there is no information about the dolls. Unlike Tegeapak’s bird, whose circulation was made possible through purchase, and the beaded belt, which circulated from hospital to museum as an institutional gift, these dolls were made by patients presumably under the care of Walter Pfeiffer. This fact, too, demonstrates yet another example of relationships within the therapeutic encounter. There were also gifts given between patients and nurses, as well as other gifts that have not been captured by museum collections, such as things made by patients for their own families, for other patients, or for personal use. The more personal gifts from patient to caregiver or from patient to family member signify the relationships built and maintained in the hospital. For people far away from home, strengthening ties to caregivers might have ensured better care. It is unclear, however, whether Walter Pfeiffer purchased these items from the patients under his care or whether they were gifts. Other hospital staff I interviewed received gifts from patients on occasion. For example, I met and interviewed a nurse who underwent training in tb care at the Camsell Hospital for a year in 1948. She recalled greeting the patients in Inuktitut each morning and

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described a doll that an Inuit patient had made for her out of fabric from the nurse’s own childhood dresses.107 How would we describe this gift and this relationship? And, in the words of Lisa Stevenson, “how would we draw the boundaries of the worlds sewn into the seams of such a doll?”108 Art historian Anne Whitelaw has written about the circulation of Inuit art and craft from gift shops to museums in the 1950s. She found that women who worked as museum volunteers had played a major role in the circulation and acquisition of Inuit craft since its introduction to the North American market. These volunteer women curated the art and craft offered for sale at gift shops and purchased this work themselves, but they also purchased work for museums or orchestrated donations of Inuit art to museums.109 Hospital staff like Walter Pfeiffer and the nurse mentioned above also curated, collected, donated, and circulated art and craft made by Indigenous hospital patients. Objects made by Indigenous patients in the personal collections of former hospital staff were subsequently donated to the Royal Alberta Museum and the University of Alberta in Edmonton, to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, and to the MacBride Museum in Whitehorse. Indigenous patients built new relationships in hospitals and cemented them with gifts of art and craft to healthcare staff, visiting dignitaries and guests, and fellow patients from other Indigenous territories. They also strove to sustain relationships with family and kin far away. Again, Indigenous patients shaped the social space of the hospital as they built and maintained relationships through art and craft.

conclusion James Tegeapak also gave away his work as gifts. One of the pieces at the Royal Alberta Museum is a dog team carved by Tegeapak and given as a gift to Edmund Sparks, who was an orderly at the Camsell Hospital from 1946 to 1961. It was then donated to the museum by Spark’s daughter, Olive Feather.110 This is one of the carvings that James Tegeapak’s daughter Nora NiptanatiakEvaglok has been able to visit in person. Nora has been learning about her culture and her biological and adoptive parents and is interested to know more about James and his time at the hospital. Her hands shook with emotion at the sight of the carvings. Nora had not known that James had made art while in the hospital. She asked, “Why didn’t they tell the family about the carvings?”111

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Art and craft made by Indigenous patients at tb hospitals will continue to circulate and build relationships. However, to date, it is non-Indigenous healthcare and museum professionals who have directed the circulation and interpretation of this art and craft. In this chapter, I have focused on the circulation of art and craft made by Indigenous tb hospital patients, tracing the links between people, places, and processes. This focus extends my analysis beyond the hospital to include other locations, and it takes analysis beyond the time period of the hospital. This approach connects many people to this art and craft and to the hospitals, and it puts us into relationship with one another. Through purchase, through institutional gifting, and through gifts to health professionals, art and craft made at tb hospitals moved from hospital to museum. The material record is a way for family members of former patients like Nora to learn about the experiences of their relatives in the hospital. In the future, this art and craft should circulate to the former communities of hospital patients. Projects and research can respond to the questions of those directly affected by the “Indian hospital” system, guiding further work on this art and craft. A band of beadwork or a carving can connect people to their family members while carrying a bigger story about health and healing, about interconnected colonial structures, about the strength and creativity of Indigenous peoples, and about the relationships between us.

acknowledgments Most of the research and writing of this chapter were completed in Treaty 6 and Métis territory. Quana Nora Niptanatiak-Evaglok for telling me about your father and for sharing with me what it means to you to learn about and encounter his work. Thank you also to Beverly Lemire, Crystal Fraser, Mary Jane McCallum, Susan Berry, Laurie Meijer Drees, Laura Peers, Anne Whitelaw, Lisa Stevenson, and Marlee McGuire for insightful comments on earlier versions of this work. Thank you to Emma Knight at the Royal Alberta Museum, Teija Dedi at the Museum of Anthropology, and Guislaine Lemay at the McCord Museum for showing me objects in your collections and for answering my many questions. Finally, I acknowledge the important work of the Edmonton Heritage Council, rise – Reconciliation in Solidarity Edmonton, and the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq/ Kitikmeot Heritage Society, particularly their support for community initiatives to share and retell the history of the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital.

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notes 1 For a general history of tuberculosis in Canada, see Wherrett, Miracle of the Empty Beds. For more about tb as a result of colonization, see Daschuk, Clearing the Plains; Lux, Medicine That Walks; Lux, Separate Beds; McCallum, “Starvation”; Grygier, Long Way from Home; Stevenson, Life beside Itself; and Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth. Tuberculosis continues to be a leading cause of death worldwide, and high rates of the disease persist in some Indigenous communities in Canada, especially in the North and on the Prairies. See Komarnisky et al., “Years Ago.” 2 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Phillips, Trading Identities; Phillips and Steiner, eds, Unpacking Culture. 5 On “Indian hospitals,” see Lux, Separate Beds. 6 See, for example, Walk, Kenojuak. 7 The regime of care in this context links caregiving to dynamics of power within a settler colonial state. See McCallum, “Starvation”; and Stevenson, Life beside Itself. For a broader analytic of regimes of care within raced and gendered systems of liberal governmentality, see Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment. 8 The clinical therapeutic encounter emphasizes the relational aspect of the clinicianpatient interaction. See, for example, Orange, Suffering Stranger. My own concept of therapeutic encounter developed out of participation in Aidan Seale-Feldman and Raphaëlle Rabanes’s panel “Therapeutic Encounters” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Minneapolis on 18 November 2016. 9 Faier and Rofel, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” 363. 10 McCallum, “Starvation,” 98. 11 I have used multisited ethnography to study the mobility, material culture, and transnational life of Mexican migrants in Alaska; see Komarnisky, Mexicans in Alaska. For multisited research, see Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System.” For object biography and material culture scholarship, see Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things; Joyce and Gillespie, eds, Things in Motion; Myers, Empire of Things; Peers, Playing Ourselves; Seip, “Transformations of Meaning”; and Thomas, Entangled Objects. On the methodology of the Object Lives project, see www.objectlives.com; and this volume’s “Introduction.” 12 See Komarnisky et al., “‘Years Ago’”; Hackett, “Tuberculosis Mortality”; Lux, Medicine That Walks, 221–3; and Lux, Separate Beds, 4, 39–46. 13 Lux, Separate Beds, 3. 14 Ibid., 6–7, 161–90. 15 This number is from Stevenson, Life beside Itself, 23. P.G. Nixon writes that in the Northwest Territories half of the Inuit (4,836) were hospitalized between 1953 and 1964. Nixon,

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“Early Administrative Developments,” 67. See also Wherrett, Miracle of the Empty Beds, 42–3. 16 Tester, “Evolution of Health,” 201. For impact on Inuit, see Grygier, Long Way from Home; and Stevenson, Life beside Itself. 17 See Lux, Separate Beds, 3, 42. 18 Charles Camsell History Committee, Camsell Mosaic; Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads; Lux, Separate Beds; Geddes, Medicine Unbundled. For an exception that presents oral histories from former patients and staff members, see Meijer Drees, Healing Histories. 19 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 5; Meijer Drees, Healing Histories, 48. 20 Charles Camsell History Committee, Camsell Mosaic, xv–xvi. Like some of the men discussed by Susan Berry in chapter 11 of this volume, Charles Camsell was involved in the work of inscription. In 1900 he was the guide for a Geological Survey of Canada party to Great Bear Lake. Arguably, the naming of the hospital is another form of inscription. 21 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 15. 22 From 1953 to 1964, the average hospital stay for Inuit patients was approximately twentyeight months. Nixon, “Early Administrative Developments,” 67. However, some patients were there for many years. 23 Tegeapak was said to be at the Camsell Hospital for longer than any other patient. He was described as a “model patient” and an “inspiration for many of the shorter term tb patients.” His fellow patients suggested a farewell party for him, and it was held in October 1963 with patients from wards 9 and 10 and current and former staff. Charles Camsell History Committee, Camsell Mosaic, 106. 24 Royal Alberta Museum, Charles Camsell Collection, H.90.130.119, H.90.130.181, H.90.130.198, H.90.130.223 a/b, H.90.130.229, H.90.130.232, H.90.130.233, H.90.130.248; Royal Alberta Museum, Olive Feather Collection, H91.111. 25 “Wood carving of man harpooning seal head,” Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, 979.63.60. 26 Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Hilary Stewart Collection, 3100/18, 3100/24. 27 This ledger, kept by Harold Pfeiffer from October 1955 to June 1956, details carvings contributed by artists and what they received from the carving instructor in return. Harold Pfeiffer, Carving Program Ledger, 1955–56, Royal Alberta Museum, Charles Camsell Collection, H90.130. See also Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 21. 28 Igloliorte, “Influence and Instruction,” 1–2, 45. 29 Ibid., 68. 30 Welfare teachers were civil servants sent north beginning in 1949 and charged with

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administering welfare programs while acting as community teachers. One of their many duties was to encourage handicraft production. See Goetz, Role of the Department, 18. 31 Ibid., 19–21; Interview with Douglas Lord, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/3. 32 Goetz, Role of the Department, 19. 33 University of Alberta Museums, Douglas B. Lord Collection of Inuit Artifacts. 34 Harold Pfeiffer to Lisa Staples, January 1992, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/19. 35 Crowe, “Harold Pfeiffer.” From 1950 the federal government’s eastern Arctic patrol ship was the C.D. Howe, operated by the Department of Transport. On its annual voyage, the C.D. Howe would visit Arctic communities to supply goods and personnel, carry out scientific expeditions, check administration and health, administer justice, dispense medicine, and transport Inuit to and from hospital and between settlements. For many Inuit, “it became almost synonymous with going out to hospital.” Grygier, Long Way from Home, 86. 36 Harold Pfeiffer to Lisa Staples, January 1992, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/19. 37 Harold Pfeiffer to Lisa Staples, January 1992, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/19. 38 Harold Pfeiffer, Carving Program Ledger, 1955–56, Royal Alberta Museum, Charles Camsell Collection, H90.130. 39 Igluit is plural for iglu, which has typically been anglicized as “igloo.” See Ohokak et al., Inuinnaqtun English Dictionary, 31. 40 McCallum, “Indigenous Histories of tb”; Lux, Separate Beds, 7, 40. 41 Stevenson, Life beside Itself, 6. 42 Interview with Grace Adam, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/13. 43 Vowel, Indigenous Writes, 68. For Chelsea Vowel, commodification is an essential part of what is allowably Indigenous: “Cultural expressions that can be purchased in the form of goods and services, or entertainment, are acceptable. Cultural expressions that cannot be so easily commodified can be seen as threatening, transgressive, or simply not Canadian.” Ibid. 44 Meijer Drees, Healing Histories, 38–9. 45 Interview with Douglas Lord, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/3. 46 Cited in Meijer Drees, Healing Histories, 39. 47 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 14. 48 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 14. According to Pat Grygier, “at the

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Camsell all patients were paid monthly a nominal amount of cash for their work.” Grygier, Long Way from Home, 113. 49 Graburn, “Epilogue,” 336. 50 To my knowledge, no research has been done that explores the links of hospitals and other institutions to individuals in the history of Inuit art. However, in her report, Helga Goetz writes that the Northwest Territories administration was interested in the development of handicrafts in industrial homes for the aged and infirm in both Chesterfield Inlet and Pangnirtung in the late 1930s. Residents were encouraged to make ivory carvings or other handicrafts because the income from the sale of these items would “enable hunters to provide for themselves and their families,” allowing them to become “self-sufficient.” See Goetz, Role of the Department, 31–2. 51 Igloliorte, “Influence and Instruction.” 52 Graburn, “Epilogue,” 336. 53 One of the craftworkers, Frances Russel, was Métis. Lucy Fortier, who was a craftworker at the Camsell Hospital from 1954 to 1965, recalls learning beadwork from Russel and the patients, as well as hide tanning from Russel. See interview with Lucy Fortier, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/7. 54 Phillips, Trading Identities. 55 Other scholars have written about the processes by which Indigenous creative work becomes “art,” including Myers, Painting Culture; Morphy, Becoming Art; and Phillips and Steiner, eds, Unpacking Culture. 56 See Stewart, Looking at Indian Art; and Stewart, Cedar. I do not know when Stewart purchased the carving of the bird. 57 Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Hilary Stewart Collection, 3100. Other works from the Camsell Hospital at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver include carvings, beadwork, dolls, a painting, and an arrow sash in the Dr Joan D. Whitney (2930) and Grace Adam (Na996) Collections. 58 Igloliorte, “Inuit Artistic Expression,” 120. 59 Kappo, “Beadwork and the Materialism”; Marchand, “Art Is the Medicine”; MacKenzie, dir., Lana Gets Her Talk. 60 Callebaut, “Indian and Eskimo,” 148. 61 The Camsell Arrow was a periodical published approximately six times a year by the Education Department of the Camsell Hospital. It contains a large archive of information, including “Ward News,” which entailed reports written by patients in each ward. For the period May 1947 to June 1955, I documented 406 entries about art and handicraft production at the hospital, most of which was from the “Ward News.” The hospital published the Arrow until 1969. 62 William Kagyoon, “Ward News: Ward 902,” Camsell Arrow, March-April 1954, 50.

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63 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 23. A soapstone carving at the Royal Alberta Museum was made by Francis Muskego, a First Nations patient from Saddle Lake Alberta. Royal Alberta Museum, Charles Camsell Collection, H90.130.262. 64 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 23–4; Interview with Lucy Fortier, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/7; Interview with Grace Adam, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/13. 65 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 12; Meijer Drees, Healing Histories, 83. 66 Oliver, Brief History, 8. 67 On 19 October 1933 the Cass Lake Times reported on the wishes of local Indigenous leaders: “If the Indian tubercular patient is to be cared for he should have a hospital of his own and not a wing in the white man’s hospital. Either that, or he should be cared for along with the rest of the patients, and no cognizance taken of his race.” Maureen Lux notes that Indigenous peoples in Canada wanted their own hospitals because they desired better accommodation of their cultural practices. See Lux, Separate Beds, 131–3. 68 Oliver, Brief History, 8. 69 Ibid., 13, 19. 70 Ibid., 13. 71 Emig, “What Is Occupational Therapy?” 72 Ibid. 73 Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads, 15; Interview with Douglas Lord, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Charles Camsell Hospital Interview Collection, pr1992.0129/3. However, some women did carve, and Ruth Callebaut donated one soapstone carving made by Alice Kinaviak to the Royal Alberta Museum, Ruth S. Callebaut Collection, H91.44.13. 74 The Cass County Museum in Walker, Minnesota, has a small collection of beaded objects made by patients at the hospital. 75 Renee Geving, Cass County Museum, personal communication with author, November 2016. 76 Interview with Clifford Bilben, Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota Sanatorium for Consumptives Oral History Transcripts, 106.I.11.2F. Bilben was a storekeeper at the hospital before becoming chief clerk in the late 1930s and finally advancing to hospital administrator in the early 1950s. 77 Interview with Clarence Burmayer, Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota Sanatorium for Consumptives Oral History Transcripts, 106.I.11.2F. 78 Cited in Komarnisky, Whitelaw, and Half, “prm Beaded Belt.” 79 Ibid. 80 Densmore, Chippewa Customs, 183–94.

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81 Interview with Reverend Alfred Gunderson, Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota Sanatorium for Consumptives Oral History Transcripts, 106.I.11.2F. 82 Catalogue record for Pitt Rivers Museum, 1938.36.1715. 83 Beatrice Blackwood, Field Diary, 1939, Pitt Rivers Museum, Papers of Beatrice Mary Blackwood. 84 Ibid. 85 Herbert A. Burns’s collection of bags is now at the Cass County Museum in Walker, Minnesota. 86 Beatrice Blackwood, Field Diary, 1939, Pitt Rivers Museum, Papers of Beatrice Mary Blackwood. 87 Mauss, Gift. 88 Burns, “Tuberculosis in the Indian,” 498. 89 Beatrice Blackwood, Field Diary, 1939, Pitt Rivers Museum, Papers of Beatrice Mary Blackwood. See also Peers, “Strands Which Refuse.” 90 Other hospitals served similar functions as places where Indigenous people were made available for record and study. 91 On a previous collecting trip to North America in the 1920s, she visited the region and collected not only ethnological artifacts and photographs but also hair samples from people at Red Lake, Minnesota. See Peers, “Strands Which Refuse.” 92 Transfers between institutions also resulted in museum collections. For example, from the 1950s to 1970s, staff at the Charles Camsell Hospital collected art and craft made there, eventually numbering over 400 items. When the hospital was transferred from the federal to the provincial government, the collection of art and handicrafts was added to the permanent collections of the Royal Alberta Museum. See Staples and McConnell, Soapstone and Seed Beads. 93 Such work was also more typically done by women patients. 94 Royal Alberta Museum, Charles Camsell Collection, H.90.130; Royal Alberta Museum, Ruth S. Callebaut Collection, H91.44 and 8 other individual accessions. 95 Grygier, Long Way from Home, 111. 96 Strickler and Alookee, Inuit Dolls. 97 Farrell Racette, “‘I Want to Call,’” 310. 98 Other scholars have documented the gendered and racialized paradigm in Western art, which shapes what “art” is and what “craft” is. See, for example, Coombes, Reinventing Africa; Huneault, “Professionalism as a Critical Concept”; Morphy, Becoming Art; Myers, Painting Culture; Parker, Subversive Stitch; Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses; Pollock, Vision and Difference; and Phillips and Steiner, eds, Unpacking Culture. 99 Farrell Racette, “I Want to Call,’” 289. 100 Stevenson, Life beside Itself, 75–100.

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101 Ibid., 29. 102 Smith, “Emergence of ‘Eskimo Status,’” 43. 103 For more information, see Dunning, “Tukitaaqtuq”; and Pottle, Awareness Series. 104 Farrell Racette “I Want to Call,’” 286. 105 The wood carvings at the McCord Museum in the Dr Walter Pfeiffer Collection Files depict nine people in kayaks (M976.102.7–12, 15, 16, and 17); an unfinished human figure (M976.102.6); a human figure with a sled (M976.102.5A, 5B); a man jigging (M976.102.4); two caribou (M976.102.3); and two bears – one standing up and one on four legs (M976.102.1, 2). There are also a kayak paddle (M976.102.18), a harpoon (M976.102.20), and an unknown implement (M976.102.19). 106 McCord Museum, Dr Walter Pfeiffer Collection Files, M976.102. 107 Interview with author, 29 February 2016. 108 Lisa Stevenson, comments on Aidan Seale-Feldman and Raphaëlle Rabanes’s panel “Therapeutic Encounters,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, 18 November 2016. 109 Whitelaw, “From the Gift Shop.” Although women volunteers were important to the circulation of Inuit art, the major donations of Inuit art to museums came mostly from male collectors. Anne Whitelaw, personal communication with author, April 2018. 110 Royal Alberta Museum, Olive Feather Collection, H91.111. 111 Nora Niptanatiak-Evaglok, conversation with author, October 2017.

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

Photo of Pitt Rivers Museum workshop, May 2015. | 35 Photo of Pitt Rivers Museum workshop, May 2015. | 37 Photo of Pitt Rivers Museum workshop, May 2015. | 40 Photo of Pitt Rivers Museum workshop, May 2015. | 42 Photo of Pitt Rivers Museum workshop, May 2015. | 45 Hide coat detail, epaulets. | 56 Hide coat detail, full back. | 60 Banyan, full front. | 61 Banyan detail, facing. | 61 Banyan, full back. | 62 Man’s cotton chintz banyan. | 63 Peter Rindisbacher, Winter Fishing on Ice of Assynoibain & Red River, watercolour, 1821. | 72 Quilled hide coat collected by William Cobbold Woodthorpe about 1830. | 74 John Bolton Woodthorpe, William Cobbold Woodthorpe, oils on panel, c. 1815. | 75 William Notman and Son, Missie Tatlow, photo, Montreal, 1891. | 83 Cover of Habillemens des coureurs de bois canadiens, no. 2, c. 1730. | 86 George Seton, Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land, 1857, watercolour. | 89 William Notman, Young Canada, photo, Montreal, 1867. | 91 John Wilson Bengough, “The Science of Cheek, or Riel’s Next Move,” cartoon, Grip, 11 April 1874. | 93 Ryder Larsen, Charles and Joseph Riel, photo, c. 1871. | 93 Louis Jaques, Playsuit with a History, photo, 12 January 1952. | 95

378

figures

3.8 “Capuchon Sets for Sturdy Canadian Youngsters,” Simpson’s ad, Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1934, 3. | 99 3.9 “Relic of a Picturesque Period: The Red River Coat,” Eaton’s ad, Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 7 November 1916, 7. | 101 3.10 “Canadiana for Young Collectors: Girls’ Traditional Red River Coats,” Holt Renfrew ad, Montreal Gazette, 20 July 1966, 9. | 101 S2.1 Wool blanket coat with Huron-Wendat embroidery, 1838. | 109 S2.2 James Hope-Wallace, A Quebec Volunteer, watercolour, 1838. | 109 S2.3 James Hope-Wallace, Winter Costume of the Lorette Indians, watercolour, 1838. | 110 S2.4 William Notman, Ives, Warren and Walpool’s Tobogganing Group, photo, Montreal, 1868. | 111 S3.1 Red River coat ensembles. | 113 S3.2 Greeting card with illustration of Red River coat ensembles, 1930s. | 113 4.1 Tobogganing suit with Park Tobogganing Club badge, full front, 1880s. | 116 4.2 Indian Hunter Descending a Precipice on Snow Shoes, watercolour, c. 1840. | 120 4.3 Cornelius Krieghoff, Glissade en Toboggan (Québec), watercolour, 1863. | 121 4.4 William Notman and Son, Tobogganing on Mount Royal Park Slide, Montreal, qc, 1885, photo. | 123 4.5 H. Brosius, Winter Carnival 1887, St. Paul Ice Palace, lithograph. | 129 4.6 Toboggan, World’s Dudes series (N31), Allen & Ginter’s Cigarettes, 1888. | 131 4.7 Brown’s Photo Craft Company, Carnival Princesses with Toboggan in Front of Tepee, St. Paul Winter Carnival, photo, 1916. | 133 4.8 Joseph Nash, Afghanistan – Tobogganing at Cabul, engraving. | 134 4.9 Postcard of tobogganing at Hotel Kosciuszko, New South Wales, Australia, c. 1900–20. | 137 S4.1 Table cover of black wool baize embroidered with dyed moose hair, c. 1870–1900. | 147 5.1 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. | 150 5.2 Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Indians Salute Governor Bulger at Fort Douglas, ink and watercolour, 1822–24. | 156 5.3 Peter Rindisbacher, A War Party at Fort Douglas Discharging Their Guns in the Air as a Token of Their Peaceable Intentions, ink and watercolour, 1823. | 156 5.4 Peter Rindisbacher, Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell at Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1815, ink and watercolour, 1823. | 154 5.5 Robert Dighton, A Real Scene in St. Paul’s Church Yard, on a Windy Day, handcoloured mezzotint, 1783. | 160 5.6 Title page of H. Jones, Views in Hudson’s Bay, 1825. | 160 5.7 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825, 1825. | 164

figures

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5.8 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. | 158 5.9 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825. | 159 5.10 H. Jones, hand-coloured lithograph after Peter Rindisbacher, The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 1825 | 171 6.1 Charles Joseph Hullmandel, hand-coloured lithograph after Edward Chatfield, Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi, 1825. | 177 6.2 Wampum belt, Wendat, c. 1760, with detail. | 178 6.3 Medal given to Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi by George IV. | 184 6.4 Charles Joseph Hullmandel, hand-coloured lithograph after Edward Chatfield, Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians, 1825. | 185 6.5 J.E. Livernois, François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché, Grand Chief of the Hurons of Lorette (1870–83), photo, n.d. | 193 S5.1 Engraved portrait of George IV after the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. | 201 S5.2 Handbill printed by Nicolas Vincent Tsawenhohi featuring the arms of King George IV. | 201 7.1 Mary Maxim, “Worsted Weight Knitting Pattern No. 890,” n.d. | 205 7.2 Urban Outfitters sweater emulating the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design, 2019. | 205 7.3 Alfred Stephenson, Gertrud in Beaded Collar, photo, c. 1930–31. | 205 7.4 Mads Pihl, Women in Greenlandic National Costume, photo, n.d. | 209 7.5 Beaded shrug (nuilarmiut), c. 1992. | 210 7.6 “Hannyrðir: Grænlenzk Peysa,” Melkorka, 1 December 1956, 82. | 214 7.7 Advertisement for Forstmann Knitwear’s Icelandic wool sweaters, Women’s Wear Daily, 11 June 1957, 93. | 217 7.8 Flyer for Greenlandic store Pilersuisoq featuring a wool sweater based on the nuilarmiut, 4 April 2019. | 223 8.1 “Mrs. Clare Sheridan in a Blood and Blackfoot Indian Headdress,” photo, The Tatler, 29 December, 1937. | 229 8.2 Aisstaohkomiaakii, Comes Calling Woman, photo, Beatrice Blackwood, 3–4 August 1925. | 232 8.3 Gerald Tailfeathers, Big Bull (Piikani), charcoal drawing, 1937. | 233 8.4 Photo of Esto Tailfeathers and relatives, Kainai First Nation, c. 1940. | 240 8.5 Eagle claw necklace, Kainai First Nation, collected 1937. | 245 8.6 Stone pounder, Kainai First Nation, collected 1937. | 247 8.7 Hudson’s Bay Company coat, Kainai First Nation, 1937. | 249 8.8 Claire Sheridan, Big Bull, plaster sculpture, 1937. | 251 9.1 Female wooden doll with moveable arms, c. mid-twentieth century. | 262

380

figures

9.2 Photo of Aamsskáápipikani (South Piikani/Peigan/Blackfeet) mother painting rawhide bag with daughter, Montana, 1908. | 265 9.3 Canadian Pacific Steamships poster for the British Empire Exhibition, London, 1924. | 268 9.4 Piikuni Blackfeet (South Piikani/Peigan/Blackfeet) doll, c. 1850. | 269 9.5 Nakoda female doll, c. mid-twentieth century. | 275 9.6 Nakoda male doll, c. mid-twentieth century. | 275 9.7 Ken Blackbird, Juanita Tucker, Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana, photo, February 1993. | 277 9.8 Niitsitapii male doll, c. 1935. | 278 9.9 Male wooden doll with moveable arms in a winter outfit, c. mid-twentieth century. | 278 9.10 Photo of Mabel Raining Bird and family, Cree of the Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, 1956. | 210 9.11 Male wooden doll with moveable arms, c. mid-twentieth century. | 281 10.1 Dew claw bag from the Northeast Woodlands, possibly Anishinaabe or Haudenosaunee, collected 1953. | 290 10.2 Dew claw bag of the Plains Cree Nehiyaw, 1939. | 292 10.3 Woman’s pipe of the Maskwacis, c. 1950. | 297 10.4 Photo of Indigenous performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Edmonton, 1914. | 300 11.1 Man’s caribou hide jacket, Dene, c. 1880–1910. | 313 11.2 Man or boy’s moose hide coat, front, Deh Gáh Got’įę, c. 1882. | 317 11.3 Man or boy’s moose hide coat, back, Deh Gáh Got’įę, c. 1882. | 320 11.4 Man’s moose hide jacket, Dene or Dene-Métis, c. 1908. | 326 11.5 Woman’s moose hide jacket, Cree or Métis, c. 1910. | 331 S6.1 Photo of Agnes Deans Cameron, Fort Simpson, 1908. | 343 S6.2 Hal Woolaston, J.A.R. Balsillie and Family, photo, 1924. | 343 12.1 James Tegeapak, soapstone bird in a trap, c. 1955. | 347 12.2 James Tegeapak, soapstone bird in a trap, bottom detail, c. 1955. | 352 12.3 Photo of Miss H. Hopkins, handicraft supervisor, Charles Camsell Hospital, 1953. | 355 12.4 Band of beadwork, 1939. | 359 12.5 Band of beadwork, detail of object tag, 1939. | 361 12.6 Male doll dressed in the central Arctic or eastern Arctic style, c. 1950–55. | 364 12.7 Female doll dressed in the central Arctic or eastern Arctic style, c. 1950–55. | 365

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Contributors

laurie k. bertram is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (2020) and the award-winning article “‘Eskimo’ Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885,” Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 1 (2018): 63–97. susan berry is curator emerita of Indigenous studies at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, where she curated several major exhibits on historical and contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples in Alberta. Her work focuses on the intersection of Indigenous history, material culture, and museum practices. sarah carter is a professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair cross-appointed in the Department of History and Classics and the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Her book Imperial Plots: Women, Land and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies (2016) was awarded the 2017 Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research. cynthia cooper is head of Collections and Research and curator of Dress, Fashion and Textiles at the McCord Museum in Montreal, where she oversees the largest museum collection of Canadian dress. She holds a master’s degree in historic costume and textiles from the University of Rhode Island. She is a three-time recipient of the Richard Martin Exhibition Award from the Costume Society of America.

420

contributors

judy half is a nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and a direct descendant of Chief Onchiminahos (Little Hunter) and members of the Blue Quills Band in the forcibly amalgamated Saddle Lake District of Treaty 6. She is an Indigenous historical researcher, a museum professional, and a cultural and social anthropologist with a specialty in Plains Cree archaeology of south-central Alberta. sara komarnisky is a settler scholar based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. She leads research activities and initiatives for Hotıì ts’eeda, a patient-oriented and Indigenous health research support centre for the Northwest Territories funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and hosted by the Tłįch Government. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and a research associate of Aurora College in the Northwest Territories. She is the author of Mexicans in Alaska: An Ethnography of Mobility, Place, and Transnational Life (2018). jonathan lainey of the Huron-Wendat Nation of Wendake, Quebec, is curator of Indigenous Cultures at the McCord Museum. He is the author of over fifty publications and academic papers on Indigenous peoples and material culture, including La “Monnaie des Sauvages”: Les colliers de wampum d’hier à aujourd’hui (2004). beverly lemire is a professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She publishes widely in the fields of fashion and material culture history, global trade, and gender, with focuses on Britain, Europe, and comparative early modern locales. Her most recent book is Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (2018). julie-ann mercer is a researcher and writer based in Edmonton, Alberta. She works for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as an art collections consultant and contributes curatorial writing for galleries, magazines, and blogs. She received her master’s degree in the history of art, design, and visual culture from the University of Alberta in 2017. laura peers is a curator and professor emerita of the University of Oxford and an adjunct professor of the Department of Anthropology and the School for the Study of Canada at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. She has explored the meanings of heritage objects to Indigenous people today in healing from colonial oppression, as well as the changing relationships between museums and Indigenous peoples.

contributors

421

katie pollock is curator of central ethnology at the Canadian Museum of History, where she serves as steward of the Great Plains and Northwest Territories ethnology collections. Working in close collaboration with Indigenous communities and artisans, she is currently conducting research that traces a distinct Indigenous women’s cottage industry on the northern Great Plains in the postwar era. anne whitelaw is a professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal with expertise in Canadian cultural policy and institutions and in practices of exhibition and display. She most recently authored Spaces and Places for Art: Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 (2017). Her current research includes examination of the work of volunteer women’s societies in North American art museums.

Index

Page numbers with (f) refer to figures. Aamsskáápipikani (South Piikani/Peigan), 264, 265(f), 273, 276, 282. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana academy: decolonization, 4–5, 13–16, 25n47; material turn in humanities and social sciences, 37–9, 48–9; time frames, 6–9. See also decolonization; historiography; knowledge, Western Adam, Grace, 354 Afghanistan – Tobogganing at Cabul (Nash, engraving, 1880), 132, 134(f) Agniolen, Maurice Sébastien, 198n22 Ah-Gwah-Ching sanitorium, Walker, Minnesota: about, 357–62; band of beadwork (Anishinaabe), 41–3, 42(f), 348, 357–62, 359(f), 361(f); commercial trade, 358–62; human experiments, 362; imprisonment of patients, 359–60; map, xx; museum collections, 374n73; occupational therapy program, 358–61. See also artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s) Ahrathenha, Chief Stanislas Koska (Wendat), 176, 182–5, 185(f), 188–9 Aisstaohkomiaakii (Esto Tailfeathers). See Tailfeathers, Esto (Aisstaohkomiaakii)

Aisstaohkomiaakii, Comes Calling Woman (Blackwood, photo, 1925), 232(f) Alberta: borderlands with US, 261–4, 284n3; historical background, 336n1; maps, xiii–xvii. See also Athabasca River (Kai’till’dehseh/ Mistahisipi), Alberta; Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta; Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta; Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta; Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Algeria: Sheridan’s life in, 236–7, 255n1, 256n16, 257n35 Allodi, Mary, 157 Anglo-Saxon, as term, 138n12. See also Britain and British Empire animals and Indigenous spirituality, 65–6, 322, 326, 328–9, 333–4 Anishinaabe: band of beadwork, 41–3, 42(f), 348, 357–62, 359(f), 361(f); bandolier bags, 361, 375n85; beadwork, 360–2; dew claw bag, 290(f), 305–6; Rocky Boy Reservation community, 264; tb hospital patients, 360–2, 375n85 Appadurai, Arjun, 41 appropriation of Indigenous culture: about, 206–7, 211–12; Arctic clothing design, 207–8,

424 211–12, 222–4, 225n13; Cowichan sweaters, 204–7; names, 122, 128; political motivations, 207, 212; resistance to, 207–8, 211–12, 222–4, 225n13; for self-promotion, 228; toboggan and snowshoes, 126; winter culture, 118–20, 120(f), 122, 130–5, 133(f), 138n25. See also Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design; tobogganing and snowshoeing Arctic: appropriation of clothing design, 207– 8, 211–12, 222–4, 225n13; Cold War culture, 204, 206, 216, 218–20, 222–4; historiography, 24n37; map (1680), xi, 12–13; meteorological observations (1882–83), 316–18, 337n9; patrol ships, 372n35; welfare teachers, 371n30. See also Inuit; Nordic countries; the North art and colonialism: anonymous vs named makers, 22, 69–70, 362–3, 366; art as image vs object, 38–9; art history’s material turn, 37–9, 48–9; circulation, 186–7; colonialist art system, 73, 158–61, 165–7, 194, 327; health and medicine, 348–9; hierarchy of evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; intercultural influences, 320–1, 327; Inuit art, 352–6; maps, 166–7; normalization of British power, 159–60, 172; portraits, 73–6, 74(f), 75(f), 158; power relations, 76, 151, 159–60, 166–7; print series, 159–60. See also colonialism; lithography; museums; portraits; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s); souvenirs The Art of Drawing on Stone (Hullmandel, 1824), 179, 185–6 artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s): about, 21–2, 346–9; anonymous vs named makers, 22, 362–3, 366; authenticity, 347, 356, 362; biographies of objects, 41–3, 42(f), 367; circulation, 348–50, 354, 356, 360–2, 367–9; colonialism, 348–9; commercial trade, 353–5, 355(f), 358–62; entangled cultures, 42–3; family and cultural connections, 22, 349, 357, 368; gifts, 348, 361–2, 367–9; hierarchy of art evaluation, 355–6, 362–3, 366, 375n98; map, xx; occupational therapy programs, 351, 357–8, 363–4, 366; patient income, 353, 354, 355, 372n48; present-day meanings, 22, 368. See also Tegeapak, James; tuberculosis hospitals artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s),

index objects: band of beadwork (Anishinaabe), 41–3, 42(f), 348, 357–62, 359(f), 361(f); dolls (Inuit), 346, 362–8, 364(f), 365(f); stone and ivory carvings, 351–7, 363, 367, 372n50, 373n63; stone carving of bird (Inuit), 346, 347(f), 349–50, 351–2, 352(f), 368–9; wood carvings, 358, 367, 375n105 Asiniiwin, Chief (Stone Child or Rocky Boy), 264. See also Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana Assiniboia, Council of, 162–3 Assiniboine: Fort Belknap, 264; Treaty of 1817, 163–5 Athabasca, Lake (Kai’till’thu/Atipaskâw Sâkanhikan), Northwest Territories, xvii, 338n25 Athabasca Landing (Kapâwinihk), xvii, 325, 327, 339n32, 345n7 Athabasca River (Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi), Alberta, xvii, 312, 322–3, 338n25 Auslander, Leora, 70 Australia: tobogganing, 136, 137(f) Awa, Salome, 225n13 Ballantyne, Tony, 14 Balsillie, James, Marie, Harold, and family, 329, 342–3, 344(f), 345n5 Banff, Alberta, xiii, 248 banyan (cloth dressing gown): about, 32, 63(f); model for hide banyan, 32, 62–4, 63(f), 66; portraits in, 71, 73; research methodologies, 39–40, 45(f), 78. See also moose hide coat, banyan (1820–40, Pitt Rivers Museum) Bauer, Ralph, 9 beadwork: about, 179–81; anonymous vs named makers, 362–3, 366; band of beadwork (Anishinaabe), 41–3, 42(f), 348, 357–62, 359(f), 361(f); bandolier bags, 361, 375n85; bone beads, 180; circulation, 360–2; commercial trade, 21, 180–1, 360–2; designs and symbols, 180, 320–1, 327; dolls, 269, 269(f), 284n14, 364(f), 365(f); glass beads, 180, 208– 11, 317(f); hide jackets, 21, 339n38; Icelandic nuilarmiut (beaded shrug), 205(f), 208–15, 209(f), 210(f), 221–2, 223(f), 224; knowledge exchanges, 320–1, 360; patients in tb hospitals, 357, 360–2, 373n53; price of hide gar-

index ments with, 339n38; seasonal work, 307; seed beads, 269, 269(f), 357, 359(f); thread, 320; wampum beads, 177(f), 179–81. See also artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); wampum belt (Wendat Great War Belt, c. 1760); wampum belts Belich, James, 117, 120, 132, 138n12 Bell, Robert: collections, 324–5; Dene hide jacket (c. 1880–1910), 313(f), 321–5, 335–6, 338nn22–4, 338n27; survey geologist, xviii– xix, 322–5, 335–6, 338n25, 338n27, 338nn28–29, 338nn31–2; wildlife conservation, 333–5 Bengough, John Wilson, 92, 93(f) Berry, Susan: hide jackets in Northwest Territories, 21, 312–45; research team, 312, 421 Bertram, Laurie K.: Icelandic sweaters, 19, 36, 203–27; research team, 36, 45(f), 46, 421 Big Bull (Piikani) (Tailfeathers, drawing, 1937), 232, 233(f), 251, 253 Big Bull (Sheridan, sculpture, 1937), 251, 251(f) Big Bull, Chief (Piikani), 232, 233(f), 251(f) Big Island Lake First Nation, Saskatchewan, 294 biographies of objects, 22n1, 40–4, 50, 64–5, 371n11. See also Object Lives and Global Histories project Blackbird, Ken, 277(f) Blackfeet Reservation, Montana: about, 238, 254n2, 264–5, 282–3; art cooperative, 271, 274–6, 282–3, 287n46; buckskin jackets, 272– 3; capots, 92; ceremonial garments, 92; commercial arts trade, 272–6; cross-border networks, 238, 264; cultural reclamation, 282; dolls, 269(f), 273–4, 276, 278(f), 284n14; historical background, 261–4; household income, 265–6, 282–3; maps, xiii, xvi; outsiders on reservations, 231, 238, 239, 255n8; photography consent, 255n8; quillwork, 282; Sheridan’s life with, 19–20, 230–1, 238, 252; tourism, 271, 274. See also Sheridan, Clare Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta: about, 234–5, 252, 254n2; capots and blanket coats, 92, 247; collectors, 231; cross-border networks, 238, 264; maps, xiii, xvi; members (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), 234, 254n2; outsiders on reserves, 231, 239; payments for posing or

425 modelling, 230, 239, 255n8; poverty, 230–1, 235, 243, 244–6, 248; Sheridan’s life with, 19– 20, 230–1. See also Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta; Piikani Nation (Peigan or Northern Blackfeet), Alberta; Sheridan, Clare Blackfoot Shirts project, 24n39 Blackmore, Edward H., 253–4 Black-Plume, Mrs (Kainai), 248, 259n103 Blackwood, Beatrice, 229(f), 255n15, 358, 360–2, 375n91 Blaeser, Kim, 9 blanket coats: about, 17–18, 247–8; feminization of, 90; hybrid garments, 108, 129–30; names for, 90, 106n66. See also capots (hooded blanket coats); Hudson’s Bay Company blanket coats; Red River coats for children; tobogganing coats and suits Blood Nation. See Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta Blue Quill’s Band, Alberta, 293 Bob Tail, Chief (Kainai), 240(f) Bohus Stickning (sweater brand), 217 borderlands. See Alberta; Montana; North Dakota, borderlands; Saskatchewan, borderlands; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Boyle, Michael J., 128–9 Brabant, Angus, 342, 345n2 Britain and British Empire: Anglo-Saxon, as term, 138n12; banyan, 32; clothing industry, 85–6, 90; colonial gifts, 145–7; historiography, 24n37, 27–8; hybrid objects, 57–8; identity and status markers, 57, 90; kinship networks, 69; masculinities, 132; multidisciplinary research projects, 27–8; racial theorizing, 124– 6; touring athletes, 133–4; travel writing, 243, 255n3; treaties and Crown relationship, 234– 5; winter sports, 117, 126–36, 134(f), 137(f). See also entangled cultures; global networks; Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc); London, England, and Indigenous visitors British Museum: sibling of moose hide coat at Pitt Rivers Museum, 59, 66, 73, 77. See also moose hide coat, quillwork (1820–60, Pitt Rivers Museum) Brock, Irving, 183, 188–9, 197n20

426 Brosius, H., Winter Carnival 1887, St. Paul Ice Palace (lithograph, 1887), 127, 129(f) Brown, Jessie Cameron, 342, 344–5 Browning, Montana: commercial arts trade, 273–4, 286n43, 286n45; maps, xiii, xvi; networks, 239, 248 Bruchac, Margaret M., 179 Bruisedhead, Sadie (Kainai), 240(f) buckskin. See deer buffalo: hunting seasons, 333; Sun Dance (Cree), 295 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4 Buijs, Cunera, 211 Bulger, Andrew: about, 154, 157; farewell to Red River (1823), 161–3, 165, 175n59; Rindisbacher’s watercolours, 154–8; Treaty of 1817, 163–5 Burnham, Dorothy K., 33 Burns, Herbert A., 360–2, 375n85 Butterworth, John, 197n21 Byrd, Jodi, 125 Caldwell, Ewan, 329, 340n48 Caldwell, John, 188, 198n31 Caldwell, William: Cree or Métis woman’s moose hide jacket (c. 1910), 329–36, 331(f), 340n48; research on northern resources (1908–11), 329–30, 334–6, 340n63 Cameron, Agnes Deans, 328, 332, 342–5, 343(f) Camsell, Charles, 350, 371n20. See also Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta capots (hooded blanket coats): about, 17–18, 85–93, 122–3; Blackfoot coats, 247–8; doll clothes, 277–9, 278(f); everyday wear, 68, 85, 86(f), 122–3; French colonists, 85–7, 86(f), 92, 122–3; Huron-Wendat capot, 108–11, 109(f), 110(f), 111(f), 130; identity and status markers, 68, 85–6, 88–92, 93(f), 104n12, 123–4; Indigenous commercial trade, 108–11, 110(f), 111(f); Indigenous garments, 85–9, 122; manufactured capots, 85–6, 88, 90, 116(f), 135–7; masculinities, 90, 128; Métis, 17, 85, 88–93, 89(f), 93(f); military adaptations, 87, 108–9, 109(f); model for children’s Red River coats, 43, 84, 85–93, 98–9, 99(f), 102; multisensory engage-

index ments with, 39; names, 96, 106n66, 112; Pitt Rivers Museum, 108–10, 109(f); in portraits, 92, 93(f); Red River Settlement, 88–92; as uniforms, 18, 87, 90; winter sports club uniforms, 116(f), 121–4, 121(f), 128–30, 135–7. See also Hudson’s Bay Company blanket coats; Red River coats for children; tobogganing coats and suits capots (hooded blanket coats), construction: about, 85–7, 108, 135; blanket stripes, 85, 86–7, 104n12, 108–9, 109(f), 114n2, 116(f); closures, 87, 116(f); colours, 85–6, 88–90, 93, 105n32, 110, 120(f); decorations, 87–8, 108, 110, 120(f); fabrics, 85–6; fitting, 86–7; fringes, 87–8; hoods, 89, 104n7, 108, 110, 116(f), 120(f); sashes, 87, 89–90; shoulder decorations, 87, 108–9, 110 Captain Bulger, Governor of Assiniboia, and the Chiefs and Warriors of the Chippewa Tribe of Red Lake, in Council in the Colony House in Fort Douglas, May 22nd, 1823 (Rindisbacher, watercolour, ink, and sepia ink, 1823), 175n59 Captain Bulger’s Palaver (Rindisbacher, watercolour, 1822–23), 175n59 Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell at Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1815 (Rindisbacher, watercolour, 1823) (fig. 5.4), 155–8, 158(f), 1961–3. See also Rindisbacher, Peter capuchon/capuchin coats, 96, 97. See also capots (hooded blanket coats); Red River coats for children Cardinal, Ekti Margaret, 315, 319, 328, 330, 332, 336n6, 338n22, 340n48; hide coats and jackets, 21 cards, collectable, 130–1, 131(f) caribou hide coats and jackets: caribou hide, 321–2, 330; construction, 58–9; Dene hide jacket (c. 1880–1910) (Bell’s jacket), 313(f), 321–5, 335–6, 338nn22–4, 338n27; fringes, 330, 338n22; fur trade communities, 58–9, 70; preparation of hides, 330; spirituality, 65–6. See also hide coats and jackets Carnival Princesses with Toboggan in Front of Tepee, St. Paul Winter Carnival (Brown’s Photo Craft Company, photo, 1916), 133(f)

index carnivals, winter. See winter carnivals Carocci, Max, 231 Caron, Adolphe-Philippe, 125 Carsten, Janet, 68, 80n28 Carter, Sarah: Clare Sheridan’s life, 19–20, 228– 60; research team, 40(f), 46, 421 Cass County Museum, Minnesota, 360(f), 374n74, 375n85 Catlin, George, 153 Caverhill, Heather, 244n13 ceremonies and rituals: buffalo, 304; bundles, 296; capots worn in, 92, 247–8; Catholic influences, 299; Chicken Dance (Cree), 294–5, 302; commercial trade of objects, 305–8; creation stories, 310–11; gender roles, 294–6, 298–300; government ban, 20–1, 291, 299, 302; healing, 294–5, 298–9, 302, 310; naming of members, 294; performances for nonIndigenous people, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4; pipes and pipe protocols, 246, 259n93; protection rituals, 246–7, 318; quillwork ceremonies, 282, 288n60; Round Dance (Cree), 295; seasonal sequences, 294–5, 299; smoking pipes (Cree), 295–6, 297(f), 311; Sun Dance (Cree), 294–5, 300–1; sweat lodge, 302; Tea Dance/ Prophet Dance (Dene Tha’), 321, 337n19; tobacco offerings, 318, 321, 337n19. See also dew claw bags; spirituality Chapman, John, 183, 197n20 Charles and Joseph Riel (Larsen, photo, c. 1871), 93(f) Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta: about, 350–4, 355(f), 363; anonymous vs named makers, 22, 362–3, 366; assimilation goals, 354, 358–9; Camsell Arrow (periodical), 357, 373n61; commercial trade of Inuit art, 352–5, 355(f); gifts, 367–9; map, xx; museum collections, 375n92; occupational therapy program, 353–4, 357, 363. See also artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); Tegeapak, James; tuberculosis hospitals Chatfield, Edward: about, 179, 196n2; prints of Wendat chiefs in London, 19, 177(f), 184–91, 185(f). See also Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians

427 (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825) Chemintz, Bibi, 211 Chicken Dance (Cree), 294–5, 302 children: consumerism, 100–3; dress-up costumes, 76; sailor suits, 101–2. See also Red River coats for children chronologies and time in Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6–9 Churchill, Winston, 228–9, 236–7, 255n4, 257n35, 257n42 circulation of objects: life cycles of objects, 64– 5, 186–7, 190, 194, 350, 360–2, 368–9. See also material culture circumpolar world. See the North class: capots as status marker, 67–8, 80n42, 85, 86(f), 122–3; clothing as status marker, 68, 70–3, 123–4 Clearwater River, Alberta and Saskatchewan, xvii, 323, 338n25 clothing: about, 17, 57, 70–1; appropriation of Indigenous design, 207–8, 211–12, 222–4, 225n13; colonial control, 57, 76; consumerism, 100–3; hybrid garments, 57, 64, 70–1; identity and status markers, 17–18, 57, 64, 68–73, 88–92, 122–4; Indigenous status, 161, 166; knowledge exchanges, 57; life cycles of objects, 64–5; national identity, 84, 90–2; power relations, 17, 64; production of stereotypes, 76; sailor suits for children, 101–2; winter clothing with layers, 337n21; women’s leisure wear, 332–3. See also coats and jackets; footwear; hide coats and jackets; sweaters; tobogganing coats and suits clothing, children’s. See children; Red River coats for children clothing, winter sports. See tobogganing coats and suits clubs, winter sports. See tobogganing and snowshoeing clubs coats and jackets: about, 17; British styles, 326– 7; British tailors, 32, 65–8; chiefs’ coats for Indigenous leaders, 65, 68, 70; circulation, 72–3; fur trade officers, 65; identity and status markers, 17–18, 57, 68–73, 123–4; intercultural influences, 330–3; knowledge exchanges, 67– 8; life cycles of objects, 64–5; multisensory

428 engagement with, 39–40; Norfolk jackets, 326–7; racially hybrid garments, 64; women’s fashions, 330–3. See also banyan (cloth dressing gown); blanket coats; capots (hooded blanket coats); Hudson’s Bay Company blanket coats; Red River coats for children; tobogganing coats and suits coats and jackets, hide. See caribou hide coats and jackets; deer; hide coats and jackets; hide coats and jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910); moose hide coats and jackets Cohen, Leonard, 106n56 Cold War, 204, 206, 216, 218–24 Coleman, Anne Gilbert, 218 collecting and collectors: about, 19–20, 231; absences in records, 69–70; anonymous vs named makers, 69–70; assessment of objects, 362; biographies of objects, 41–3, 64–5; colonial representations, 267–8; fur traders, 57; gender, 368, 376n109; hbc officers, 154–5, 157, 168; repatriation of objects, 234, 254, 256n21; scientists, 21, 42, 312; women volunteers in institutions, 368, 376n109. See also Bell, Robert; Blackwood, Beatrice; museums; Sheridan, Clare; souvenirs Collier, John, 238 colonialism: about, 4–5; art and normalization of power, 76, 172; displays, 267–8, 268(f); dolls as representations, 267–8; identity and status markers, 57, 70–3, 76, 161; pan-Indigenous stereotype, 161, 166; perception of difference, 76; racial theorizing, 124–6; travel imagery, 161; travel writing, 255n3; winter sports, 18, 115–20, 124–5, 136–7, 207. See also appropriation of Indigenous culture; art and colonialism; Britain and British Empire; decolonization; entangled cultures; Indigenous peoples; knowledge, Western; military and militarism; museums; portraits; winter sports Colorado, winter carnivals, 130 commercial trade of Indigenous objects. See Indigenous material culture for commercial trade; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) conservation of wildlife, 333–5 contact cultures. See entangled cultures

index Cooper, Cynthia: Red River coats, 17–18, 82– 114; research team, 40(f), 45, 421 Cooper, Sarah, 211 Cooper, William, 182 Coverdale, W.H., 190 Cowichan sweaters, 204–7. See also sweaters crafts and souvenirs. See artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); souvenir arts, USCanada borderlands (1880s–1930s); souvenirs Crazy Crow (Kainai), 239–40, 246 Crean, Frank, 329–30, 333–5, 340nn62–3 creation stories, 310–11 Cree: dolls, 79n25; hunting and fishing rights, 334; hunting frocks, 326, 339n38; laws, 309; performances for non-Indigenous people, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4; Rocky Boy Reservation community, 264; Sun Dance, 294–5, 300–1; Treaty of 1817, 163–5. See also dew claw bags; Half, Judy; Saddle Lake Cree Nation Cree-Metis, 58. See also Métis/Metis Crow Cree, Montana, 301 Dakota, 127, 140n79 Dalhousie, Earl of (George Ramsay), 181–2 Davis, Kate, 212 Dawson, Henry P.: Arctic meteorological observations (1882–83), 316–18, 337n9; moose hide coat (Deh Gáh Got’įę) (1882), 316–21, 317(f), 320(f), 335–6, 337n14 Dean, Carolyn, 57 decolonization: about, 4–5, 13–16; “decentering,” 15–16; historiography, 7–8; Indigenization of institutions, 13–16, 308–9; museums, 13–14; present-day meanings of Indigenous objects, 77–8, 368–9; reclamation, 77–8; resistance to cultural appropriation, 207–8, 211– 12, 225n13; terminology, 25n47; time frames, 6–9 deer: buckskin dolls, 273–4, 284n14; buckskin jackets, 272–3, 327, 339n40; dew claws, 291. See also dew claw bags Dehcho (Mackenzie River), Northwest Territories: Cameron’s travels, 342, 344; hide jackets, 312, 318, 327, 337n14; map, xvii; steamships, 342, 345n7 Deh Gáh Got’įę (Slavey): moose hide coat

index (1882), 317(f), 318–20, 320(f), 335–6, 337n14; in Nishi’ko, 316 Dempsey, L. James, 256n20 Dene: animal relations, 334; caribou hide jacket (c. 1880–1910) (Bell), 313(f), 321–5, 335– 6, 338nn22–4, 338n27; ceremonies, 334; coats gifted to leaders, 318; hospital patients, 351; hunting frocks, 326, 339n38; mixed economy, 314; moose hide jacket (c. 1908) (Turton), 325–9, 326(f), 335–6, 339nn43–4, 342, 344–5; at Nishi’ko, 316; red ochre on garments, 319; worldview, 322 Denesułine: hunting and fishing rights, 334 Dene Tha’ (South Slavey): fire offerings, 321; Tea Dance/Prophet Dance, 321, 337n19 Deninu K’ue (Fort Resolution), Northwest Territories, xvii, 323, 338n27, 345n5 Denmark, 19, 212, 224. See also Nordic countries Des Nedhé (Slave River), 322–3, 340n63 de Stecher, Anne, 146–7 Detroit Institute of the Arts, 191–2 Dewar, Virginia, 207–8 dew claw bags: about, 20–1, 290(f), 291–2, 302– 8; collections, 305–6; commercial trade, 21, 304–8, 310; creation stories, 310–11; deer’s dew claw, 291; elevation of bag, 291, 302; gendered objects, 296, 302–3, 305–6, 309–10; knowledge keepers, 298; makers, 304–8; maternal ancestral lines, 294, 303; medicines, 299, 302–3; multisensory engagements with, 39; Northeast Woodlands, 290(f), 305–6; Plains Cree, 291–2, 292(f); purpose and use, 21, 302–3, 305–7, 310; women makers, 20–1; women’s smoking pipes (Cree), 295–6, 297(f), 311 Dighton, Robert, A Real Scene in St. Paul’s Church Yard (mezzotint, 1783), 160(f) diplomacy: gifts of moose hair embroidery, 146–7, 147(f); wampum belts, 180–2, 187–9 Dogrib (Tlicho), 316, 318 dolls: about, 261, 267–71, 362–8; adaptations for markets, 274–6, 278(f), 280–2, 281(f); anonymous vs named makers, 362–3, 366; authenticity, 274; Blackfeet, 269(f), 273–4, 276, 278(f), 284n14; buckskin dolls, 273–4, 284n14;

429 circulation, 268–71; clothes, 18, 84, 269, 269(f), 274, 277–9, 278(f), 284n14; colonial displays, 267–8; commercial trade, 20, 269, 269(f), 270–4, 284n14, 363–4; Cree, 79n25; Doll Talk (magazine), 270–1; Fort Belknap, 274–6, 275(f); gender of makers, 277; gifts, 368–9; historical background, 267–70; Inuit, 363–8, 364(f), 365(f); Nakoda, 274–6, 275(f); Niitsitapii, 276, 278(f); pan-Indigenous stereotype, 268, 270–2, 276, 278(f), 279–83, 284n14; Rocky Boy Reservation, 262(f), 276– 83, 278(f), 281(f); uses and purposes, 268–70, 285n24; wooden dolls, 262(f), 278(f), 280, 281(f). See also souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Douglas, Thomas and Dunbar James. See Selkirk, 5th Earl of (Thomas Douglas); Selkirk, 6th Earl of (Dunbar James Douglas) drums and drumsticks, 310 Dufferin, Lady, 93, 106n52, 111, 121 Dutch East India Company, 62 eagle claw necklace (Kainai), 244, 245(f) East India Company: banyans, 71; research project, 27–8 Echaot’įe Kúé (Fort Liard), Northwest Territories, xvii, 328, 342, 344 Edmonton, Alberta: maps, xvii, xx; steamship travel, 327, 345n7. See also Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta; Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton; University of Alberta, Edmonton Edwards, Elizabeth, 152, 167–8 embroidery: authenticity, 327–8; beadwork, 17; colonial gifts, 146–7, 147(f); crewel embroidery, 146; floral motifs, 320–1; intercultural influences, 320–1, 327, 330, 335–6, 345n5; pouches, 321–2; price of hide coats with, 339n38; skills in boarding schools, 327, 330; spirituality, 321; techniques, 330. See also beadwork; moose hair embroidery; quillwork Emig, Martha and Magdalena, 358, 361 England. See Britain and British Empire; London, England, and Indigenous visitors Enoch’s Band, Alberta, 293 entangled cultures: about, 7, 9–10, 41–2, 115–17;

430 agency of things, 14–15, 33, 44, 45, 48–50, 64; autonomous imaginings, 10; European dependence on Indigenous knowledge, 9, 12– 13, 118–19, 338n32; the North, xi, 9–13; Object Lives and Global Histories project methodologies, 7, 9–10, 41–2, 51n25; winter sports, 115–17. See also Britain and British Empire; global networks environmental sustainability, 333–5, 340n63, 341n65 epaulets. See shoulder decorations (epaulets) “Eskimo,” as term, 224n1 “Eskimo sweater,” 203, 212–13, 216, 224n1. See also Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design ethnobotany, 302 Europe, northern. See Arctic; Nordic countries; the North Europeans: banyans, 32; entangled cultures, 9–10; winter sports, 117. See also Britain and British Empire; entangled cultures; knowledge, Western Eye of the Goat Trading Post, Banff, 248 Fabien, Alfred, 329 Faier, Lieba, 348 Farrell Racette, Sherry, 5, 66–9, 78, 79n25, 80n42, 288n59, 363–4, 366 Feather, Olive, 368 Fenelon, James, 122 festivals, winter, 126, 127–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103. See also winter sports Finn, Margot, 145 First Nations. See Indigenous peoples Fisher, Michael, 14 footwear: kamik (sealskin boots), 208, 209(f), 211–12. See also moccasins Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana: about, 264–5, 282–3; art cooperative, 271, 274–6, 282–3, 287n46; commercial arts trade, 271–6; cross-border networks, 264; household income, 265–6, 282–3; map, xvi; membership, 264–5, 279; Nakoda dolls, 274–6, 275(f). See also souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, xvii, 321, 323, 329–30, 333–4, 338n27

index Fort Churchill, Rupert’s Land, 67–8 Fort Douglas, Red River Settlement, 149, 153, 154, 161–6, 172. See also Bulger, Andrew; Red River Settlement Fort Gibraltar, Red River Settlement, 153 Fortier, Lucy, 373n53 Fort Liard (Echaot’įe Kúé), Northwest Territories, xvii, 328, 342, 344 Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 155, 157, 158(f), 162 Fort Macleod, Alberta, 253 Fort Nelson (Tthek’eneh Kúe), British Columbia, xvii, 342, 344 Fort Peck Reservation, Montana, xv, 264, 271 Fort Providence (Zhahtí Kóé), Northwest Territories, xvii, 320–1, 345n5 Fort Resolution (Deninu K’ue), Northwest Territories, xvii, 323, 338n27, 345n5 Fort Simpson (Liidlii Kue), Northwest Territories, xvii, 328, 340n45, 342–5 Fort Smith (Th bachag ), Northwest Territories, xvii, 321, 329–30, 334, 339n32 François-Xavier Picard Tahourenché, Grand Chief of the Hurons of Lorette (1870–83) (Livernois, photo, n.d.), 193(f) Franklin, John, 159–61, 160(f), 174n43 Frewen, Moreton, Clara Jerome, and Jonathan, 236, 244n9 Frog Lake, Alberta, 294 Fryd, Vivien, 166 fur trade communities: about, 58–9, 70–1, 336n1; anonymous vs named makers, 69–70; beads as trade item, 180; Canada’s land purchase (1870), 314, 336n1; chiefs’ coats for Indigenous leaders, 70; country marriages, 68; decline in trade, 270; historical context, 70–1, 336n1; hybrid societies, 58–9, 67; identity and status markers, 57, 68–73, 122–3; kinship networks, 68–9; knowledge exchanges, 32, 57, 67–9; labourers’ garments, 67–8; maps, xii, xvii; mixed economy, 314; North West Company, 153; North-Western Territory, xvii, 312– 14, 336n1; women’s work, 58, 67–70. See also capots (hooded blanket coats); Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc); Red River Settlement; Rupert’s Land

index Gandhi, Mohandas, 229–30 Gell, Alfred, 14–15, 44 gender: anonymous vs named makers, 22, 69– 70, 362–3, 366; hierarchy of art evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; knowledge exchanges in clothing construction, 32, 67–8; occupational therapy programs in tb hospitals, 358; Red River children’s coats, 94, 95(f), 96, 101(f), 103; volunteers in institutions, 368, 376n109. See also Indigenous peoples, women; masculinities A Gentleman Travelling in a Dog Cariole in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825), 152 geological surveys, 322–4, 336n1, 338n25, 338n27, 338nn28–29, 338nn31–2, 371n20 George III, King, 179, 181, 198n22 George IV, King, 179, 183–4, 184(f) George VI, King, 235, 253 Germany, Indigenous performances, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4 Ghosh, Durba, 69 Ghostkeeper, Elmer, 315 gifts: at adoptions of non-Indigenous allies, 237–8; colonial gifts and identities, 145–7, 147(f); hospital patients, 348, 361–2, 367–9; institutional gifts, 361–2, 367–9; moose hair embroidery, 145–7, 147(f); political alliances, 319; for protection and safety, 246–7; wampum belts, 180. See also diplomacy Gillies, Elsie, 332 Girl in a Red River Coat (Peate, 1973), 82, 84, 103 Glacier National Park, Montana: commercial arts trade, 272–3, 282; maps, xiii, xvi; Reiss art colony, 230, 237–8, 239, 255n13; tourism, 271, 274, 282 Gladstone, Nora, 235 Glissade en Toboggan (Québec) (Krieghoff, watercolour, 1863), 121, 121(f) global networks: about, 11–16; agency of people, 13–14; agency of things, 14–15, 44, 45, 48– 50, 64; colonial gifts, 145–7, 147(f); entangled cultures, 9–13, 41–2; map (1680), xi, 12–13; nation-states in, 13; winter sports, 117, 126–35, 134(f), 137(f). See also Britain and British Empire; entangled cultures; maps Godsell, Philip H., 259n103

431 Goetz, Helga, 372n50 Goldfrank, Esther, 235 Gooderham, Goerge H., 259n103 Gopher, Joe (Chief Walking) (Chippewa-Cree), 262(f), 277–80, 278(f) Gorfer, Nina, 211 Gosden, Chris, 14 The Governor of Red River, Hudson’s Bay, Voyaging in a Light Canoe (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825), 151–2 The Governor of Red River Driving His Family on the River in a Horse Cariole (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825), 152 Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (grasac), 24n39, 28–9, 36–7, 50n6 Great Peace of Montreal (1701), 191, 192, 193 Great Slave Lake. See Tucho (Great Slave Lake), Northwest Territories Greenland and Greenlandic national costume: about, 19, 205(f), 208–13, 209(f), 210(f); appropriation of, 205(f), 208, 211–12, 224; circulation, 213–14, 214(f), 221–4; Denmark as colonial ruler, 212, 224; glass beads, 208–11; home rule symbol, 208, 211–12; kamik (sealskin boots), 208, 209(f), 211–12; knitting patterns, 205(f), 212–13, 221–2, 224; manufacturing networks, 212, 218–19; nuilarmiut (beaded shrug), 208–15, 209(f), 210(f), 221–2, 223(f), 224; present-day meanings, 224; research methodologies, 36. See also Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design; Nordic countries Grey-Egerton, Cecily Louisa, 145–7 Griffiths, Antony, 170 Grinnell, George Bird, 238 Groat, John, 340n62 Grouard, Alberta: Cameron’s travels, 342, 344– 5; map and location, xvii, 325; steamships, 325, 327, 345n7; Turton’s life in, 325, 339n35, 344–5 Guðjónsson, Elsa E., 216 Half, Judy: Cree knowledge keeper, 30, 68, 289, 293–4, 309, 422; dew claw bags, 20–1, 39, 289– 311; research team, 5–6, 35(f), 37(f), 39, 40(f), 46, 68, 289, 295, 298, 422

432 Haliburton, Robert Grant, 124–5, 138n32 Hall, Catherine, 132 Hamilton Art Gallery, 348 Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Frederick, 121 handicrafts and souvenirs. See art and colonialism; artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s); souvenirs Hart, Janice, 167–8 Hastings Museum, Sheridan Collection, 231, 232, 233(f), 244n9, 245(f), 246, 247(f), 251, 251(f), 254, 255n9, 259n93 Haudenosaunee, dew claw bag, 290(f), 305–6 hbc. See Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) Heininen, Lassi, 8 Hendrickson, Hildi, 64 hide coats and jackets: about, 17, 58–9, 70–6, 77–8, 334–6; authenticity, 327–8; circulation, 17, 63, 69, 72–3, 76, 327, 332; commercial trade, 21, 304–5, 307, 327–8, 330–3, 338n27, 339n36; exoticism, 71, 76; fringe jackets, 272, 322, 330, 338n22, 339n40; gendered wear, 330; historical context, 70–1; identity and status markers, 17, 57, 68–73; intercultural influences, 318–20, 330–5, 337n14; knowledge exchanges, 57; life cycles of objects, 64–5; military influences, 318–19; portraits, 73–6, 74(f), 75(f); pouches worn with, 321–2, 332; present-day meanings, 17, 77–8; prices, 339n36; purpose and use, 17, 64–5, 332–3; research methodologies, 45, 77–8; souvenirs, 73–4; spirituality, 65–6, 322, 326, 328–9, 333–4; wear and tear, 71, 73; wearing of, 70–6; winter clothing, 337n21. See also caribou hide coats and jackets; deer; fur trade communities; moose hide coats and jackets hide coats and jackets, construction: about, 64–70, 334–6; alignment of hide and wearer, 66, 79n25; anonymous vs named makers, 69– 70; British styles, 32, 58–9, 65–7; collaborative projects, 68–9, 71, 328–9; decoration, 320–1; embroidery, 320–1; floral motifs, 320–1; Indigenization of British fashion, 65–8; Indigenous women’s work, 58; intercultural influences, 58–9, 65, 318–20, 330–5, 337n14; life cycles of objects, 64–5; neck and shoulder

index construction, 66, 79n25; preparation of hides, 330; red ochre, 319–20; seams, 319–20, 330; sewing machines, 330, 332; skill sets, 318; spirituality, 319–21; tanning process, 318, 334; time needed, 328, 340n44, 340n48; trunk construction, 319; women’s work, 65–70. See also beadwork; quillwork hide coats and jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910): about, 21, 312–14, 335–6; absences in records, 312; collectors, 21, 42, 312; Cree or Métis woman’s moose hide jacket (Caldwell), 329–36, 331(f), 340n48; Deh Gáh Got’įę moose hide coat (Dawson), 316–21, 317(f), 320(f), 335–6, 337n14; Dene caribou hide jacket (Bell), 313(f), 321–5, 335–6, 338nn22–4, 338n27; Dene or Dene-Métis moose hide jacket (Turton), 325–9, 326(f), 335–6, 339–40nn43–4, 342, 344–5; map, xvii hide coats and jackets, specific: buckskin jackets, 272–3, 327, 339n40; Cameron’s jacket, 342, 343(f), 344; Cree jackets, 304–5; hunting frocks, 326–7, 339n38; quilled coat (c. 1830) (Woodthorpe), 73–6, 74(f), 75(f). See also caribou hide coats and jackets; deer; hide coats and jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910); moose hide coats and jackets; moose hide coat, banyan (1820–40, Pitt Rivers Museum); moose hide coat, quillwork (1820–60, Pitt Rivers Museum) historiography: agency of people, 9–11, 13–16, 68–9; agency of things, 14–15, 44, 45, 48–50, 64; decolonization, 15–16, 25n47; entangled cultures, 9–13, 41–2; Eurocentrism, 7–10, 48; global histories, 11–16; Global South, 11; Indigenous underrepresentation, 13–14; national histories, 13, 15; the North, 7–8, 24n37. See also decolonization; entangled cultures; global networks; maps; Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies Hixson, Walter, 125 Hope-Wallace, James, Winter Costume of the Lorette Indians (watercolour, 1838), 110(f) hospitals. See artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); tuberculosis hospitals Houston, James and Alma, 355–6, 363 Hreinsdóttir, Harpa, 212

index Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc): about, 12; chiefs’ coats for Indigenous leaders, 65, 70; country marriages, 68–9; criticisms in artworks, 165–7; fabric imports, 63; identity and status markers, 70–3; map (1680), xi, 12–13; officers as collectors, 154–5, 157, 168; production of coats, 63, 65, 69–70; Red River Settlement, 88, 152–4; Treaty of 1817, 163–5. See also fur trade communities Hudson’s Bay Company blanket coats: about, 90, 106n66, 112, 114n2; doll clothes, 277, 278(f); London tobogganing club coat (1880s), 116(f), 117, 135–7; names for, 106n66, 112; Sheridan’s coat (Kainai), 234, 247, 249(f), 250, 254; Sheridan’s coat (obtained in Montana), 246. See also capots (hooded blanket coats); Red River coats for children; tobogganing coats and suits Hullmandel, Charles Joseph, 177(f), 179, 185–6, 185(f). See also Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825) hunting: environmental sustainability, 333–5, 340n63, 341n65; hunting and fishing rights, 333–5, 341n65; hunting frocks, 326–7, 339n38; and outdoor wear, 332–3; press promotion of, 332–3; spirituality, 334 Huron-British Treaty of 1760, 197n12, 198n32 Huron-Wendat Nation: appropriation of Indigenous names, 122; British alliances, 181, 194, 197n12, 198n32; capots, 108–11, 109(f), 110(f), 111(f), 130; commercial trade goods, 108–11, 109(f), 130, 146; diplomacy traditions, 146–7, 181–4, 187–9, 194; moose hair embroidery, 108, 111, 146–7, 147(f); wampum belts, 190. See also Tsawenhohi, Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent (Wendat); wampum belt (Wendat Great War Belt, c. 1760); wampum belts Huron-Wendat Nation, London visit by four chiefs (1824–25): about, 18–19, 176–8, 182–4, 194–6; diplomacy traditions, 181–4, 187–9, 192, 194; gift exchanges, 182, 195, 197n21, 198n22; greatcoats, 177(f), 184–5, 185(f), 197n21; medals, 177(f), 179, 183, 184(f), 198n22. See also Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi

433 (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Tsawenhohi, Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent (Wendat); wampum belt (Wendat Great War Belt, c. 1760) Hutgohsodoneh (Haudenosaunee athlete), 133–4 Huyghue, Samuel Douglas Smith, 181, 188–9, 197n10 Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/ lopapeysa design: about, 19, 203–4, 221–4; appropriation of design, 204–8, 219, 222–4; circularly knit sweaters, 212, 215; circulation, 46, 213–23, 214(f), 227n63; Cold War influences, 206, 219–24; commercial markets, 215– 16, 218–22, 227n63; hand-knitting industry, 213–15, 219, 223–4; imagery, 215; knitting patterns, 205(f), 212–13, 214(f), 216, 221–2, 224; lopapeysa (Icelandic sweater), 213–16, 214(f), 222, 226n37, 226n49; lopi wool yarn, 213–16, 219, 221, 222, 226n44, 227n53; manufactured versions, 203–6, 205(f), 215, 218–19, 221–4; nuilarmiut (beaded shrug), 205(f), 208–15, 209(f), 210(f), 219, 221–2; sheep culture, 214– 15, 219, 221–2; sovereignty movement, 213–14; sweaters emulating the designs, 205(f), 206, 222, 223(f); Swedish knitwear industry, 216– 21; women’s magazines, 213, 214(f), 222. See also Greenland and Greenlandic national costume; Nordic countries; Sweden and Icelandic sweaters ice palaces, 127–30, 129(f). See also winter carnivals identity: clothing as marker, 64, 70–3; heritage and memory, 84; hybrid objects as markers, 57, 64; Red River children’s coats and national identity, 84, 90–2, 91(f), 97–103 Igloliorte, Heather, 355–6 India: banyans, 32, 63, 63(f); East India Company at Home project (1757–1857), 27–8 Indiana, winter sports, 131 Indian Reform Movement, 271–2 Indigenous knowledge: about, 9–10; all my relations, 65–6, 283n1, 329; animacy of objects,

434 33, 39; environmental sustainability, 333–4, 340n63; European dependence on, 9, 12–13, 118–19, 338n32; fire management, 340n63; hunting, 333–4; knowledge exchanges, 32, 67–8, 357; multisensory engagements with objects, 39–40, 46, 51n23; Object Lives and Global Histories project methodologies, 26–7; time frames, 8–10; traditional laws, 295, 309; worldview, 65–6, 322, 329. See also appropriation of Indigenous culture; ceremonies and rituals; decolonization; entangled cultures; Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies; oral tradition; spirituality Indigenous material culture: about, 49–50; agency of things, 14–15, 44, 45, 48–50, 64; animacy of objects, 33, 39; anonymous vs named makers, 69–70; authenticity, 266, 271–4, 327–8; commodification of cultural expression, 372n43; decolonization of institutions, 13–16, 308–9; entangled cultures, 9–10; hierarchy of art evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; life cycles of objects, 64–5; metonyms for presence, 135, 147; multisensory engagements with objects, 39–40, 46; present-day meanings, 77–8; reclamation, 77–8; recontextualizations, 68–9; repatriation of objects, 234, 254, 256n21, 308; research projects, 28–9; terminology, 25n47; winter skills, 118–20, 120(f), 138n25. See also art and colonialism; colonialism; decolonization; entangled cultures; material culture Indigenous material culture for commercial trade: about, 20, 272–4; adaptations for markets, 274–6, 278(f), 280–2, 281(f), 354; arts cooperatives, 271, 274–6, 275(f), 282–3, 287n46; authenticity, 271–4, 327–8; borderlands, 20, 270–3; circulation, 47; collaborative projects, 328–9; household income, 20, 265–6, 282–3, 308, 328; Huron-Wendat goods, 108–11, 109(f), 130, 146; intercultural influences, 330– 3; life cycles of objects, 64–5; pan-Indigenous stereotype, 268, 270–2, 276, 278(f), 279–83, 284n14; souvenir trade, 271–3; spirituality, 328–9; steamship transportation, 325, 327, 345n7; US arts reforms, 271–3. See also art-

index work, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); capots (hooded blanket coats); souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s); souvenirs Indigenous material culture for commercial trade, objects: ceremonial objects, 305–8; dew claw bags, 304–8; dolls, 270–4, 284n14, 363–4; fashion objects, 47, 330–3; hide coats and jackets, 304–5, 307, 327–8, 330–3; Inuit artwork by tb patients, 352–5, 360–2; moccasins, 47, 108, 110, 130; Red River coats for children, 84, 106n53; snowshoes, 130; souvenir arts, 270–2, 363. See also Indigenous material culture for commercial trade; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s– 1930s); souvenirs Indigenous peoples: agency of people, 4–5, 9–11, 13–16, 68–9, 90; assimilation, 350, 354, 358–9; colonialist art system, 161, 165–7; diplomacy traditions, 181–4, 187–9, 192, 194; entangled cultures, 9–10; healthcare, 346, 348, 350, 369n1, 370n15, 371n22; hunting and fishing rights, 333–4; kinship networks, 68; matriarchal governance, 310; mixed economy, 314; networks, 237–8, 261–3, 283n1, 296–8, 301–2, 309; Object Lives and Global Histories project perspectives, 3–6, 10, 13–16, 26–7, 45–50; pan-Indigenous stereotype, 161, 166, 268, 270–2, 276, 278(f), 279–83, 284n14; residential schools, 235, 239–40, 241–3, 257n61, 303, 311n4; resistance and reconciliation, 49, 77, 271; settler cultural claim to Indigenous territory, 125–6, 127, 128–9, 136–7, 140n79; Sixties Scoop, 303, 311n4; stereotypes, 70, 76, 134–5, 166, 270; US-Canada borderlands (1885–1945), 261–4; “vanishing” stereotype, 194, 252, 253, 270, 273–4, 285n31. See also appropriation of Indigenous culture; colonialism; global networks; sports and Indigenous peoples; United States, Indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples, groups. See Anishinaabe; Blackfeet Reservation, Montana; Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta; Cree; Dene; Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana; Greenland and Greenlandic national costume; Huron-

index Wendat Nation; Inuit; Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta; Métis/Metis; Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana; Saddle Lake Cree Nation Indigenous peoples, women: absences in records, 69–70; anonymous vs named makers, 69–70; clothing construction, 32, 65–70; fur trade communities, 58, 67–70; hierarchy of art evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; intermarriage, 64, 68–70; knowledge exchanges, 32, 65–70; networks, 68–70; personal pronouns and makers, 33; wives of hbc clerks, 321. See also gender “In Quest of the Red Indian” (Sheridan, 1937), 241 inscription theory, 314–16, 327, 335, 371n20 Inuit: appropriation of clothing design, 207–8, 225n13; carvings, 367, 372n50, 373n63, 374n73, 375n105; commercial trade of art, 352–6, 363, 372n50; dolls, 362–8, 364(f), 365(f); government identification, 366; healthcare, 350, 366, 369n1, 370n15, 371n22; hierarchy of art evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; knowledge systems, 13; map (1680), xi, 12–13; spirituality, 356. See also artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s– 60s); Indigenous peoples; the North; Tegeapak, James; tuberculosis hospitals Iroquois, 134, 192, 237 Isawanhonhi, as misspelling, 193–4, 199n43. See also Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825) Isham, James, 71 Japan, gifts of kimonos, 32 Jerome, Clara, 236–7 jingle dress, 46 Jóelsdóttir, Ásdís, 212, 215, 216, 221–2, 226n44 Johnson, William, 180 Jones, H. (lithographer): art markets, 158–9; colonialist art system, 161, 165–7; variations of Rindisbacher’s watercolours, 149–52, 155, 158–9, 162, 165–6. See also lithography; Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) Jones, H. (lithographer), works: The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825 (1825) (fig. 5.7),

435 152, 162–7, 164(f); The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (1825) (fig. 5.8), 168, 169(f); The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (1825) (fig. 5.9), 168–70, 170(f); The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (1825) (fig. 5.10), 171–2, 171(f). See also The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825) (fig. 5.1); Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) Jørgensen, Dolly, 7–8 Joseph Big Head’s Band, Alberta, 294, 309 Juanita Tucker, Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana (Blackbird, photo, 1993), 277(f) Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta: about, 19–20, 234–5, 254n2; blanket coats, 247–8; commercial trade, 252–3; contemporary presentations to, 232–4, 256n21; gift giving, 241, 244–6, 254; map, xiii, xvi; outsiders on the reserve, 239, 241, 255n8; poverty, 235, 243, 244–6, 254; residential schools, 235, 239–40, 241–3, 257n61, 311n4; Sheridan’s relationship, 19–20, 234–5, 238–41, 243, 254; societies, 247– 8; Treaty 7, 234–5. See also Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta; Sheridan, Clare; Tailfeathers family (Kainai); Tailfeathers, Esto (Aisstaohkomiaakii) Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta, ceremonies and rituals: capots, 247–8; Grass Dance, 246; pipes and pipe protocols, 246, 259n93; protection rituals, 246–7; sacred bundles, 244; Sun Dance, 238, 239 Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta, objects: beadwork, 243; buffalo stone (iniskim), 244; eagle claw necklace, 244, 245(f); hbc blanket coat (Night-Gun), 234, 247, 249(f), 250, 254; red stone pipe, 246, 259n93; stone pounder, 246, 247(f) Kai’till’dehseh/Mistahisipi (Athabasca River), Alberta, xvii, 312, 322–3, 338n25

436 Kai’till’thu/Atipaskâw Sâkanhikan (Lake Athabasca), Northwest Territories, xvii, 338n25 Kalaalit, home rule movement, 208. See also Greenland and Greenlandic national costume Kapâwinihk (Athabasca Landing), xvii, 325, 327, 339n32, 345n7 Keating, William, 89 Keraronwe (Indigenous athlete), 120 Kinaviak, Alice, 374n73 King, Charlotte Flett, 321 King, William Cornwallis, 318–19 knit clothing. See sweaters knowledge, Indigenous. See Indigenous knowledge knowledge, Western: anonymous care in hospitals, 366; Arctic meteorological observations (1882–83), 316–18, 337n9; cultural biases, 36–8; European dependence on Indigenous knowledge, 9, 12–13, 118–19, 338n32; exploration of northern resources (1908–11), 329– 30, 333–6, 336n1; geological surveys, 322–4, 336n1, 338n25, 338nn27–9, 338nn31–2, 371n20; inscription theory, 314–16, 327, 335, 371n20; time frames, 6–9; wildlife conservation, 333–5; working in isolation, 36–7. See also academy; art and colonialism; colonialism; decolonization; maps; museums Komarnisky, Sara: Indigenous tb patients, 21– 2, 41, 346–76; research team, 40(f), 349, 422 Kopytoff, Igor, 22n1, 41 Krieghoff, Cornelius, Glissade en Toboggan (Québec) (watercolour, 1863), 121, 121(f) Kutenai (Kootenay) Indians, 301 lace, 87 Lac La Biche, 338n25, 338n32 Lac La Loche, 338n25 lacrosse, 134 Laferté, Boniface and Madeleine, 342–3, 345n4 Lainey, Jonathan: Huron-Wendat Nation, 30; Indigenous chiefs in London, 18–19, 176–99; research team, 35(f), 40(f), 45, 45(f), 422 Lake Athabasca (Kai’till’thu/Atipaskâw Sâkanhikan), Northwest Territories, xvii, 338n25 Lampson, Curtis Miranda and William, 59

index Lansdowne Toboggan Club, 121 LaPier, Rosalyn, 231, 241, 255n15 Larsen, Ryder, Charles and Joseph Riel (photo, c. 1871), 93(f) Latour, Bruno, 314–16 Laurence, Margaret, 107n89 Laxness, Auður, 212 Le Huron tobogganing club, Quebec City, 122 Leibsohn, Dana, 57 Lemire, Beverly: dialogue with Half, 20–1, 289– 311; “Introduction,” 3–25; research team, 40(f), 45–6, 45(f), 53–4, 422; tobogganing and toboggan suits, 18, 115–44 Le Moine, James MacPherson, 199n43 Leslie, Anita, 250 Lesser Slave Lake, Alberta, 325. See also Grouard, Alberta Liard River (Nácháhdeh), Northwest Territories, xvii, 312 Liidlii Kue (Fort Simpson), Northwest Territories, xvii, 328, 340n45, 342–5 lithography: about, 18, 150–1, 159, 172, 185–7; art as image vs object, 38–9, 45; art markets, 150, 158–9, 167–72; The Art of Drawing on Stone (Hullmandel, 1824), 179, 185–6; Brosius’s Winter Carnival 1887, St. Paul Ice Palace (lithograph, 1887), 129(f); circulation, 18, 150–1, 159, 179, 185–7; colonial variations, 18, 152–67; compared with watercolours, 159; “del” (drawn on stone), 159; documentary functions, 189; formats, 151, 167–72; framed prints, 167, 170–2; life cycles of prints, 186, 190; print series, 159, 167–72; processes, 159, 186; reproduction of errors, 193–4; varnished prints, 167, 171–2; wear and tear, 167–72. See also art and colonialism; Jones, H. (lithographer); Jones, H. (lithographer), works; Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) Little Crow, Chief (Dakota), 140n79 Little Hunter, Chief (Onchaminahos) (Cree), 292–4, 303, 309, 422

index Livernois, J.E., 191, 193(f) Loft, Steven, 4–5 London, England, and Indigenous visitors: about, 18–19; athletes, 133–4; diplomacy traditions, 18–19, 182; everyday life, 187, 198n29. See also Huron-Wendat Nation, London visit by four chiefs (1824–25); Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825) Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman (Misaamahkoiyinnimaakii), 239, 244–6, 257n54 lopapeysa (Icelandic sweater) and lopi yarn. See Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/ lopapeysa design Lord, Douglas, 353, 363 Lorette (Wendake), 108–10, 176. See also Huron-Wendat Nation; Huron-Wendat Nation, London visit by four chiefs (1824–25) Losche, Diane, 10 Lux, Maureen, 350, 374n67 Luxton, Norman, 248 MacBride Museum, Whitehorse, 368 MacDonald, Graham A., 255n9 MacDonald, John, 339n32 Macdougall, Brenda, 283n1, 329, 335 Mackenzie Basin, map, xix, 324 Mackenzie River. See Dehcho (Mackenzie River), Northwest Territories magazines. See press Mainardi, Patricia, 154–5 Manitoba: map, xv; steamships, 327, 345n7; winter sports clubs, 125–6. See also Red River Settlement; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) manliness. See masculinities A Map of the North-Pole and the Parts Adjoining (1680), xi, 12–13 maps: as colonial land ownership, 166–7; imagining the North, xi, 12–13; Indigenous presence, 4; inscription theory, 314–16, 371n20; in lithographs, 166–7. See also geological surveys maps related to Object Lives and Global Histories project, xi–xx

437 marten fur, 325, 326(f) masculinities: Métis voyageurs, 89–90, 89(f); militarism, 119; sports, 118–19; winter sports and carnivals, 90, 118–19, 128, 132 Maskwacis (formerly Hobbema) community, Alberta, 294, 305 material culture: about, 3–5, 10; agency of things, 14–15, 44, 45, 48–50, 64; art history’s material turn, 37–9, 48–9; biographies of objects, 22n1, 33, 40–4, 50, 64–5, 371n11; colonial gifts, 145–7; entangled cultures, 9–10; identity and status markers, 68–73, 123–4; life cycles of objects, 64–5, 186, 190; metonyms for presence, 135, 147; multidisciplinary work, 27–33, 39–40, 43–6; multisensory engagements with objects, 33–4, 39–40, 46, 50n2; overview of objects in Object Lives and Global Histories project, 16–22; repatriation of objects, 234, 254, 256n21, 308. See also Indigenous material culture; Indigenous material culture for commercial trade; Object Lives and Global Histories project Matheson, Sarah Robertson, 256n16 The Matter of Slavery in Scotland project, 28 McAdam, Sylvia, 309 McCallum, Mary Jane, 348–9 McCord, David Ross, 191, 198n22 McCord Museum, Montreal: feather fans, 47; Huron-Wendat objects, 148n7, 179; Inuit carvings, 367, 375n105; Inuit dolls, 348, 363–8, 364(f), 365(f); lithograph by Jones after Rindisbacher (1825), 149–51, 150(f), 159; lithograph of Tsawenhohi (1825), 177(f), 179; map, xx; Notman photos, 83(f), 91(f), 111, 111(f), 123(f), 142n103; Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6, 53–4; Red River children’s coats, 83–4, 83(f), 112, 113(f); tobogganing coats, 111, 143n122. See also museums Mead, Matt, 152 medals: circulation, 191; Huron-Wendat chiefs, London visit (1824–25), 177(f), 179, 183, 184(f), 198n22; Peguis’s coat and medal, 163– 5, 164(f), 175n61 media. See press mementos. See souvenirs memory, 82–4

438 men. See gender; masculinities The Men of the North and Their Place in History (Haliburton, 1869), 124–5 Mercer, Julie-Ann: lithographs based on Rindisbacher’s watercolours, 18, 41, 149–75; research team, 34, 37(f), 45(f), 54, 422 methods, research. See Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies Métis/Metis: about, 58; capots, 88–90, 89(f), 103, 105n32, 277–9, 278(f); capots, politicization of, 17, 91–2, 93(f); commercial trade, 20; dolls, 277–9, 278(f); fur trade communities, 58; global networks, 58; guides for nonIndigenous explorations, 338n32; hunting frocks, 326, 339n38; identity and status markers, 58, 68–73, 88–92, 103; national identity, 90–1; portraits, 92, 93(f); Red River Resistance (1885), 91–2, 102, 126, 264; Rocky Boy Reservation community, 264, 277–9, 278(f); stereotypes, 89, 89(f); terminology, 5, 58, 78n2, 284n6; Treaty of 1817, 163–5; voyageurs, 89, 89(f); wahkootowin (relations), 283n1, 329, 335; women’s clothing, 280, 288n59; women’s work, 58; worldview, 329. See also fur trade communities; Red River Settlement; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Middleton, Frederick, 125 Middleton, S.H., 239, 241–3 Middleton, Yevonde, 250–1 Miles City, Montana, 128 military and militarism: capots as uniforms, 18, 87, 108–9, 109(f); chiefs’ coats, 65, 70; hide coats, 318–19; ice palaces, 127–9, 129(f); Indigenized European fashion, 65, 67, 70; quillwork, 67; Red River children’s coats, 97; shoulder decorations (wings), 87, 109(f); sports and masculinities, 119, 132; tobogganing clubs, 121, 128, 132 Milne-Home, Mary Pamela, 256n16 miniatures: collectables, 270; dolls, 267, 363; everyday objects, 270; paintings, 157. See also dolls; Red River coats for children Mini-Kata/Kills in the Water (Joseph Tucker), 276, 287n51 Minnesota: Ah-Gwah-Ching tb hospital, 348, 357–62, 361(f); Anishinaabe, 360; Sheridan’s

index travels, 360; territorial claims, 127, 128–9; winter sports and carnivals, 127–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103 Minnesota Historical Society, 140n79, 262(f) Misaamahkoiyinnimaakii (Long Time Medicine Pipe Woman), 239, 244–6, 257n54 moccasins: Blackfoot moccasins, 253; ceremonial uses, 307; chief ’s moccasins, 177(f), 179; collectors, 248, 253; commercial trade, 47, 108, 110, 130, 243, 273, 286n43; construction, 67–8; embroidery on, 179, 185, 201, 253; fringe, 306; identity markers in portraits, 92, 161; sensory engagement with, 46; on souvenir dolls, 274, 279; tb hospital patients as makers, 351, 358 Montana: arts cooperatives, 271, 274–6, 275(f), 282–3, 287n46; as borderland space, 284n3; commercial arts trade, 273–7; historical background, 127, 261–6; maps, xiii–xvi; multiethnic membership in reservations, 264–5, 279; territorial claims, 127, 128–9; winter sports and carnivals, 128. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana; Browning, Montana; Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana; Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana; souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Montreal: clothing as status marker, 123; Peace Treaty of Montreal (1701), 192; winter sports and carnivals, 118–19, 123(f), 126, 127, 135 Montreal Snow Shoe Club, 119, 126–7 moose hair embroidery: about, 146; capots, 108, 111; circulation, 146; Huron-Wendat objects, 108, 109(f), 111, 146–7, 147(f); moccasins, 47, 179; present-day meanings, 345n4; shoulder decorations, 108, 202; table covers, 146–7, 147(f); tobogganing coats, 111; woman’s jacket and red slippers, 47 moose hide coat, banyan (1820–40, Pitt Rivers Museum): about, 45(f), 59–63, 61(f), 62(f), 71; circulation, 32, 57, 59, 63, 70–3, 76, 77; cloth banyan as model, 32, 62–3, 63(f), 66, 78; construction and decoration, 59–63, 66, 71, 76, 338n22; present-day meanings, 77–8; research methodologies, 39–40, 45(f), 78; wear and tear, 59, 62, 71. See also moose hide coats and jackets moose hide coat, quillwork (1820–60, Pitt

index Rivers Museum): about, 56(f), 59, 60(f); circulation, 57, 59, 70–3, 77–8; construction, 59, 71–2; Cree-Metis, 59; painted designs, 59, 62, 66; quillwork, 59, 66; sibling coat at British Museum, 59, 66, 73, 77; wear and tear, 59, 73. See also moose hide coats and jackets moose hide coats and jackets: about, 55–9; circulation, 57, 63, 72–3, 77; collectors, 58; construction, 58–63, 330; embroidery, 330; fur trade communities, 58–9, 63, 70; identity markers, 57, 77; life cycles of, 64–5, 77–8; moose hunting, 333–5; preparation of hides, 330; spirituality, 65–6, 329, 333–4. See also hide coats and jackets; hide coats and jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910) Morand, Anne, 153 Morley Reserve, Alberta, 248 Moses, Melissa-Jo Belcourt, 21, 315, 319, 322, 336n6, 338n23 Mountain Sanitorium, Hamilton, 363 Museum of Anthropology, ubc, Vancouver: artwork by tb hospital patients, 368, 373n57; map, xx; Tegeapak’s works, 347(f), 348, 351, 356 Museum of the Plains Indian, Montana, 274 museums: absences in records, 69–70; anonymous vs named makers, 43, 69–70, 362–3, 366; colonialism and knowledge production, 73, 348–9, 361–2; decolonization, 13–16, 308– 9; gifts, 361–2, 368–9; hierarchy in object evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; life cycles of objects, 64–5; map, xx; multidisciplinary work, 27–8, 39–40; multisensory engagements with objects, 33–4, 46; object placement in cultural traditions, 77; present-day meanings of objects, 77–8; repatriation of objects, 234, 254, 256n21, 308; technologies, 34; women volunteers, 368, 376n109. See also collecting and collectors; decolonization; Object Lives and Global Histories project, host institutions; Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies Muskego, Francis, 373n63 Nácháhdeh (Liard River), Northwest Territories, xvii, 312 Nakoda: dolls, 274–6, 275(f)

439 narratives: “circulation narratives” or “it-narratives” (tales narrated from perspective of inanimate objects), 151 Nash, Joseph, 132, 134(f) national identity, 84, 90–2. See also identity Nebraska. See Hastings Museum, Sheridan Collection needlework. See beadwork; embroidery; moose hair embroidery; quillwork; sweaters Neel, Ellen, 206 Nesbitt, Sarah: research team, 40(f), 45, 45(f) The New North (Cameron, 1909), 342 newspapers. See press New York City: winter sports and carnivals, 126 Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825): about, 19, 177(f), 178–81, 184–8, 194–6; absences in records, 195; active pose, 187–8; art as image vs object, 38– 9; authentication of Wendat Great War Belt (c. 1760), 179; circulation, 19, 176–9, 189–90, 193–5; collectors, 179, 189–90; diplomacy traditions, 19, 182–4, 187–9; first-hand accounts of events, 187–9; McCord Museum, 176, 179, 195; misspelling, 193–4, 199n43; presentation of Wendat Great War Belt (c. 1760), 178, 178(f); wear and tear, 194–5. See also Tsawenhohi, Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent (Wendat) Night-Gun (Kainai), 234, 241, 247 Niitsitapii doll, 276, 278(f). See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana Niptanatiak-Evaglok, Nora, 368–9 Nishi’ko (Old Fort Rae), Northwest Territories, xvii, 316–21, 337n9 Nordic countries: about, 7, 19, 216–18; appropriation of clothing design, 19, 207–8, 211–12; Cold War influences, 204, 216–19; map (1680), xi, 12–13; scholarship on, 7; winter fashion industry, 221–4. See also Greenland and Greenlandic national costume; Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design; the North; Sweden and Icelandic sweaters Norfolk jackets, 326 Norman, Alison, 256n16 the North: about, 6–9, 11–12; climate, 7–8, 11– 12; entangled cultures, 11–13; European imaginaries, 11–12, 24n37; government control, 42;

440 historiography, 7–8, 24n37; Indigenous peoples, 7–8; maps, xi–xx, 12–13; time frames, 6– 9. See also Arctic; historiography; Indigenous peoples; Inuit; Nordic countries North Dakota, borderlands: capots, 92; map, xv; Rocky Boy Reservation members, 264. See also souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Northern Montana Art Cooperative, 271, 274– 6, 275(f), 282–3, 287n46 North West Company, 153 North-Western Territory, xvii, 312–14, 336n1 Northwest Territories, xvii, 336n1, 372n50. See also Arctic; Dehcho (Mackenzie River), Northwest Territories; the North; Tucho (Great Slave Lake), Northwest Territories Northwest Territories, hide jackets. See hide coats and jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910) Norton, Marcy, 9, 14, 41, 115, 118 Norway, sweaters, 212–13 Notman, William, 83(f), 91(f), 111, 111(f), 123(f), 142n103 Nova Scotia: winter sports, 132 nuilarmiut (beaded shrug), 205(f), 208–15, 209(f), 210(f), 219, 221–2, 223(f), 224. See also Greenland and Greenlandic national costume; Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/ lopapeysa design Nunavut: lawsuits on cultural appropriation, 225n13 Nykänen, Kaarina, 215 Oberholtzer, Cath, 79n25 Object Lives and Global Histories project: about, 3–10, 15–22, 49–50, 53–4; agency of Indigenous peoples, 4–5, 9–10, 13–16, 26, 68–9, 90; agency of things, 14–15, 44, 45, 48–50, 64; art as image vs object, 38–9; biographies of objects, 22n1, 40–4, 50, 64–5, 371n11; circulation as objects, 39, 43–4, 46; colonialism, 4; community partners, 5–6, 29, 30–1, 47–8; criteria for selection of objects, 16, 29, 31; decolonization, 4–5, 13–16, 25n47; entangled cultures, 6–7, 9–10, 41–2; funding, 5–6, 26; global networks, 11–16, 26; goals and objec-

index tives, 26, 30–1; Indigenous perspectives, 5–6, 10, 13–15, 26–7, 45–50; “the North,” 6–8; overview of objects examined, 16–22; project management, 53–4; research team, 5–6, 29– 30, 45–8, 53–4; terminology, 5, 25n47, 78n2, 284n6; time frames, 6–9; website, 54. See also material culture Object Lives and Global Histories project, host institutions: about, 6, 46, 53–4; map, xx. See also McCord Museum, Montreal; Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; University of Alberta, Edmonton Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies: about, 16–17, 26–9, 49–50, 53–4; art as image vs object, 38–9; art historical methodologies, 37–9; broad contexts, 43–8; close looking, 16, 22, 31, 33–6, 35(f); collaborative analysis, 6, 16, 22, 27, 29–31, 36–7; communications, 30–1, 53–4; construction details, 34; cultural biases, 33, 36–8; dialogue, 6, 16–17, 48; discovery process, 31–2; expert/ learner positions, 30; face-to-face meetings, 31–6, 46–7; first-person voice, 48, 289; humble position, 16; Indigenous perspectives, 5– 6, 26–7, 29–31, 33, 39, 47–50; key questions, 40–1, 43; life cycles, 64–5, 186, 190; longitudinal study, 16, 27; multidisciplinary work, 27–33, 39, 43–6, 48–50; multisensory engagements, 32–5, 39–40, 46, 50n2; object genres, 43–6; present-day meanings of objects, 49, 77–8; project management, 53–4; sketching, 33–4; virtual meetings, 6, 30–1, 47, 53; wear and tear, 34, 167–8 Occom, Samson, 187 Ojibwa-Metis, 58. See also Métis/Metis Ojibwe community, Red River, 153, 163–5. See also Peguis, Chief (Ojibwe) Old Fort Rae (Nishi’ko), Northwest Territories, xvii, 316–21, 337n9 Onchaminahos, Chief (Little Hunter) (Cree), 292–4, 303, 309, 422 Ondialaréthé, Chief Simon Romain (Wendat), 190 Onion Lake First Nation, Alberta, 292–4, 310; map, xiv oral tradition: about, 15–16; collection of place

index names, 324; creation stories, 310–11; as unwritten history, 291, 311; winter snows, 118 Oxendine, Joseph B., 118 Oxford. See Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford Padmialuk, Willie, 357 Painter, Nell Irvin, 124 Pakan’s Band, Alberta, 293 Papaschase’s Band, Alberta, 293 Parc Savard Hospital, Quebec City: about, 363; commercial trade, 353, 363; dolls, 348, 363–8, 364(f), 365(f); map, xx Park Tobogganing Club uniform (1880s), 116(f), 135–7. See also tobogganing and snowshoeing; tobogganing and snowshoeing clubs; tobogganing coats and suits Peace Treaty of Montreal (1701), 191–3 Peate, Mary, 82, 84, 103 Peers, Laura: cited, 4, 155, 165, 166, 360; “Introduction,” 3–25; moose hide coats, 17, 55–81; research team, 35(f), 39, 40(f), 45(f), 53–4, 422 Peguis, Chief (Ojibwe): about, 163–7; Bulger’s relations with, 163; chief ’s coat and medal, 163–5, 164(f), 175n61; as possibly “Red Lake Chief ” in Jones’s lithographs (1825), 156(f), 163–7, 164(f); Treaty of 1817, 163–5 Peigan/Northern Blackfeet. See Piikani Nation (Peigan or Northern Blackfeet), Alberta Peigan/South Piikani (Aamsskáápipikani), xiii, 264, 265(f), 273, 276, 282. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana Pelly, Robert Parker, 154–5, 157 Perry, Adele, 13 Petersen, Mariane, 211 Petty-Fitzmaurice, Henry, 121 Pfeiffer, Harold and Walter, 353, 363, 367, 368, 371n27, 375n105 Phillips, Ruth, 20, 28, 70, 77, 266, 283, 308, 356 photography: Indigenous consent, 255n8; Notman’s winter portraits, 83(f), 91(f), 111, 111(f), 123(f), 142n103; portrait of Riel brothers (c. 1871), 92, 93(f); tactile engagement, 167–8; as unmediated views, 152 Picard, Paul and Pierre-Albert, 190–1 Piikani Nation (Peigan or Northern Blackfeet),

441 Alberta: about, 234, 254n2; map, xiii, xvi; wooden dolls, 269, 269(f). See also Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta pipes: men’s and women’s, 296, 297(f); red stone pipe (Kainai), 246, 259n93; smoking pipes (Cree), 295–6, 297(f), 311. See also ceremonies and rituals Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford: band of beadwork (Anishinaabe), 41–3, 42(f), 348, 357–62, 359(f), 361(f); collectors, 79n11, 360–2; dew claw bag, 290(f), 305–6; Greenlandic beaded shrug, 210(f); HuronWendat capot, 108–10, 109(f), 110(f); Indigenous perspectives, 47; moccasins, 47; moose hide coat, banyan, 59–62, 61(f), 62(f); moose hide coat, quillwork, 55–7, 56(f), 59, 60(f); Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6, 53–4; Object Lives and Global Histories project research sessions, 30–3, 35(f), 36, 37(f), 40(f), 42–3, 42(f), 45(f); quilled pad saddle and crupper, 47; saddle bag, 35(f). See also museums Pointon, Marcia, 158 Pollock, Katie: research team, 37(f), 423; souvenir art in borderlands, 20, 41, 261–88, 301 porcupine quills. See quillwork portraits: about, 73–6, 74(f), 75(f), 158; commercial trade, 158; exoticism, 71, 76; fiction and fact, 158, 159; hide coats, 73–6, 74(f), 75(f); moccasins in, 92, 161; Riel brothers (c. 1871), 92, 93(f); Sheridan’s Tatler portrait (1937), 228, 229(f), 248, 251; studio props, 111n6; timelessness, 158; winter sports and carnivals, 110–11, 111(f), 142n103 pouches, 321–2, 332 Poulter, Gillian, 118, 119, 161 power relations: art and colonialism, 76, 151, 166–7, 172; clothing as identity and status markers, 57, 64, 68–73, 76, 123–4; entangled cultures, 10; hybrid objects, 64; Indigenous relations with nonhuman entities, 65–6; regimes of care, 370n7. See also colonialism Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 155, 157, 158(f), 162 press: execution of Scott, 92, 105n48; hunting journals, 332–3; letters from Franklin’s expeditions, 161; national identity construction,

442 91–2; Sheridan’s 1937 article on the Kainai, 241–3; winter sports coverage, 119 Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Yellowknife, 351 print media: Indigenous peoples, 18–19; life cycles of objects, 186, 190; posters, 267, 268(f); reproduction of errors, 193–4; tactile engagement, 149, 167–8, 172; travel books, 161; women’s magazines, 213, 216. See also lithography; photography; portraits; press Prophet Dance/Tea Dance (Dene Tha’), 321, 337n19 Prown, Jules, 36 Pugh, J.E. (Indian agent), 241, 252 Quebec. See Montreal; Parc Savard Hospital, Quebec City quillwork: about, 327–8; authenticity, perceptions of, 327–8; collaborative projects, 328–9; commercial trade, 339n38, 342–4; designs, 325, 326(f), 327; dyes, 339n43; Fort Liard, 328, 342–5; gun cases, 343–4, 344(f); guncoats, 339n38; hide coat (Pitt Rivers Museum), 56(f), 59, 60(f), 66, 73; hide coat (Woodthorpe), 73–6, 74(f), 75(f); hide jackets (Dene), 313(f), 315–17, 322, 325–8, 326(f); knowledge exchanges, 67–8, 327, 339n43; location on animal’s body, 338nn23–4; preparation ceremonies, 282, 288n60; price of hide coats with, 339n38; quill-wrapped fringes, 59, 62(f), 66, 313(f), 322, 325, 326(f), 338n22; shoulder pads, 338n23; time to weave, 340n44 rabbit-skin coats, 70 race and ethnicity: anonymous vs named makers, 69–70, 362–3, 366; hierarchy of art evaluation, 363, 366, 375n98; identity and status markers, 68–73, 76, 123–4; intermarriage, 64, 68–70; multiethnic categories, 276, 279; racial hierarchies, 70–1, 270; racial theorizing, 124– 6; racist caricatures, 122; winter sports, 119– 20, 124–5 Raining Bird, Arthur, Mabel, Barbara, Joseph, and Louis, 279–81, 280(f), 281(f) Rasmussen, Dorothe, 209–10 A Real Scene in St. Paul’s Church Yard (Dighton, mezzotint, 1783), 159, 160(f)

index reclamation, 77–8. See also decolonization Red Crow College, 256n21 The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825 (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825) (fig. 5.7), 152, 162–7, 164(f). See also Jones, H. (lithographer); lithography; Rindisbacher, Peter; Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825) (fig. 5.1): about, 149–52, 150(f), 172; McCord Museum, 149–51, 150(f), 159; Rindisbacher’s watercolours as inspiration, 155, 162; tactile engagement, 149, 167–8, 172. See also Jones, H. (lithographer); lithography; Rindisbacher, Peter; Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) The Red Lake Indians Salute Governor Bulger at Fort Douglas (Rindisbacher, watercolour, 1822–24) (fig. 5.2), 155, 156(f). See also Rindisbacher, Peter Red River coats for children: about, 17–18, 82– 4, 83(f), 93–103; absences in records, 43–4; accessories, 82, 95(f), 96–7, 114; biographies of objects, 43; capot as model, 43, 84, 85–93, 98–9, 99(f), 102; commercial trade, 84, 94– 103, 99(f), 101(f), 106n53, 112–14, 113(f); consumerism, 100–3; dolls, 84, 114; as form of heritage, 97–9, 99(f), 102–3; francophones, 97–9, 99(f); gendered clothing, 94, 95(f), 96, 101(f), 103; history of, 90–1; identity markers, 17–18, 84, 90–2, 91(f); in literary stories, 82, 84, 103, 106n56, 107n89; manufacturers, 95–7, 100, 112–14; McCord Museum, 83–4, 100, 112; miniaturized adult dress, 92, 93, 97, 102; multisensory memories, 82–3, 106n56; names, 88, 94, 97, 102, 106n66, 112; national identity, 90– 2, 91(f), 97–103, 114; Object Lives and Global Histories project research, 106n53; prices, 95; wear and tear, 83. See also capots (hooded blanket coats) Red River coats for children, construction: about, 82, 83(f), 113(f); colours, 82, 93, 96–7, 106n61, 113(f); fabrics, 96, 112; fashionable

index variations, 95–7; hoods, 93, 96–7, 113(f); military-style, 97; red trim, 96–7, 113(f); sashes, 93, 96–7, 113(f); shoulder decoration, 93, 96; side seam stripes, 82, 113(f) Red River Resistance (1885), 91–2, 102, 125–6. See also Métis/Metis Red River Settlement: about, 88–9, 152–4; Bulger as governor (1821–23), 154; capots, 17, 88–92, 93(f); Colony House, 162, 164–6, 172, 175n59; Council of Assiniboia, 162–3; Fort Douglas, 149, 153, 154, 161–6, 172; historical background, 70, 88, 152–4, 165; living conditions, 153–4, 162–3; manufactured trade goods, 88, 90; map, xii; Métis communities, 17, 88–92, 93(f), 125–6, 153; Rindisbacher at, 18, 152–4; Scottish settlers, 88, 153; Swiss settlers, 18, 152–4, 162, 165; trade networks, 151, 153–4; Treaty of 1817, 163–5; winter sports clubs, 125–6. See also Bulger, Andrew; Métis/Metis; Rindisbacher, Peter Redskin Interlude (Sheridan, 1938), 228, 230–1, 234–6, 238, 242, 251–3. See also Sheridan, Clare Reiss, Winold. See Reiss art colony, Montana Reiss art colony, Montana, 230, 237–9, 255n13, 257n45 research project. See Object Lives and Global Histories project; Object Lives and Global Histories project, host institutions; Object Lives and Global Histories project, methodologies resistance. See decolonization ribbon work, 272 Riel, Charles and Joseph, 92, 93(f) Riel, Louis, 92, 93(f) Rindisbacher, Peter: about, 18, 149–50, 152–7; absences in records, 43–4; colonialist art system, 161, 165–7; life in Red River Settlement, 152–4; miniature painter, 157 Rindisbacher, Peter, watercolours: about, 149– 50, 154–5; circulation, 18, 154–8; criticism of hbc in, 165–7; inspiration for Views in Hudson’s Bay lithograph series by Jones (1825), 155, 165–6, 172; pan-Indigenous stereotype, 161, 166; Pelly’s commissions, 154–5; quilled hide coats, 71, 72(f), 80n47; variations for buyer’s needs, 155–9, 162. See also Views in

443 Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) Rindisbacher, Peter, works: Captain Bulger, Governor of Assiniboia, and the Chiefs and Warriors of the Chippewa Tribe of Red Lake, in Council in the Colony House in Fort Douglas, May 22nd, 1823 (1823), 175n59; Captain Bulger’s Palaver (1822–23), 175n59; Captain W. Andrew Bulger Saying Farewell at Fort Mackay, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1815 (1823) (fig. 5.4), 155–8, 158(f), 161–3; The Red Lake Indians Salute Governor Bulger at Fort Douglas (1822–24) (fig. 5.2), 155, 156(f); A War Party at Fort Douglas Discharging Their Guns in the Air as a Token of Peaceable Intentions (1823) (fig. 5.3), 155, 156(f); Winter Fishing on Ice of Assynoibain & Red River (1821), 71, 72(f), 80n47 rituals. See ceremonies and rituals; spirituality Roberts, Jennifer L., 151, 186–7 Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana: about, 264– 5, 282–3; art cooperative, 271, 274–6, 275(f), 282–3, 287n46; beaded jackets, 272; commercial arts trade, 272–3; cross-border networks, 264, 301, 304; dolls, 262(f), 276–83, 278(f), 281(f); Gopher, 262(f), 277–80, 278(f); household income, 265–6, 282–3; maps, xiv–xvi; membership, 264–5, 279; Raining Bird family, 279–81, 280(f), 281(f); Sitting Pretty (Ochino), 262(f), 277–80, 278(f); Sun Dance, 300; tourism, 271, 274; Wild West shows, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4. See also souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Rocky Mountain House Band, Alberta, 301 Rofel, Lisa, 348 Root, Deborah, 206 Ross, Bernard Rogan, 340n44 Rossen, Rosannguaq, 209, 211 Rothschild, Emma, 117 Rough Hair (Kainai), 243–4, 245(f) Rourke, Louise, 327 Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton: artwork by tb hospital patients, 348, 351, 363, 368, 371n24, 373n63, 374n73, 375n92; Indigenous advisors, 336n6; Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6. See also artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); hide coats and

444 jackets, Northwest Territories (1880–1910); museums Rupert’s Land, xii, 67–8, 70–2, 336n1. See also fur trade communities; Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc); York Factory Russel, Frances, 373n53 Russell, Frank, 339n36, 339n38 Saddle Lake Cree Nation: about, 20–1, 292–3, 302–3; arranged marriages, 303; carvings by tb patients, 373n63; Chicken Dance, 294–5, 302; commercial trade, 21, 304–8; cross-border travel, 301; dew claw bags (âpiscimôsis), 20–1, 291, 293, 298; forced amalgamation, 21, 292–3, 309; healing, 298–9, 302, 309; knowledge keepers, 20–1, 289, 293–4, 309; map, xiv; networks, 296–8, 301–2, 309; residential schools, 303; Sixties Scoop, 303, 311n4; Sun Dance, 294–5, 300–1; sweat lodges, 302; women ceremonialists, 20–1, 293–4, 298; women’s smoking pipes, 295–6, 297(f), 311. See also dew claw bags sailor suits for children, 101–2 Saint Paul, Minnesota: Sheridan’s travels, 360; winter sports and carnivals, 127–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103. See also Minnesota Saint Paul’s Indian Residential School, Kainai Reserve, 235, 239–40, 241–3, 257n61, 311n4 Salish, Cowichan sweaters, 204–7 Salopree, Roy, 21, 315, 321–2, 334, 336n6 sanitoria. See artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); tuberculosis hospitals Sapp, Allen, 299, 311n3 Saskatchewan, borderlands: historical background, 261–4, 336n1; maps, xiv–xvii. See also souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Savard, Teharihulen Michel, 195–6 Sawatanen, Louis Vincent, 182, 197n13 Scandinavia. See Nordic countries Schultz, Christian, 86 Schultz, James W., 238, 239 Schweizer, Bernard, 243 “The Science of Cheek, or Riel’s Next Move” (Bengough, caricature, 1874), 92, 93(f) scientific ventures. See knowledge, Western

index Scotland and slavery, research, 28 Scott, Thomas, execution of, 92, 105n48 Sehwahtahow, 69 Selkirk, 5th Earl of (Thomas Douglas): Red River Settlement’s establishment (1812), 88, 153, 165; Treaty of 1817, 163–5 Selkirk, 6th Earl of (Dunbar James Douglas): wedding gifts, 145–7, 147(f) Senefelder, Alois, 159 Seton, George, Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land, 1857 (watercolour), 89(f) settler colonialism. See colonialism Sheridan, Clare: about, 19–20, 229(f), 230–1, 236–7, 250–4; in Algeria, 236–7, 254n1, 256n16, 257n35; with Blackfoot and Blackfeet communities, 19–20, 230–1, 238–9, 241–3, 248–9, 250–4; British surveillance of, 229, 236, 255n4, 257n35; children, 236–7, 241, 248; collector, 19–20, 241, 243–8, 254; financial concerns, 236, 257n35; gifts, 19–20, 241, 246; global networks, 238, 250–4; life of (1885– 1970), 19–20, 236–7, 241–2, 250–4, 254n1; Reiss art colony, Montana, 230, 237–8, 239, 255n13; sculptor, 248, 251, 251(f); Tatler portrait (1937), 228, 229(f), 248, 251; views on colonialism, 228–31, 237, 241–3; views on Indigenous peoples, 230–1, 238–9, 242–3, 248–9, 252; views on modernity, 248–9. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana; Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta; Hastings Museum, Sheridan Collection; Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta; Tailfeathers family (Kainai); Tailfeathers, Esto (Aisstaohkomiaakii) Sheridan, Clare, objects: about, 19–20, 254; beadwork, 243–4; Big Bull (Piikani) (Tailfeathers, drawing, 1937), 232, 233(f), 251, 253; buffalo stone (iniskim), 244; eagle claw necklace, 244, 245(f); eagle plume, 246–7; hbc blanket coat, 234, 247, 249(f), 250, 254; her views on, 231, 243, 246; moccasins, 248; Mrs Black-Plume (sculpted), 248, 259n103; present-day meanings, 232–4, 254; red stone pipe, 246, 259n93; repatriation of, 234, 254, 256n21; scalps, 246; stone pounder (Kainai), 246, 247(f); Stoney-Nakoda, 248. See also Hastings Museum, Sheridan Collection

index Sheridan, Clare, works: Arab Interlude (1936), 228, 236, 254n1; Big Bull (sculpture, 1937), 251, 251(f); “In Quest of the Red Indian” (1937), 241–2; My American Diary (1922), 236; reception, 251–2; Redskin Interlude (1938), 228, 230–1, 234–6, 238, 242–6, 251–3; Russian Portraits (1921), 236; sculptures, 231, 248, 251, 251(f), 255n13 Sheridan, Wilfred, 236 Shields, Rob, 314 Shot Both Sides, Chief (Kainai), 235, 239, 244– 6, 257n54 shoulder decorations (epaulets): capots, 87, 96, 108, 109(f), 110–11, 111n8, 116(f), 135; chief ’s greatcoats, 177(f), 178, 185(f); hide coat, banyan, 59, 62(f); knowledge exchanges, 67; military uniforms, 87–8, 109(f); moose hair embroidery, 108, 202; quilled bands, 338n23; Red River children’s coats, 96; tobogganing coats, 96, 116(f), 135–7 Sibbern, Annichen, 212–13, 219, 221–2 Sifton, Clifford, 324 Siksika, 234, 254n2. See also Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta Simon, John, 198n31 Sitting Pretty (Ochino), 262(f), 277–80, 278(f) Sixties Scoop, 303, 311n4 Slave River (Des Nedhé), 322–3, 340n63 slavery and Scotland, research, 28 Slavey. See Deh Gáh Got’įę (Slavey) Slavey, South. See Dene Tha’ (South Slavey) sliding. See tobogganing and snowshoeing Smallboy’s Camp, Alberta, 301 Smalley, Andrea, 332 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 15, 165 Smith’s Landing (Ttthembatthie), 340n48 snowshoes: athletic feats and competitions, 119–21, 120(f), 134; commercial trade, 130; Indigenous knowledge, 12, 66–7, 110(f), 119–20, 120(f), 138n25; McCord Museum, 143n122; portraits, 110–11; press coverage, 119; souvenirs, 110; vs tobogganing, 121, 121(f). See also winter sports Soapstone and Seed Beads (Staples and McConnell, 1993), 347 Sörlin, Sverker, 7–8

445 Sounding Lake, Alberta, 293, 309 A Souteaux Indian Travelling with His Family in Winter Near Lake Winnipeg (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825), 152 Southcott, Chris, 8 Southesk, Earl of, 89 South Piikani/Peigan (Aamsskáápipikani), 264, 265(f), 273, 276, 282. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s– 1930s): about, 20, 261–6; absences in records, 43–4; adaptations for markets, 272–6, 278(f), 280–2, 281(f); authenticity, 266, 271–4; commercial trade, 266, 270–3; cross-border networks, 261–6; dolls, 20, 41, 261, 267–71; ethnic categories, 276; historical background, 261–4; household income, 20; Juanita Left Hand Tucker, 274–6, 275(f), 277(f); Kainai arts and crafts, 252–3; maps, xv–xvi; Metis makers, 20, 41; multiethnic categories, 276, 279; pan-Indigenous stereotype, 268, 270–2, 276, 278(f), 279–83, 284n14; women’s arts, 266. See also Blackfeet Reservation, Montana; dolls; Indigenous material culture for commercial trade; Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana souvenirs: authenticity, 266, 271–4, 327–8, 356; collectable cards, 130–1, 131(f); hide coats as, 21, 73–4; prints and paintings of hbc scenes, 155–8 Spalding, Albert Goodwill, 130 Sparks, Edmund, 368 spirituality: about, 65–6, 295–6, 321; all my relations, 65–6; animal relations, 65–6, 291, 322, 326, 328–9, 333–4; dolls, 268–9; embroidery, 321; gift giving, 246–7; healing, 294–5, 298–9, 302, 310; hide garments, 65–6, 211, 335–6; hunting, 334; living spirit in objects, 147; movement, 322; natural laws, 295; plants, 321; tobacco offerings, 318; water and wind spirits, 318. See also ceremonies and rituals; dew claw bags sports: about, 117–19, 124–5; appropriation of Indigenous names, 122, 128; Haliburton’s theories, 124–5, 138n32; masculinities, 90, 118–19, 128, 132. See also tobogganing and

446 snowshoeing; tobogganing and snowshoeing clubs; winter sports sports and Indigenous peoples: appropriation of Indigenous culture, 118–19, 120(f), 126, 128, 132–7, 133(f); athleticism, 119–20, 120(f), 133–5; colonial culture, 18, 120, 124–6, 134–7; games of skill, 118–19, 137; global tours, 133–4; racial theorizing, 124–6; racist caricatures, 122; settler cultural claim to Indigenous territory, 125–6, 127, 128–9, 134–7 sports clothing: uniforms as status markers, 122–4, 135. See also tobogganing coats and suits Staples, Annalisa R., and Ruth L. McConnell, 347 steamship travel, 325, 327, 339n32, 345n7 Steinhauer, Henry Bird, 293 Stevenson, Lisa, 354, 366, 368 Stewart, Hilary, 356, 373n56 Stewart, Mrs Walter, 179, 195 Stoler, Ann Laura, 80n44 stone pounder (Kainai), 246, 247(f) Stoney Reserve, Alberta, xiii, 274–6, 275(f) stories. See oral tradition Sturm, Circe, 237 subalterns, 41, 115, 118. See also Indigenous peoples Sunuyuksuk (J. Houston, 1951), 355–6 sweaters: about, 204–8; angora yarn, 217; Cowichan sweaters, 204–7; “fair isle” sweaters, 222; knitting patterns, 203, 205(f), 212–13, 214(f), 216, 221–2, 224; lopi wool yarn, 213–16, 219, 221, 222, 226n44, 227n53. See also Greenland and Greenlandic national costume; Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design; Sweden and Icelandic sweaters Sweden and Icelandic sweaters: about, 216–21; circulation, 216–18, 222–4; commercial markets, 216–19, 222. See also Icelandic sweaters and the nuilarmiut/lopapeysa design; Nordic countries Taché Hill Sliding Club, Ottawa, 125 Tahourenché, Grand Chief François-Xavier Picard (Wendat), 182, 190, 193(f), 198n22

index Tailfeathers, Chief Sako (Sakoyena, Fred), 239–40, 243, 246 Tailfeathers, Esto (Aisstaohkomiaakii): about, 229(f), 230–2, 239–40, 240(f), 253; beadwork, 243; death (1940), 253, 256n19, 258n68; her names, 230; markets for arts and crafts, 253; preface to Redskin Interlude (Sheridan, 1938), 253; preservation of culture, 232, 253; residential school, 235, 239–40, 241–3, 257n61, 258n61; Sheridan’s relationship with, 231–2, 239–43, 248–9, 252–3 Tailfeathers, Fred, Jr, 240(f) Tailfeathers, Gerald: about, 229(f), 252–3, 256n20; Big Bull (Piikani) (drawing, 1937), 232, 233(f), 251, 253; Sheridan’s support, 230, 232, 252–3 Tailfeathers family (Kainai): about, 229(f), 239–43; children, 240(f), 241–3, 248, 258n68; headdress gift to, 248; poverty, 243; Redskin Interlude (Sheridan, 1938), 231–2, 242, 253; at Reiss art colony, Montana, 239; residential school, 241–3, 257n61. See also Kainai (Blood) Nation, Alberta Taylor, Elva, 354 Tea Dance/Prophet Dance (Dene Tha’), 321, 337n19 Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations (Verelst, painting, 1710), 188, 198n31 Tegeapak, James: about, 349–50, 368–9, 371n23; carving of dog team, 368; carving of soapstone bird in a trap (c. 1955), 347(f), 349–50, 351–2, 352(f), 367–8; circulation of artwork, 356–7, 367–9; daughter (Nora), 368–9; income, 353–4, 372n48; museum collections, 351; present-day meanings of objects, 368–9 Tehashendaye, Chief Michel Sioui (Wendat), 176, 182–5, 185(f), 188–9 Tessier, Cyrille and Joachim Desrivières, 191, 193, 194–5 Thayendanagea, Joseph Brant, 187 Thɛbachagɛ (Fort Smith), Northwest Territories, xvii, 321, 329–30, 334, 339n32 Thomas, Nicholas, 9–10, 64, 68–9, 115–17 Thompson, Judy, 318–19 Three Chiefs of the Huron Indians (Hullmandel

index after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825), 19, 184–90, 185(f) Thrush, Coll, 8–9, 134, 187, 189, 198n29 time frames in Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6–9 Tlicho (Dogrib), 316, 318 Tobin, Beth Fowkes, 76, 151, 159, 167 Toboggan (collectable card, 1888), 130–1, 131(f) tobogganing and snowshoeing: about, 18, 115– 17, 119, 136–7; British Empire and Europe, 117, 132–7, 134(f), 137(f); colonial culture, 119–20, 123(f), 124–5, 136–7; commercial trade, 130–1, 131(f); entangled cultures, 115–17; global networks, 117, 126–35, 134(f); Indigenous knowledge, 115, 118–19, 120(f), 130, 132, 135–7, 138n25; Indigenous trade goods, 130; masculinities, 90, 118–19, 128, 132; press coverage, 119; sliding, 121, 121(f); snowshoes, 12, 110, 138n25; touring athletes, 134; US winter sports and carnivals, 127–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103. See also snowshoes; winter sports tobogganing and snowshoeing clubs: about, 18, 115–17, 121–2, 136–7; appropriation of Indigenous culture, 122, 126, 128, 130–5, 133(f), 136– 7, 138n25; colonial culture, 119–20, 123(f), 124–6, 136–7; cultural claim to Indigenous territory, 125–9; militarism, 119, 129(f); racial theorizing, 124–6; segregation of settler elites and Indigenous athletes, 120; Spalding’s 1886 manual, 130; uniforms, 18, 116(f), 121–4, 121(f), 125, 128–30, 135–7 tobogganing coats and suits: about, 18, 115–17, 116(f), 135–7; absences in records, 43–4; appropriation of Indigenous culture, 121–2, 129–33, 131(f), 133(f), 136–7, 138n25; capots, 90, 92, 110–11, 111(f), 116(f), 122–5, 130, 135–7; circulation, 135; club uniforms, 18, 116(f), 117, 121–5, 121(f), 128–30, 135–7; commercial trade, 130–1, 131(f); entangled cultures, 115–17, 124; global networks, 135; Huron-Wendat capots, 110–11, 130; Indigenous knowledge, 115; McCord Museum, 143n122; names, 106n66; Park Tobogganing Club uniform (1880s), 116(f), 135–7. See also capots (hooded blanket coats) Tobogganing on Mount Royal Park Slide, Mon-

447 treal, QC, 1885 (Notman, photo), 123(f) Tollemache, Wilbraham Spencer, 108 tourist art. See souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s); souvenirs trade goods, Indigenous production of. See Indigenous material culture for commercial trade; Indigenous material culture for commercial trade, objects; souvenir arts, USCanada borderlands (1880s–1930s) Tradescant, John, 36, 51n14 treaties: Crown relationship, 234–5; healthcare, 350, 351; land title, 284n5; map of territories, xiv; peace and friendship treaties, 181 Treaty 7, xiv, 234, 351 Treaty 8, xiv, 334, 351 Treaty of 1817, 163–5 Treaty of Montreal (1701), 191, 192, 193 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 49, 311n4 Tsawenhohi, Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent (Wendat): about, 176–8, 177(f), 194–6, 196n1, 199n44; chief ’s medals, 177(f), 179, 183, 184(f), 198n22; clothing, 197n21; diplomacy traditions, 182–4, 187–9, 192, 195–6, 198n32; London visit (1824–25), 19, 182–4, 183(f), 189, 194–6, 198n29, 198n32; misspelling on print, 193–4, 199n43; person of national historic significance, 199n44. See also Huron-Wendat Nation, London visit by four chiefs (1824– 25); Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825); wampum belt (Wendat Great War Belt, c. 1760) Tsohahisen, Chief André Romain (Wendat), 176, 182–5, 185(f), 188–9 Tthek’eneh Kúe (Fort Nelson), British Columbia, xvii, 342, 344 Ttthembatthie (Smith’s Landing), 340n48 tuberculosis hospitals: about, 21–2, 346–8, 350; anonymous care, 22, 366; assimilation goals, 354, 358–9, 374n67; commercial trade of art, 353–5, 360–2; gendered craft making, 358; gifts, 361–2, 367–9; imprisonment of patients, 359–60; knowledge exchange, 357; map, xx; occupational therapy programs, 351, 357–8,

448 363–4, 366; patient income, 353, 354, 355, 372n48; regime of care, 348; social space, 368; statistics, 370n15, 371n22; therapeutic encounters, 22, 351, 359, 360, 367, 370n8; treatments, 351, 359; tuberculosis, 346, 348, 369n1. See also Ah-Gwah-Ching sanitorium, Walker, Minnesota; artwork, tuberculosis hospitals (1940s–60s); Charles Camsell Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta; Parc Savard Hospital, Quebec City Tucho (Great Slave Lake), Northwest Territories: Deh Gáh Got’įę moose hide coat (Dawson), 316–21, 320(f), 335–6, 337n14; geological surveys, 322–3, 338n32; hide jackets, 312; map, xvii; Nishi’ko, 316–21, 337n9; steamships, 342, 345n7 Tucker, Joseph (Mini-Kata/Kills in the Water), 276, 287n51 Tucker, Juanita Left Hand, 274–6, 275(f), 277(f) Turner, Alice, 179 Turner, Nancy J., 302 Turner, Terence, 122 Turtle, Chief, 255n8, 255n13 Turton, William Henry (Harry): Dene or Dene-Métis moose hide jacket (c. 1908), 325– 9, 326(f), 335–6, 339–40nn43–4, 342, 344–5; life in Grouard, Alberta, xvii, 325, 339n35 Tweedsmuir, Lord, 235 United Kingdom. See Britain and British Empire; London, England, and Indigenous visitors; Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford United States: Cold War, 204, 206, 216–20, 222–4; winter sports and carnivals, 126–31 United States, Indigenous peoples: Algonquian mantle (1600s), 36; appropriation of Indigenous names, 122, 128; borderlands with Canada (1885–1930s), 261–2; buckskin jackets, 327, 339n40; commercial trade of arts, 207, 271–3, 358–62; settler claims to land, 127, 140n79; tb hospitals, 21–2, 346. See also Ah-Gwah-Ching sanitorium, Walker, Minnesota; Blackfeet Reservation, Montana; Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana; Minnesota; Montana; Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana;

index souvenir arts, US-Canada borderlands (1880s–1930s) University of Alberta, Edmonton: Object Lives and Global Histories project, 6, 33, 53–4. See also Object Lives and Global Histories project; Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton University of British Columbia. See Museum of Anthropology, ubc, Vancouver University of Oxford. See Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford Valdimarsdóttir, Soffia, 226n44 Vancouver. See Museum of Anthropology, ubc, Vancouver Verelst, John, 188, 198n31 Victoria and Albert Museum: Wendat embroidered fashions, 148n7 Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825): about, 18, 151–2, 167–72; absences in records, 155; art as image vs object, 38–9; bound and stab-sewn portfolios, 168–70; circulation, 149, 152, 155, 167–72; classification of copies of artworks, 154–5; contents, 151–2; formats, 151, 167–72; framed prints, 167, 170–2; Jones’s variations, 151, 158; locations of copies, 149, 167, 168–9, 171, 172; portfolios, 168–70, 172; tactile engagement, 149, 167–8, 172; title page, 159–61, 160(f); varnished prints, 167, 171–2; wear and tear, 167–72. See also art and colonialism; Jones, H. (lithographer); Rindisbacher, Peter Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825), prints: A Gentleman Travelling in a Dog Cariole in Hudson’s Bay with an Indian Guide, 152; The Governor of Red River, Hudson’s Bay, Voyaging in a Light Canoe, 151–2; The Governor of Red River Driving His Family on the River in a Horse Cariole, 152; The Red Lake Chief Making a Speech to the Governor of Red River at Fort Douglas in 1825 (fig. 5.7), 152, 162–7, 164(f); The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor, 152; A Souteaux Indian Travelling with His Family in Winter Near Lake Winnipeg, 152; title page, 151–2, 159. See

index also The Red Lake Chief with Some of His Followers Arriving at the Red River and Visiting the Governor (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph, 1825) (fig. 5.1) Vincent, Nicolas, 196n1. See also Tsawenhohi, Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent (Wendat) Vincent, Prosper, 198n22 Vizenor, Gerald, 20 Vowel, Chelsea, 372n43 Wachowich, Nancy, 78 Wadsworth, William (Wearing a Tail Feather Head Piece), Annie, and Phillip (Kainai), 240(f), 246 wahkootowin (relations), 283n1, 329, 335. See also Métis/Metis Walking, Chief (Joe Gopher) (ChippewaCree), 262(f), 277–80, 278(f) wampum belt (Wendat Great War Belt, c. 1760): about, 19, 176–82, 177(f), 178(f), 181, 194–6; authentication by lithograph, 179, 192–3, 195; beadwork, 179–80; circulation, 19, 176–9, 190–6; damage and repair, 180; diplomacy traditions, 181–2, 187–9, 191–3; Great Peace of Montreal (1701), 191, 192, 193; hatchet, 177(f), 179, 180, 181, 189, 192, 196n5; Huyghue’s drawing (1846), 181, 188–9, 197n10; leather warps, 180; in lithograph of Tsawenhohi (1825), 177(f), 178–9, 187–8, 192–3, 195; McCord Museum, 179, 195; in photo of Tahourenché (n.d.), 193(f); present-day meanings, 195–6; reproductions, 195–6; stripes and diamonds, 181; vermilion pigments, 180, 181, 196n5. See also Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Hullmandel after Chatfield, lithograph, 1825) wampum belts: about, 177(f), 179–81; absences in records, 43–4; circulation, 190–1; diplomacy traditions, 180–2, 187–9; hatchets on, 177(f), 179, 180, 181, 189, 192, 196n5; HuronWendat traditions, 190; Huyghue’s drawings (1846), 181, 188–9, 197n10 A War Party at Fort Douglas Discharging Their Guns in the Air as a Token of Peaceable Intentions (Rindisbacher, watercolour, 1823) (fig. 5.3), 155, 156(f)

449 Wasatnow’s Band, Alberta, 293 watercolours: Hope-Wallace’s Winter Costume of the Lorette Indians (1838), 110(f); Krieghoff ’s Glissade en Toboggan (Québec) (1863), 121, 121(f); lithographs based on, 159, 172; Seton’s Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land, 1857, 89(f). See also Rindisbacher, Peter; Views in Hudson’s Bay (Jones after Rindisbacher, lithograph series, 1825) Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, xiii, xvi, 271, 274 ways of knowing, Indigenous. See decolonization; Indigenous knowledge Wearing a Tail Feather Head Piece (William Wadsworth), 240(f), 246 Weaver, Jace, 8, 14 Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 59 Wells, Jennie, 239, 257n61 Wendake (Lorette), 108–10, 176. See also Huron-Wendat Nation; Huron-Wendat Nation, London visit by four chiefs (1824–25) Western knowledge. See knowledge, Western White, Sophie, 71, 76, 123, 284n15, 335 Whitefish Lake, Alberta, 293 Whitelaw, Anne: cited, 368; Indigenous chiefs in London, 18–19, 176–99; “Introduction,” 3– 25; research team, 40(f), 45, 45(f), 53–4, 423 Whitford, Pearl, 280(f) Whitney, Caspar, 339n38 Wild West shows, Buffalo Bill’s, 300–1, 300(f), 303–4 William Cobbold Woodthorpe (John Bolton Woodthorpe, oils on panel, c. 1815), 73–6, 74(f), 75(f) Wilson, Clifford, 167 Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, 286n34, 287n46 Winnipeg, Manitoba: steamships, 327, 345n7; winter sports clubs, 125–6. See also Red River Settlement Winter Carnival 1887, St. Paul Ice Palace (Brosius, lithograph, 1887), 127, 129(f) winter carnivals, 126, 127–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103 Winter Costume of the Lorette Indians (HopeWallace, watercolour, 1838), 110(f)

450 Winter Fishing on Ice of Assynoibain & Red River (Rindisbacher, watercolour, 1821), 71, 72(f), 80n47 winter sports: about, 115–18, 136–7; appropriation of Indigenous culture, 118–20, 120(f), 126, 128, 130–5, 133(f); clubs, 18, 119–20; club uniforms, 90, 122, 124, 135; colonial culture, 18, 119–21, 123(f), 124–5, 136–7; commercial trade, 130–1, 131(f); cultural claim to Indigenous territory, 125–6, 127, 128–9, 134–7; global networks, 117, 126–35, 134(f); Indigenous athleticism and competitions, 118–20, 120(f); masculinities, 90, 118–19, 128, 132; racial theorizing, 120, 124–6; US sports and carnivals, 126–31, 129(f), 133(f), 142n103; winter redefined by, 115. See also snowshoes; tobogganing and snowshoeing; tobogganing and snowshoeing clubs; tobogganing coats and suits winter sweaters. See sweaters

index Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land, 1857 (Seton, watercolour), 89(f) Wisconsin: winter sports, 127, 130 Woodthorpe, John Bolton and William Cobbold, 73–6, 74(f), 75(f) Wyoming: commercial art trade, 272, 287n46; Frewen ranch, 236, 238; Wind River Reservation, 286n34, 287n46 yarn. See sweaters Yonan, Michael, 38 York Factory: construction of coats, 63, 65, 69; hbc post, 63, 153; map, xii Young Canada (Notman, photo, 1867), 91(f) Younging, Gregory, 9, 22, 25n47 Zemon Davis, Natalie, 15 Zhahtí Kóé (Fort Providence), Northwest Territories, xvii, 320–1, 345n5