From Girdles to Sandals – Extreme Sophistication in Native Clothing

Ceremonial clothing such as headdresses, cloaks, intricate braided bags, and baskets have been recovered from burials at elite mounds in Spiro, Oklahoma, and some other items have been found in places like Etowah, but little has been recovered from sites of the villages to Wickliffe. The evidence comes from printed-on-cloth pottery which very clearly depicts the techniques used to make braided textiles from a variety of plant fibers, including dogbane (hemp); nettle and milkweed. The woody stems are harvested in the fall and inside are fibers that are twisted together to make twine and from there the sky is the limit. The increased number of complex structural trends parallels the increased social complexity inferred from Mississippi settlement configurations. (Penelope Ballad Drooker) Which means that the more textile construction techniques there are and the more complex they become, it seems to be a reflection of the increasing complexities in everyday life.

Unfortunately, there is an extremely limited amount of remaining textile material to investigate, however large Mississippian textiles, like those of earlier periods, tend to have rectangular shapes used for skirts, cloaks, and blankets. Three-dimensional objects such as bags and bags are also common. There is much more to textile manufacturing than what is found in archaeological sites. Doubts remain as to whether this was a task relegated to one gender or whether both participated. Although cultures and societies came and went, often without explanation, sophisticated woven textile types were used throughout the contact period.

The Moravian missionary, David Zeisburger, left journals detailing crooked clothing worn only a generation earlier. He was among the Delaware in Ohio in the mid to late 18th century. The Hovey Lake Archaeological Site in far southwestern Indiana is a site that was populated from about 1400 to 1700 with remains of the Angel Mound people. They seem to have continued the tradition of making clothing and using braided textiles to print pottery. Cheryl Ann Munson’s interpretation of Hovey Lake in this regard is stated very clearly on the Hovey Lake website: “Villagers wove a variety of cloth items, such as blankets, shawls, skirts, and bags, using threads of vegetable fibers. Knotted nets were another type of fabric.”

There are few descriptions of this type of clothing worn by the natives after contact, thus again the lack of evidence to specifically state that the use of plant fibers continued well into the 17th century. There are a few visual pieces that can be interpreted as being made from plant fibers, including one by artist John White in 16th-century Virginia of a “Religious Man” depicted wearing a short twisted cloak that covers the left arm and leaves the right arm exposed. There is substantial evidence to strongly suggest that the basic pre- and proto-contact garment worn by women was a wraparound skirt. Usually described as knee-length, this garment was transferred to commercial cloth in the mid-18th century. Some resources mention native cloth skirts from Virginia and North Carolina that are said to be made of “grass silk with fringe at the bottom.”

Men appear to have worn cloaks as a single tunic-like garment or perhaps in combination with or over a loincloth. Women are almost always described as wearing coats in combination with a skirt. These “styles” continued into the 18th century when wool, cotton, silk, and linen fabrics were introduced through trade. In the mid-18th century, Thomas Davies began illustrating the Huron and other people of the Great Lakes, constantly putting the women in a sort of skirt made of trade cloth and leggings made of wool. The shirts seem to be highly valued in terms of what the natives sell. Cotton from India and the Middle East found its way to the trading centers of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes. It ranked higher than commercial rifles on lists of high-demand products. Shirts were worn over skirts and loincloths with woolen blankets instead of the earlier plant fiber cloaks. Silk ribbons in a variety of colors and sizes were also in high demand. Many of the earliest examples the author has seen in museums and collections use one- or two-color silk ribbons in multiple rows beginning at the hem of a garment and sometimes reaching mid-waist. Along with this came the use of commercial silver earrings, ear wheels, cone and ball, triangle pieces worn on both the nose and ears, silver crosses and brooches from the size of a tiny button to ring brooches placed on multiple rows and in some cases with geometric effects. design patterns on both shirts and skirts.

Silk scarves were worn around the head as a turban in men, and were sometimes worn as neck wraps in women. The use of silver brooches on silk scarves and blankets continued to increase towards the end of the 18th century. There was also a change in the way silk ribbons were worn in the late 18th century and it was fully developed in 1802 as a style of cut silk appliqué that became very popular and widely represented in the Wabash Valley. by the English painter George. Winter. He spent 1838-1839 with the Miami and Potawatomi Indians of central and northern Indiana. The dozens of portraits of him give insight into the life and culture of the last days of these extraordinary people before the US government forcibly deported them and altered their lives and traditions forever. Silk turbans and shoulder-length hair on men became the norm. In the 18th century we see men with shaved heads, locks of the scalp, gasweh or cockroach hair attached to the lock of the scalp. Eighteenth-century men appear to have cut off their ears and pierced them to accommodate an additional outer row of earrings, wampum, or other ornamentation.

Leggings in the 19th century show a wider band or wing flap where the two halves of the fabric were sewn together and embellished with appliques of silk ribbons. Both men and women wore hand-woven girdles or belts, but these were now made from woolen threads or yarn rather than plant fibers. Moccasins replaced fiber sandals and were constructed primarily from a single piece of leather, usually elk or buffalo. They had wing flaps, had a center seam construction, and were often embellished with porcupine quills on the flaps and sometimes the center seam. The fringes on the lapels consisted of tin or silver cones, each with a tuft of red or orange deer tail hair extending from it. White glass beads were sometimes sewn to the edges of the lapels to provide a finished look. By the 1830s, silk ribbon dominated the lapels of Miami and Potwatomi moccasins in the central Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, as well as among the Potawatomi and Menominee of Wisconsin. The Miami, Potawatomi, Piankeshaw, or other tribes in this region did not make extensive use of beads to create appliques until they were moved to Kansas and Oklahoma. Museum collections in Canada, Chicago, Grand Rapids, and elsewhere support this evidence.

As George Winter pointed out, these clothes with elegant silk ribbons and men’s frock coats, women’s silk parasols and silk shawls were worn regularly and not just for funerals or ceremonies. Winter stayed in the log cabin belonging to the captive Frances Slocum and made numerous observations in his journals to this effect.

A marked change in the blouse or shirt worn by women occurred in the early 19th century. Kakima Burnett, a Potawatomi woman who was married to an American merchant, was greatly influenced by the Catholic nuns and missionaries who frequented the Potawatomi villages in southwestern Michigan when the Burnetts established a trading operation in 1780. Kakima was the daughter of Chief Aniquiba and Topenebee’s sister. , principal chief of the Potawatomi in southwestern Michigan. She married them a Catholic priest in Detroit. Her children were educated in Detroit by Catholic nuns. One of the sons came to the Fort Wayne, Indiana area and associated with Issac McCoy, a missionary to the Indians. Kakima came to Indiana after the death of her husband sometime towards the end of the War of 1812. With all the influence of “Black Robes”, Kakima and other women from the same background and culture began to emulate the nuns by wearing big collars on their shirts. By the 1830s, it is clear that this style or tradition had taken hold in the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. George Winter represents many of the women of Potawtomi and Miami, some who were not necessarily of the Catholic faith, wearing blouses or shirts with large collars. The large cloaks gave women additional ways to adorn their garments with silver brooches and silk ribbons. The earliest known illustration is of a woman wearing a caped blouse in the Detroit area around 1814. Another early depiction clearly shows a Seneca woman from western New York wearing one while teaching Iroquois children at a long wooden house

After researching countless garments from this period, there seemed to be two decidedly different types of caped blouses. One that reached the stomach and another that was long and was called waist. The shorter styles may be those worn by unmarried ladies of the town up to the time they took husbands. Then longer, fuller styles with a larger center opening seem to be worn by married women who would be having children, making it easier to breastfeed through the larger neck opening. More research is still being done on this.

In the late 1830s and 1840s, thousands of these central Wabash and Ohio Valley natives were forced to leave their homes and go west to Kansas and then to Oklahoma. Ribbon skirts, caped blouses and leggings, and even loincloths, were part of a tradition that remained partially intact in Oklahoma into the 20th century. There are reflections of this pre-moving era in modern pow wows, but many cross-cultural adaptations have been made since then.

Many other items left with family members were sold to collectors for food and coins during the depression era. There are significant collections of Miami clothing and other cultural items at the Cranbrook Institute in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. There are some Potawatomi items in the collections of the Chicago Field Museum. 18th and 19th century handbags, moccasins, finger woven sashes and knife sheaths are scattered throughout Europe, often taken as war effects or gifts during trade negotiations or treaties in the 18th and 19th centuries by military officers. . Others were sold to collectors in New York and California.

Many items from various Great Lakes and Ohio Valley tribes are stored in the back rooms of the American Indian Museum on the Mall in Washington DC. Previously, many of those items were located at the Heye Foundation in the Bronx, New York, where they were stored in crowded drawers and storage rooms. There are several books, mostly out of print, including “Bou Jou Nee Jee”; “Spirit Sings Collection” and “Patterns of Power, the McMichael Canadian Collection” which were published based on exhibits from the 1970s and 1980s. They have a fairly large selection of items that have been carefully studied by historians and re-enactors who wish to recreate clothing and feather work, finger weaving and silver trading and being as accurate and authentic as possible when speaking to the public and working with students.