|  Native
American culture can reasonably be said to take a holistic approach
to the world, in which food, clothing, shelter, ceremony, spirituality,
past, present, and future are all intertwined and incorporated into
a single comprehensive worldview. This outlook accepts evolution as
much as it accepts tradition. The exhibition Identity by Design: Tradition,
Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses, showing at
the National Museum of the American Indian, demonstrates how clothing
is intricately entwined and a vibrant element in the lives of Native
American women.
For many Native tribes, the clothing a woman wears is a visual representation
of her triumphs, trials and tribulations. It is a method of telling
the story of her life. As a girl, she will receive a dress made for
her by her parents or grandparents. As an adolescent becoming an adult,
new dresses will be produced to symbolize this stage of her journey.
Sometimes certain girls will become a representation of a great spirit,
and the appropriate clothes will be made to illustrate this aspect.
As such, clothing is not only a part of female identity, but also a
catalyst for the transformative process.
There are three popular dress styles in Native American clothing which
have changed and evolved with time. These are the side-fold dress, the
two-hide dress, and the three-hide dress. The side-fold dress tends
to use one large animal hide which is worn around the body and sewn
up on one side. This method was popular in the early 1800s with the
tribes in the Upper Missouri River, northeastern Plains and western
Great Lakes areas. The two-hide dress style became popular in the early
1830s, most likely as the availability of skins increased (Paterak:1994,
84), and was found in many of the Plains and Plateau tribes. Made from
matching two deer, elk, or sheep hides, this fashion became popular
as horseback riding was being introduced. The three-hide dress developed
after the two-hide, and is often used in dance ceremonies.
As time went on and Caucasian influences increased, many new materials
were introduced. These were integrated into existing designs as well
as forming the basis for new ones. This ingenuity had extended to before
Europeans had even arrived, when foreign materials were introduced by
trade between tribes. Dentalium shells, elk teeth, shell beads, and
paints are all examples of rare pre-European goods that arrived via
intertribal trade and were incorporated into dresses. With the arrival
of the Europeans in the 1700s came a slew of trade goods. Some tribes
utilized these materials while others resisted, however there irrefutably
was an effect on the styles of dresses that could be made. Indian cloth
and trade beads were two of the main products to become incorporated
into Native American garments. “Indian” cloth, a woolen
cloth also  known
as saved-list, was produced primarily in the Gloucestershire region
of England, and became more widely used when Euro-American groups decimated
the local animal species used for hides. Later on, calico and other
cheaper cloth material would be used instead of wool.
In December 2005, six Native American women artists from the Plains,
Plateau and Great Basin areas were invited to see the National Museum
of the American Indian’s collection. These dressmakers—Jamie
Okuma, Gladys Jefferson, Jackie Parsons, Keri Jhane Myers, Joyce Growing
Thunder Fogarty, and Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty — shared
their in-depth knowledge of Native American clothing from a contemporary
as well as a historical viewpoint. Some of them would later donate costumes
to the exhibition. It is clear from their stories that the creation
of clothing forms part of the foundation of a whole lifestyle. In the
show’s catalogue, Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock) relates
her childhood, “After my first powwow when I was five at my grandmother’s
reservation, that was it for me. Seeing all the outfits really pushed
me to do beadwork. The powwow experience when I was younger was the
best thing I could have ever done or had my family involve me in.”
From a young age, these women were enveloped in this world of creation.
The design of the dress also has animate qualities. Juanita Growing
Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine/Sioux) explains, “A lot of dresses
have sound. I have coins on my dress. I like it when I can hear the
clinking of my coins or the snapping of my fringes when I’m dancing.
It’s all part of the feeling that the dress is alive.” Jackie
Parsons also imparts this special feature: “When I’m wearing
a Blackfeet dress that I have made, I feel really powerful, because
I feel so very connected to everything around me.” This is a fairly
typical view illustrating the holistic nature not just of Native American
clothing, but Indian culture in general. As plants and animals have
spirits, by incorporating them into a wearable object, they empower
the individual and make her or him one with the world. While the materials
used are significant to the power of a piece, symbolism in the form
of the design of the dress is just as important, if not more so. The
patterns, paintings and beadwork incorporated into the clothing can
sometimes tell a story, other times simply represent what is important
to the maker. Using old materials from a previous dress, for instance,
is a connection between the past and the present.
Many dresses play a crucial role in the ceremonies of various tribes.
The Jicarilla Apache’s Keesda Ceremony has a specific dress for
puberty dances or ceremonies which can be passed down through generations
of daughters. The minimally beaded buckskin dress
is worn with a bone necklace and shell to represent White Shell Woman,
a revered spirit also known as Changing Woman. This dress is worn until
the last day of the ceremony when the garment is removed and the girl
symbolically becomes a woman. For the Lakota, young virgin girls are
chosen to represent the White Buffalo Calf Woman, and are transformed
into an avatar of the spirit by their costume. Many of these ceremonies
have formed in modern times, illustrating the flexibility and everchanging
nature of Indian society. Jackie Parsons comments on her own Blackfeet
tribe that, “Blackfeet women did not dance until about the 1920s.
The men allowed the women to dance, but they could only dance with the
men in a circle to the Owl Dance.” She goes on to describe the
formation of new societies in the Blackfeet tribe such as the Headdress
Society, where new fashions were introduced.
The tribulations of the Native peoples also manifested itself in the
short-lived Ghost Dance movement, which started in the late 1880s. These
dresses were decorated with boldly painted figures and symbols. Both
buckskin and cloth were used in the making of Ghost Dance clothing.
The designs embellished onto these dresses, such as the Thunderbird
and new moon symbols, represented the hope of Native Americans for the
stanching  of
the evils being brought upon them and a new existence. The Ghost Dance
movement ended only a few years after it began. The painted symbols
of Ghost Dance dresses were attempts to call the power of the spirits
and their world to save the Indian people from the cultural genocide
they found themselves in. When the movement failed to deliver on these
promises, it faded away, and the old traditions were taken up again.
In the late reservation era, following the end of the Ghost Dance movement,
forced assimilation was increasing drastically. In response, heavily
beaded and ornamented clothing rife with symbolism was produced by Native
women, their method of combatting this attempt to stamp out their culture.
There would be other spiritual movements that would continue to present
themselves, and would have their own effect on Native American fashion
up to the present day.
There are specific accolades that are unique to each tribe, adornments
which symbolize power and demand respect. For the Comanche, this is
an otterskin cap. Elk tooth dresses may be given to the brides of certain
tribes such as the Cheyenne, or worn by young girls of powerful families.
Often rarity of the ingredient gives value to the material. Since the
elk teeth used were the eyeteeth, only two would be obtained from every
elk. Gladys Jefferson comments that, “As a boy grew up, he would
collect elk teeth and save them for his mother and sisters to put on
a dress for his wife when he married.” These dresses would be
created sometimes by artistic guilds within the tribe, other times by
individuals, a mother, a  relative,
a husband, a daughter, but in all cases the end result is a garment
which bestows recognition upon the owner as well as the maker. Beaded
moccasins, for example, are sometimes made for special individuals.
Mary Little Bear Inkanish’s (Cheyenne) biography describes how,
“At the Sun Dance when Mary was about a year old, her aunt had
a give-away in her honor. She had made Mary a pair of full-beaded moccasins—even
the soles were beaded —to show that this little girl’s family
would not let her feet touch the ground if they could help it.”
In contemporary times, a dressmaker might honor ancestors with a dress
which shows her late relatives’ deeds. By wearing this dress,
the dressmaker would be physically, emotionally and spiritually connecting
to her ancestors. Such is the case with Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty
(Assiniboine/Sioux) who made a Sioux-style dress complete with accessories,
decorated with beaded imagery of horses to honor her grandparents Ben
and Josephine Gray Hawk. Georgianna Old Elk from the Assiniboine tribe
says of her dancing dress, made for her by her extended family in Canada,
“I’m just the first keeper; it’s not mine. When I
dance I am never alone. Not only with my dress, but every bit of me
or every part I wear was made by family. Even though they are gone now,
they are still with  me,
and I feel them with me. So, I know I am never alone. I believe in the
power of my dress and who made it for me.”
Ultimately Identity by Design demonstrates how dresses form an integral
part of Native American culture, where the constructive process and
ownership of the garment compose a large part of a woman’s self-image,
as an individual, as a member of the tribe, and as a Native American.
Keri Jhane Myers illustrates as she comments, “When I was growing
up, these dresses were part of our family. For the women in my family,
the buckskin dress is part of our being. Every week in my life, I spent
at least two to three days in my own dress, in my own buckskin.”
The six artists who assisted in this exhibition mention how dressmaking
takes up their day, an activity that never ends. Inez Hubert (Spokane)
recalls, “I used to get up at two o’clock in the morning
and start on an outfit so I could get it done on time and just bead
all day long. And if my husband was going to work, why I’d get
his breakfast, too, and then he’d leave and I’d just stay
at the bead. And I was always, always, and always at it.”
Photographs by
Ernest Amoroso, courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Museum of the
American Indian. www.nmai.si.edu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the National Museum of the American Indian
for providing the ancillary materials and catalogue Identity by Design:
Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses,
edited by Emil Her Many Horses,
which was a comprehensive and enlightening covering of the subject,
as well as the source for the quotes used in this article. Also thanks
to the authors of the articles within the catalogue, including W. Richard
West, Jr., Emil Her Many Horses,
Colleen Cutschall, Elizabeth Woody, and Janet Catherine Berlo.
REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Paterak, Josephine. 1994 Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume. New
York,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Her Many Horses, Emil (Editor). 2007 Identity by Design: Tradition,
Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses. New York, HarperCollins
Publishers.
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