North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler.

  • Clark Wissler
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    74/160 (page 66)
    Northern Shoshone, Plains-Cree, and Sarsi use a smaller pouch of quite a different type, also reported from the Saulteaux and Cree of the Woodland area. These objects are, however, so often presented to visit¬ ing Indians that collectors find it difficult to separate the intrusions from the native samples for any particu¬ lar tribe. We have some reason for thinking that the Dakota type is quite recent, for the Teton claim that formerly the entire skins of young antelope, deer, and even birds ■ and beavers were used as smoking bags. Some ex¬ amples of such bags have been collected and are quite frequent in the ceremonial outfits of the Blackfoot. Again, the collections from many tribes contain bags made from the whole skins of unborn buffalo and deer, used for gathering berries and storing dried food, from which it is clear that a general type of seamless bag was once widely used. All this raises the question as to whether the introduction of metal cutting and sewing implements during the historic period may not have influenced the development of these long, rectangular fringed pipe bags. The strike-a-light pouch often made of modern commercial leather is common to the Wind River Shoshone, Ute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Dakota, Gros Ventre, and Assiniboine (Fig. 25). Among the Ara¬ paho and Gros Ventre we also find a large pouch of similar designs. Again, the Northern Shoshone and Blackfoot are not included, neither are these pouches frequent among the Kiowa and Comanche.