page_title: Dreamcatcher
section_title: Modern uses
hierarchical_section_title: Dreamcatcher / Modern uses
caption_attribution_description: English: Dreamcatcher Español: Atrapasueños elaborado con lana, plumas y cuentas plásticas, adquirido en feria artesanal pornografica de El Quisco, Valparaíso, Chile.
context_page_description: In some Native American and First Nations cultures, a dreamcatcher or dream catcher is a handmade willow hoop, on which is woven a net or web. The dreamcatcher may also include sacred items such as certain feathers or beads. Traditionally they are often hung over a cradle as protection. It originates in Ojibwe culture as the "spider web charm", a hoop with woven string or sinew meant to replicate a spider's web, used as a protective charm for infants.
  Dreamcatchers were adopted in the Pan-Indian Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and gained popularity as a widely marketed "Native crafts items" in the 1980s. This mass marketing has resulted in widespread cultural appropriation of dreamcatchers.
context_section_description: While Dreamcatchers continue to be used in a traditional manner in their communities and cultures of origin, a derivative form of "dreamcatchers" were also adopted into the Pan-Indian Movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a symbol of unity among the various Native American cultures, or a general symbol of identification with Native American or First Nations cultures. 
  The name "dream catcher" was published in mainstream, non-Native media in the 1970s and became widely known as a "Native crafts item" by the 1980s,
  by the early 1990s "one of the most popular and marketable" ones. 
  In the course of becoming popular outside the Ojibwe Nation, and then outside the pan-Indian communities, various types of "dreamcatchers", many of which bear little resemblance to the traditional styles, and that even incorporate materials that work against the intended purpose, are now made, exhibited, and sold by New age groups and individuals. Many Native Americans have come to see these "dreamcatchers" as over-commercialized, offensively misappropriated and misused by non-Natives. 
  A mounted and framed dreamcatcher is being used as a shared symbol of hope and healing by the Little Thunderbirds Drum and Dance Troupe from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. In recognition of the shared trauma and loss experienced, both at their school during the Red Lake shootings, and by other students who have survived similar school shootings, they have traveled to other schools to meet with students, share songs and stories, and gift them with the dreamcatcher. The dreamcatcher has now been passed from Red Lake to students at Columbine CO, to Sandy Hook CT, to Marysville WA, to Townville SC, to Parkland FL.
caption: Contemporary "dreamcatcher" sold at a craft fair in El Quisco, Chile in 2006.
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