Pair Mittens
date: label: Accession Date
content: 1 Mar 1883
label: Collection Date
content: 1881
name: label: Collector
content: Ivan Petroff
label: Donor Name
content: Ivan Petroff
notes: label: Notes
content: From card: "Loan: Crossroads Sep 22 1988. Loan returned: Jan 21 1993. Illus.: Crossroads of Continents catalogue Fig. 295, p. 223." From 19th or early 20th century exhibit label with card: "Mittens - Made of dressed deerskin, decorated with porcupine quills in a double row down the back of hand and around wrist, a single line down back half around the ball of thumb. The leather at the wrist is cut into a fringe and each strand wrapped with a quill at its base. Atnah Indians. Length, including fringe, 12 inches. Copper River, Alaska, 1881. Gift of Ivan Petroff. Collected Nuchek, Prince William Sound."
label: Notes
content: In the accession record, the collector, Petroff, says that this pair of mittens was made by an Ahtna person / people in the Copper River area of Alaska. The person who owned them moved to Nuchek, Prince William Sound, where Petroff collected them in 1881.
label: Notes
content: Illus. Fig. 4.15 p. 154 in Thompson, Judy. 2013. Women's work, women's art: nineteenth-century northern Athapaskan clothing. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Identified as mittens, Ahtna, caribou hide, porcupine quills, red ochre, silverberry seeds, sinew.
label: Notes
content: Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact http://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=604, retrieved 8-26-2012: Mittens, Ahtna Athabascan. These summer mittens made of tanned caribou skin are from the Ahtna people of the Copper River valley. They would have been worn with a caribou hide tunic, hood, and moccasin-pants. The mitts are simply but beautifully decorated with bands of dyed porcupine quill stitching and with quill-wrapped fringes, and have a quilled keeper-string that went around the neck. The mittens were collected ... [at] a time when glass trade beads were replacing porcupine quill designs on Athabascan clothing.
label: Notes
content: This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.
label: Record Last Modified
content: 3 Mar 2023
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Hinchinbrook Island / Nuchek (collected here), Prince William Sound / Copper River, Alaska, United States, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Ahtna
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 012804
label: USNM Number
content: E72842-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Mitten
physicalDescription: label: Length - Object
content: 32.5 cm