Pouch
date: label: Accession Date
content: 25 May 1892
name: label: Collector
content: Brig. Gen. William B. Hazen
label: Donor Name
content: Mrs. Mildred M. Hazen
notes: label: Notes
content: From card: "Made of soft-tanned almost black-colored (really dark brown) skin, probably buck or doeskin. Top end tapered to a long convex point and the lower end split into two separated parts for the lower 14.5 cm. The tapered part of the top is open on the sides, and very much worn tan and maroon cloth [edges the two top tabs]. Sparsely decorated with lines of very fine quillwork, in double triangular design on top, double "fishhook" in the center, and wavy lines around edge and in a curve through the separate lower parts. This [object] was originally on a single card with others which were called and likely are Sioux, but Nov. 1964 Norman Feder suggests that this bag is likely to be Delaware. It does not fit known styles from the Plains area. ... Loan: Denver Museum, 3/15/65, returned 10/6/65." There is an old 19th or early 20th century exhibit label with card. Label describes Catalogue Nos. E158006?, E154012, E154000, and E154005. The reference that includes E154012 seems to be the part of the label that says "Accompanying are tobacco bags made of buckskin with extravagant ornamentation of quill work ...."
label: Notes
content: There is a string of basswood cordage around the edge of the bag. Quillwork designs include thunderbird with snakes on front of bag, and horned underwater panther on back.
label: Notes
content: This tabbed pouch is similar to one published as Figure 12, p. 63 in Duncan, Kate C. "So Many Bags, so Little Known: Reconstructing the Patterns of Evolution and Distribution of Two Algonquian Bag Forms." Arctic Anthropology 28, no. 1 (1991): 56-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40316292. That one is identified as an medicine pouch, Upper Great Lakes, said to have been collected in the 18th century at Mackinac. Denver Art Museum 1941.271. On pp. 61 - 62 in the publication, Duncan notes: "Some two-lobed animal-body pouches were made through the nineteenth century. One conventionalized version was the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century two-tabbed medicine pouch used in the upper Great Lakes area (Fig. 12). Tall and rectangular, and made of dark-dyed hide, it was constructed with two broad round- or square-ended tabs closed along the edges so that the pouch extended into them. Long fringes, sometimes with bells attached to the ends, hung between the tabs. Such bags were embroidered in quills with abstract geometric symbols or figural representations of manitos or spirits associated with both animate and inanimate objects in nature as they appeared in dream representations (Phillips 1984)."
label: Notes
content: Tabbed pouch of black-dyed deerskin, embroidered with porcupine quillwork including a figure of a thunderbird holding snakes in its talons. Published in "Tab Pouches of Northeastern North America" by Christian Feest, American Indian Art Magazine 22 (4): 36-47, 120, 1997. There, and in an email communication in 2017, he attributes this type of pouch to the southeastern Great Lakes region of the early 1800s, including, but not necessarily exclusive to, the Delaware.
label: Record Last Modified
content: 7 Sep 2020
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Great Lakes Region, United States, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Delaware (Lenape) (?)
label: Culture
content: Great Lakes Indian
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 025748
label: USNM Number
content: E154012-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Bag