Winter Gloves
date: label: Accession Date
content: 26 Jan 1869
name: label: Donor Name
content: Dr. William H. Dall
notes: label: Notes
content: FROM CARD: "INVENTORIED 1976."
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 https://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=22 , retrieved 1-7-2022; see web page for additional information: Gloves, Inupiaq. Decorated gloves-like this beaded caribou pair with wolverine cuffs-were worn at dances. Iñupiaq men started wearing gloves at about the same time they began hunting with rifles, because of the difficulty of pulling a trigger with mittens on. By the late 1800s, gloves were commonly worn across northwest Alaska for both dancing and hunting. Gloves from the Bering Strait region were made from caribou, reindeer or seal skin. The skin was tanned with the hair scraped off, or left on and turned to the inside for warmth. The wrists were usually trimmed with fur such as wolverine, wolf or otter. Gloves were also decorated with dyed skin and strings of beads. Some pairs were joined with a string, so that they could hang around the neck when not in use. W. H. Dall attended a Unalakleet festival in December of 1867 where he saw men wearing "gloves trimmed with wolverine skin," and women wearing "snow-white gloves, fitting closely and made with great care from the tender skin of the reindeer fawn." While living at St. Michael in the early 1900s, E. W. Hawkes observed that at ceremonial dances male dancers always wore gloves with elaborate trim. Women did not wear gloves but held grass "handlets" (dance fans) decorated with feathers. Gloves were usually made with five separate finger pieces, including a loose, triangular thumb. Gloves with three or four fingers-like this pair from Unalakleet-may have been developed specifically for shooting guns, leaving the index finger free for pulling the trigger but combining others for warmth. On the north coast of Alaska, hunters wore thin caribou-skin gloves underneath bearskin mittens, pulling off the latter when ready to shoot. The use of gloves probably became much more common after the introduction of firearms, which occurred in the Norton Sound area in around 1855.
label: Record Last Modified
content: 7 Jan 2022
label: Specimen Count
content: 2
place: label: Place
content: Unalakleet, Norton Sound, Alaska, United States, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Eskimo, Inupiaq, Malemiut
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 69A00010
label: USNM Number
content: E7592-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Glove
physicalDescription: label: Length - Object
content: 30 cm