‘Many tender ties’: The shifting contexts and meanings of the S BLACK bag

Abstract

An embroidered and beaded bag collected in a fur‐trade social context in western North America in the early 1840s has shifted drastically in meaning over the course of its existence. Initially expressing affectionate ties between its maker and its recipient, the bag later came to represent outsiders’ denigration of Native women and those who married them, and became an exotic souvenir in an English Victorian household. Still later, the bag became a museum artefact seen as expressing tribal identity, and most recently it is seen as embodying histories of contact. This article retraces the initial and shifting meanings of the bag as it moved through different contexts.

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