Ribbonwork of the Great Lakes Indians : the material of acculturation /

Abstract

In addition to pictorial evidence, these volumes contain descriptions of form and style as well as general information on the development of ribbonwork.However, except for a three-page essay by Leech, Polyak and Ritzenthaler (1973 in the Flint Institute of Arts catalogue) which synthesized previously published material, these works do not provide contextual information nor present primary research.Studies on the clothing ways of Great Lakes Indians are another source of basic information on ribbonwork.Cyr (1978) utilized pri mary historical literature and museum artifacts to investigate change in the dress of the Chippewa across three centuries.Danker (1973) described clothing for Winnebago men, women, and children, and demon strated style changes from pre-contact to the fur trading period, to the nineteenth and twenticuh centures.Miller (1979) categorized Potawatomi costume by gender, and established how form, meaning, and function of clothing change with culture contact.While all three authors featured items with ribbonwork, the focus on descriptions of style changes circumvented specific investigation of the introduction, spread, and continuation of ribbonwork.Detailed descriptions and information on construction techniques 1 can be found in a third group of sources.Feder (1956), Krumroy (1962), Stewart (1973) and Wood (1981) were oriented toward the description and replication of ribbonwork and all included construc tion patterns.Contextual information was minimal and derived from secondary sources.Feder (1956) attempted a typology of ribbonwork styles.This interest has been revived recently.The sole doctoral dissertation on ribbonwork (Abbass 1979) provided a typology of contemporary Oklahoma ribbonwork, an explanation of construction techniques, and the crea tion of an etic (or non-native) system of notation for the description of ribbonwork styles.Her focus was on contemporary ribbonwork and museum specimens; therefore, an investigation of primary historical and ethnographic sources was precluded.The Abbass structural typol ogy was presented at a symposium held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming (Abbass 1980) along with alternate typologies by Conn (1980) and Marriott and Rachlin (1980).Conn utilized museum specimens and nineteenth century paintings in support of his type categories, although the number of documentary sources was extremely restricted.Marriott and Rachlin organized their typology from infor mation gathered in personal fieldwork with Plains tribes.Cultural anthropology provides another source of information on ribbonwork.Early twentieth century anthropologists with interest in material culture frequently related descriptions of ribbonwork (Skinner 1910, 1921, 1925, 1926;Speck 1914Speck , 1927)).In that same tradition, Lyford (1943) presented an overview of the history and construction of ribbonwork along with sample curvilinear and geometric designs in her study of Ojibwa crafts.Underhill (1953) briefly treated ribbonwork in a general history of North American Indians.More recently, Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler ([1970]1983) included descriptive information about ribbonwork in their ethnographic study of the material culture of woodlands Indians.In an article on the ceremonial dress of the Delaware man, Howard (1976) presented drawings and photographs of contemporary ribbonwork.Two anthropological studies considered ribbonwork in the context of acculturation.Keesing (1939) utilized ethnographic and museum data in his study of culture contact and change among the Wisconsin Menomini.Keesing referred to ribbonwork as a manifestation of the efflorescence of art among the Menomini in which European materials were substituted for native decorative media.Haynes (1985) conducted an ethnohistorical study of alterations in the personal appearance of the Delaware as an indication of acculturation.Two eighteenth cen tury documents were noted as sources on ribbon-decorated garments and the adoption of European clothing elements by the Delaware.Both Keesing and Haynes presented ribbonwork as resulting from culture contact, but did not attempt to investigate the cultural dynamics of its development.Marriott*8 paper (1958) continues to be the most frequently cited source on ribbonwork.Entitled "Part I," Marriott briefly covered the geographical distribution and historical development of ribbonwork, with longer sections comparing ribbonwork to precontact decorative arts (quillwork, moosehair embroidery, and birchbark decoration) and European decorative arts.The proposed "Part II" was never published, although a reiteration of the original essay can be found in Marriott and Rachlin (1980).Despite the wide variety of references to ribbonwork, the resources are uniformly short, descriptive treatments of ribbonwork.Marriott (1958), Marriott and Rachlin (1980), and Conn (1980) are the only authors to delve into an investigation of the historical develop ment of ribbonwork, and their bibliographies indicate a limited exami nation of primary documentary sources.Feather and Sibley (1979) noted that clothing forms which synthesize European and American Indian elements (including ribbonwork) have been overlooked.This absence of in-depth investigation serves to support concentrated research into the historical and cultural background and development of ribbonwork.The lack of in-depth study on ribbonwork stems from several factors.First, Indian tribes from the Great Lakes region were scattered or assimilated into Euro-American culture earlier than tribes from the Great Plains or the Northwest coast.Therefore, ribbonworking tribes have received less attention from ethnographers proposing techniques for the analysis of acculturation data (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936).With the goal of clarifying the meaning of acculturation, they proposed the first formal definition: Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups.(Note: Under this definition, acculturation is to be distinguished from culture-change, of which it is but one aspect, and assimilation, which is at times a phase of acculturation.It is also to be differentiated from diffusion, which, while occurring in all instances of acculturation, is not only a phenomenon which frequently takes place without the occurrence of the type of contact between peoples specified in the definition given above, but also constitutes only one aspect of the process of accultu ration.)(Redfield et al. 1936:149-150) The committee also developed an outline as a guide for research and analysis to provide order in data collection and assist in the gather ing of comparable materials.The main categories of the outline were: (a) an analysis of the acculturation process, that is types of con tacts, contact situations, and cultural processes such as selection and determination of traits and their integration into the accepting culture, (b) psychological mechanisms of acculturation, and (c) the results of acculturation, specifically acceptance, adaptation, or reaction to contact and change.The 1936 memorandum is generally accepted as the seminal effort in formulating the conceptual framework of acculturation.Two of the three members of the committee continued to publish on the subject of acculturation.Herskovits (1938) reviewed the past usage of the term acculturation and expanded on the distinctions between acculturation, diffusion, and assimilation, which were Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield, Illinois eighteenth century letters from American military and traders; commercial papers of trader Pierre Menard

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