Forms of Exchange

Art of Native Peoples from the Edward J. Guarino Collection

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Boot Whimsy, Iroquois

Iroquois

Beaded boot whimsy, "From Niagara Falls," with bird and flower design; clear and pink beads on blue cloth with white border, c. 1890-1900

The Guarino collection includes purses, "whimsies," and hats decorated in several distinctive beadwork styles that appealed to Victorian consumers. One popular style was the delicate and refined pastel-floral style, which features a single flower with pointed petals as a central motif. Another was the flat-multicolored style, which consists of a curvilinear, all-over pattern of flower and leaf motifs in a bright variety of hues. Iroquois bead workers developed a third style, known as raised or embossed. In this ebullient style, beads are worked into three-dimensional shapes, and larger beads form highlights.

Iroquois Beadwork and Baskets

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"The ability to make things with your own hands, to individualize communal thought, is an honored tradition. Every time that I come across a piece of beadwork by an Iroquois person, I feel that I am meeting an old friend." Richard W. Hill, Sr., Tuscarora

Before European contact, the Iroquois were semi-nomadic hunters and seasonal agriculturalists who occupied widespread lands in what are now New York, Ontario and Quebec. The Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca Nations, were joined by the Tuscarora people in the 1720s. Like other Eastern Woodlands Natives, they made beads out of bone, shells, quills, and pottery shards to ornament clothing, carry in medicine bags, use in rituals, and bury with their dead. From ancient times, beads — especially those made of white, luminous substances which are associated with light, knowledge, enlightenment, and peace — not only lend beauty to useful objects, but also spiritual potency. No wonder that the Woodlands people responded enthusiastically when European explorers first offered lustrous Venetian glass beads in trade. Native people found the visual quality of foreign beads entrancing and advantageous from a practice standpoint.

As colonialist incursions increasingly undermined traditional ways of life, the Iroquois developed survival strategies. One of the most successful was making articles for sale at places like Niagara Falls, where tourists flocked to witness the grandeur of nature. Iroquois bead workers made souvenirs and also useful objects, such as moccasins, hats, pincushions, and various types of containers. Similarly, Iroquois basket makers, especially those from the Akwesanse Mohawk Territory (St. Regis Reservation) made woodsplint baskets to sell. White patrons particularly prized Mohawk "fancy" baskets with twisted and curled wefts. Profits from beadwork and basket making served as a way to resist the government programs of forced assimilation that tried to make the Iroquois into settled farmers or wage laborers.

After the Victorian period, Iroquois beadwork and basket making went into decline, but several decades ago, these forms enjoyed a resurgence. Cayuga bead workers Lorna Hill and Samuel Thomas have studied nineteenth-century pieces and revived techniques and motifs such as birds, flowers, and fruits. Longstanding Iroquois beliefs hold that beads and berries are visually and metaphorically interchangeable, and strawberries — the first fruits of spring — signify spiritual regeneration and renewal. Drawing on similar associations, Onondaga artist Gail Tremblay titles her basket Remembering Wild Strawberries. Made of bright, red 16mm film leader and twisted in the manner of a fancy basket, the work is an homage to a film by Ingmar Bergman as well as an evocation of enduring Iroquois traditions.