ART MASTERPIECE Q~LEDBABYC~RCOVER
Great Plains - SIOUX
A Sioux Indian woman made the Quilled
Baby Carrier Cover in the 1880's when
your Great-Great-Grandparents lived. The
Sioux Indians lived in South Dakota from
the 1400s to the present day. The Sioux
Indians moved a lot due to droughts in their
former homeland, increasing population
pressure and later the arrival of the white
settlers who took Indian lands, forcing the
tribes to move farther West. So this baby
carrier was used quite often.
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The North American Indians were the
only people in the world to use the prickly
quills of the porcupine to make beautiful
designs. First the Indian woman broke off
the sharp points of the quill. Then they
softened the quills with water and flattened
then using either a stone or their teeth. They
colored them with dyes made from plants.
The Indian women then would have woven
the porcupine quills on soft animal skins,
such as deerskins, in a kind of braid work in
which the ends were secured underneath.
Beading / Painting / Carving
Native Americans for Kids
The Plains people were
marvelous artists.
Pipes: They carved pipes
out of wood. Some were
beautifully decorated.
Painting: They made paints
and natural dyes using berry
juice and other plants in
nature. Most paintings were
action scenes - scenes of
battle, of hunts, of warriors
riding horses and warriors
shooting bows and arrows.
They often painted
The their
weapons.
Porcupine Quills:
Plains People wove
geometric designs (squares,
triangles, diamonds) into
their clothing, moccasins,
and other personal goods.
They did not use beads. They
used porcupine quills. They
used quill pieces as small as
one eight of an inch (1/8")
and as large as 5" to create
these designs. They used
natural dyes, so their colors
were tan, dull white, bright
red, vivid yellow, and black.
Their stitching was so perfect
and tiny that the end result
looked like beadwork.
Beads and Barter:
Quillwork spread from the
Woodland People to the
Plains People. The People
were eager to trade pelts for
beads. The white man's beads
came in many colors and
were much easier to use than
porcupine quills.
Unlike the Woodland Islands,
where men did the beadwork,
in the Plains, women did the
beadwork. The women were
proud of their work. The men
wore their clothes with pride.
Their women might add 5 or
6 pounds of beads to a
garment that was already
heavy because it was made
from animal hide.
Ancient Voices
A Museum to honor the least known people in North
America, the Original Tribal Women
Bead work & Quill work
The quill work almost died out when the easy to work beads came into the women's lives, but
thankfully more people today are learning the fine art of using quills
Quill work
(a form of embroidery)
Quills were used to decorate clothing, mocassins, bags, and baskets.
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 Only certain women were trained to collect and decorate with quills.
They got the quills by throwing a blanket over a porcupine and could then pick the quills out of
the blanket.
 Different sizes of quills were used for different types of embroidery.
 The quills were dyed different colors using natural dyes from plants and earth.
 After the quills were flattened they could be sewn to make designs.
 Quills were soaked in the mouth to soften.
(An interesting fact about quills is that they contain an antibiotic, so when the women were
using them and flattening them in their mouths they were in fact taking in medicine which kept
them well. Once the beads came in this practice ended and sickness came upon them. This was
found out in the past few years when a University study was done.)
Birchbark baskets were decorated with quills. An awl was used to poke holes in the bark. Quills
were placed in the holes to make designs.
First Nations in Canada
Women prayed before they worked with quills. In all First Nations, quillers were highly respected for
their talents.
Each First Nation has its own set of designs and colours which people used to decorate clothing, tipis,
containers, and utensils. Through these works of art, people express who they are as individuals and as a
community.
This is an example of what kind
of work is possible using the
single-quill line technique. This
is a small motif done in the
Huron floral style. The quills
are dyed with all natural dyes
and the background material is
brain tanned leather dyed with
walnut hulls.
Photo from Native Tech website
NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art
The End of the World
Lakota story told by Jenny Leading Cloud (White River, Rosebud reservation, SD)
to Richard Erdoes in 1967. Typed from Erdoes and Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends
Somewhere at a place where the prairie and the Maka
Sicha, the Badlands, meet, there is a hidden cave. Not
for a long, long time has anyone been able to find it.
Even now, with so many highways, cars and tourists, no
one has discovered this cave. In it lives a woman so old
that her face looks like a shriveled-up walnut. She is
dressed in rawhide, the way people used to before the
white man came. She has been sitting there for a
thousand years or more, working on a blanket strip for
her buffalo robe. She is making the strip out of dyed
porcupine quills, the way ancestors did before the white
traders brought glass beads to this turtle continent.
Resting beside her, licking his paws, watching her all
the time is Shunka Sapa, a huge black dog. His eyes never wander from the old woman,
whose teeth are worn flat, worn down to little stumps, she has used them to flatten so
many porcupine quills.
A few steps from where the old woman sits working on her blanket strip, a huge fire is
kept going. She lit this fire a thousand or more years ago and has kept it alive ever since.
Over the fire hangs a big earthen pot, the kind some Indian peoples used to make before
the white man came with his kettles of iron. Inside the pot, wojapi is boiling and
bubbling. Wojapi is berry soup, good and sweet and red. That soup has been boiling in
the pot for a long time, ever since the fire was lit.
Every now and then the old woman gets up to stir the wojapi in the huge earthen pot. She
is so old and feeble that it takes a while to get up and hobble over to the fire. The moment
her back is turned, Shunka Sapa, the huge black dog starts pulling the porcupine quills
out of her blanket strip. This way she never makes any progress, and her quillwork
remains forever unfinished. The Sioux people used to say that if the old woman ever
finishes her blanket strip, then at the very moment that she threads the last porcupine quill
to complete the design, the world will come to an end.
NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art
Porcupine Quill Embroidery
by Tara Prindle
Porcupine Quillwork is perhaps the
oldest form Native American
embroidery, and was a widespread form
of decoration for Great Lakes and
Plains peoples living within the natural
range of the porcupine. The quills are
folded, twisted, wrapped, plaited and
sewn using a wide range of techniques
to embellish articles of clothing, bags,
knifesheaths, baskets, and wooden
handles and pipe stems.
Delaware and Ojibway Quilled
Knife Sheaths (Orchard 1984)
Native Americans in 17th century New
England were long familiar with quill embroidery, they used porcupine quills to decorate
their clothing and accessories, and to decorate containers of birchbark as well. European
accounts from the 1600's refer to several dye colors (black, blue, red and yellow for
examples) for porcupine quills embroidered on baskets, bags and mats.
A few rare examples of 17th century hemp and basswood bags have survived the
centuries. A Mohegan bag woven of Indian Hemp in the 1600's has a design embroidered
with purple-black porcupine quills. The design on the Mohegan bag consists of two thin
horizontal bands of solid color placed within three thicker bands of solid color which has
been further broken into a series of geometric diamond and triangular shapes around the
circumference of the bag. Other accounts from the 1600's describing New England
Native Americans, include descriptions of designs: birds, beasts, fishes and flowers in
colors placed upon baskets.
Dyed quills decorated moccasins in red, blue and
violet; to the north, moose skin robes were dressed
white and embroidered top to bottom a finger's
breadth wide, with closed or open work figures of
animals. Quill embroidery embellished the
Penobscot pouches and bags of deer or mole skin.
Exquisite Maliseet-Passamaquoddy quilled
birchbark containers were not often produced after
Native splint and sweetgrass basket manufacture
became popular in the 1700's.
In general, quillworking flourished among Native
Americans until the mid-1800's when glass beads
became easily attainable through trade with
Europeans. Later traditions of embroidery using glass beads were built upon techniques
and designs in quillworking. Although considered a 'lost art' by many, Native Americans
such as the Sioux, Cree and Ojibway and others still carry on the tradition of quill
embroidery.
Seneca and Sioux Quilled
Moccasins (Orchard 1984)
Lakota - Dakota - Sioux Nation
The Lakota (also Teton, Tetonwan, Teton Sioux) are a Native American tribe. They are part of a confederation of seven
related Sioux tribes (the Oceti Sakowin or seven council fires) and speak Lakota, one of the three major dialects of the
Sioux language.
The Lakota are the western-most of the three Sioux groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The seven
branches or "sub-tribes" of the Lakota are Sicangu, Oglala, Itazipco, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Sihasapa, and Ooinunpa.
Notable persons include Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) from the Hunkpapa band and Tasunka Witko (Crazy Horse),
Manpiya Luta (Red Cloud), Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) and Billy Mills from the Oglala band as well as Touch the Clouds.
In North America the territory of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota Nation covers some 200,000 km2 in the present day
state of South Dakota and neighboring states.
The Lakota, Nakota and Dakota Nation (also known as the Great Sioux Nation) descends from of the original
inhabitants of North America and can be divided into three major linguistic and geographic groups: Lakota (Teton, West
Dakota), Nakota (Yankton, Central Dakota) and Dakota (Santee, Eastern Dakota). The total number of native North
Americans is approximately 1,5 million, of which around 100,000 are Lakota. They reside near the Sacred Black Hills of
South Dakota.
The Lakota ("friends" or "allies", sometimes also spelled "Lakhota") are a Native American tribe, also known as the
Sioux (see Names). The Lakota are part of a band of seven tribes that speak three different dialects, the other two being
the Dakota and the Nakota. The Lakota are the western most of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and
South Dakota. The Nakota, the smallest division, reside on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota, the Northern
portion of Standing Rock Reservation, and Canada (the Stoney and Assiniboine), while the Dakota live mostly in
Minnesota and Nebraska.
The Lakota
The Lakota [lakxo'ta] came from the western Dakota of Minnesota who, after the adoption of the horse,
('power/mystery dog'), became part of the Great Plains Culture with their Minnesota Algonkin-speaking allies, the
Tsitsistas (Cheyenne), living in the northern Great Plains, which centered on the buffalo hunt with the horse.
There were 20,000 Lakota in the mid-18th century. The number has now increased to about 70,000, 20,480 of whom
still speak their ancestral language.
Because the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota (who refer to them as the Paha Sapa, they objected to mining in the
area, which has been attempted since the 19th century.