Details

Object type

dancing apron

Title

naaxhein k’ideit

Culture/School

Tlingit: Chilkat

Place Associated

North America, United States, Alaska (place collected); North America, Canada, British Colombia (place of manufacture)

Date

19th century

Materials

mountain goat hair, puffin beaks, hide, cotton thread

Description

This dance apron was made by a woman of the Chilkat division of the Tlingit people of the Pacific North West Coast of North America. It was made on a half-loom, a loom with a single cross bar from which the warp was suspended, leaving the lower ends to hang free. It is made of a core of shredded cedar bark wrapped in mountain goat hair. The design of highly stylized totemic animals and birds in abstract forms in blue, yellow, black and white would have been copied from a pattern board painted by one of the men. Only the weft was dyed using the traditional dyes that produce the three colours. The two layers of hide fringing have been decorated with jingles of puffin beaks. From the 1890s, commercial dyes and yarns began to replace the traditional materials. Chilkat aprons were a reproduction of a shaman’s painted leather waist robe.

ID Number

1902.8.bi

Location

In storage