Cultural Continuity

by MARIAH GRUNER Recentering Collections Curatorial Fellow

Moose hair embroidery adorns Wendat women’s legacy

Moose hair was used to embroider a floral-inspired design on this birch bark box. (Donated by Eliza Winslow Eaton Holland, 1932)

Mariah Gruner holds a doctorate in American & New England Studies from Boston University, where she studied the political uses of American women’s decorative needlework, 1820-1920. She is working with Historic New England’s collection services team to develop a new collecting plan to more fully represent the diversity of living in the region and to conduct new research on marginalized and suppressed voices within the existing collections.

As the RecenteRing collections

Curatorial Fellow, my work involves thinking about the ways we tell stories with and about the objects in our care. In particular, I have been thinking about the importance of centering Indigenous presence and agency, not constructing Native people as remnants of the past.

A few months ago, a velvet purse caught my eye. This nineteenth-century bag was lushly decorated with flowers, both inked onto its surface and stitched into lozenge-shaped adornments. I immediately recognized these stitched floral motifs as examples of moose hair embroidery on birch bark, a craft worked by Wendat and other Indigenous makers.

I began to look for other objects in Historic New England’s collection and found two boxes and a card case (containing a dance card from 1857), each worked in this recognizable style, featuring naturalistic stitched flowers and bundles of couched moose hair trimming the edges.

I became fascinated by these objects, tracing everything I could find about their donors and trying to see if there was any documentation of their provenance. Such bark items embroidered with moose hair were a recognizable form in the nineteenth century—they were frequently purchased as souvenirs and collected by many. These particular items were donated by Jane “Jennie” Norton Grew, Eliza Winslow Eaton Holland, Elsie Whitney Allen, and Dorothy S. F. M. Codman—all white women who donated many items to Historic New England and other institutions but did not include detailed information about the source of the embroidered materials that they had acquired. Several of these women most likely obtained these specific objects through inheritance (for example, Jane Grew’s mother, Henrietta May Goddard, probably purchased the birch panels sewn onto the purse on a tourist journey to Niagara Falls and passed the purse down to her daughter), rather than direct purchase. None named a Wendat source and many did not identify the materials correctly. These stories are important lenses on the way that objects related to Native life and community become decontextualized.

Rather than centering stories of disconnection and decontextualization, I am interested in understanding these objects in relationship to ongoing Wendat making practices and through the long legacy of Wendat makers’ work. Sherry Farrell Racette, a member of the Timiskaming First Nation in Québec and a scholar of Métis identity, writes in a chapter of Restoring the Balance: First Nations Women, Community, and Culture that material culture is a document of Indigenous women’s “remarkable intellectual, technical, and artistic legacy.” Moose hair embroidery on birch bark certainly is.

In the early nineteenth century this genre of moose hair embroidered work became a popular souvenir at both Niagara Falls and Wendake (Lorette)—a village a few miles northwest of Québec City. Wendake means “where the Wendat live” and can refer to many places, but members of the Huron-Wendat Nation have been living at Wendake (Lorette) since 1697, following years of epidemics, conflict, and settler encroachment. From there, they faced a series of colonial governments.

Wendat scholar Linda Sioui recounts that in the early nineteenth century her people were threatened by the British colonial government’s land dispossession and assimilationist imperatives. But turning to and promoting Wendat craft production—especially moose hair embroidery—brought a measure of economic prosperity while “preserving our knowledge of traditional techniques that are a fundamental part of our identity.”

Wendat maker Marguerite Vincent Lawinonkié (1783-1865) is particularly remembered for her role in stewarding traditional craft production during this period, transforming the local economy and resisting assimilation.

This success also brought complications. White tourists and collectors consumed these objects voraciously, often with little regard for specific histories. Accounts often reference moose hair embroidery without specific identifications, rendering complex and distinct identities homogenous. The popularity and misattribution of this work also led to white collectors deriding it as inauthentic. These assessments of the value of Indigenous cultural traditions fundamentally misinterpreted the importance and vitality of these objects, seeing them as valuable only for their ability to speak to an exoticized idea of purity and otherness.

This form, however, has long been used in complex and culturally important ways, threading together stewardship of craft practice and engagement with contemporary concerns. Throughout its history, this craft has been deployed by Indigenous women (particularly Wendat women), French Catholic nuns, and white women living in North America. Catholic nuns became known for decorative items made with birch bark and moose hair embroidery in the eighteenth century and white women living in the Northeast dabbled with these materials in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in knowing acts of appropriation. But this craft’s deeper history speaks to Indigenous resistance to assimilation and colonization and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. These objects reveal constant engagement with the realities of modern life and a fusion of traditional materials and techniques with present concerns.

The mainstream narrative goes like this: in 1639, an order of French Catholic nuns known as the Ursuline Sisters arrived in what is now Québec City and established a convent and missionary school. The nuns were known for their embroidered vestments and altar cloths; they would send these to their patrons in France. However, the materials that they used (silks and gilt threads) were difficult to come by in their new context, so they turned to more local materials. Convent records from 1714 say that another Ursuline nun taught the sisters to make bark boxes in the style of local Indigenous people. The nuns eventually became known for birch bark objects—like workbags and pocketbooks—with moose hair embroidery. By 1806, the association between the nuns and these materials was strong: Patricia Wakefield, an English traveler in 1806, wrote: “[t]he works of these sisters in birchbark, embroidered with elk hair, dyed of the most brilliant colours, are very ingenious! … Strangers are expected to purchase some of them, which I did willingly.”

The Ursuline Sisters became known for this mode of production. However, it is not at all clear that it was their innovation. Wendat women, as well as other women from Eastern Woodlands nations, had long been using moose hair and porcupine quills as decorative materials and making birch bark objects. Contemporary scholarship suggests that Wendat women participated actively in this fusion of their traditional materials with European embroidery motifs and object form, making their own adaptations outside the convent walls. Scholar Annette de Stecher writes, “Wendat and other Indigenous women had the skills and the tools… to bring European embroidery stitches and floral motifs into their own long-established techniques of textile design, both out of aesthetic interest and as a commercial opportunity, without European assistance.”

It cannot be forgotten that the Ursuline nuns were in the region to convert Native girls, to assimilate them into white, Christian culture. The nuns were explicitly interested in working to franciser — or as scholar Mairi Cowan writes, “frenchify”—their mission was to strip young women of their traditional practices and inculcate them in French Catholic culture. They taught needlework, emphasizing skills that they associated with the norms of European femininity. But local Wendat women were already expert needleworkers with traditions organic to their own culture.

The nuns were largely unsuccessful in their mission to assimilate and convert Indigenous girls. De Stecher's research has shown that young girls maintained their linguistic practices, returned frequently to visit their families, maintained their matrilineal kinship structure, and often rejected the nuns’ lessons. Marie de l’Incarnation, the mother superior, wrote in 1668 that “it is very difficult, if not impossible, to franciser’’ the local Indigenous population. The convent began taking on more daughters of French colonists and by 1720 they wholly shifted their mission from conversion and assimilation to educating French colonists.

Needlework may have played an important part in this Indigenous resistance. While the needlework that the nuns sought to teach their Indigenous students was geared toward inculcating them with the values of European domestic womanhood, the moose hair needlework that Wendat women performed at home was more associated with women’s role in politics, diplomacy, and the transmission of cultural knowledge.

Missionaries overlooked the deep cultural importance of these embroideries, while Wendat women adapted European stitching techniques to their own visual lexicon and materially benefited from the sale of these objects. The Wendat were known for diplomacy, often giving moose hair embroidery gifts to important dignitaries and potential political allies. By presenting objects marked with materials redolent of place and local knowledge, Wendat women constructed important ties. Commercial objects might also help solidify relationships, communicate local priorities, and simultaneously allow for the Wendat to continue to assert their sovereignty and right to self-determination.

By the nineteenth century, this craft production was a source of sufficient income that the Wendat might resist new British colonial imperatives to assimilation. It also created a space for Wendat makers to transform the floral language of European embroidery into motifs relevant to their own traditions. For example, the birch bark card case shown on page 29 features strawberries worked in dense, textural knots; strawberries feature heavily in Wendat systems of belief. These objects were not just marketed for European tastes and consumption habits; they bear within them meanings that resonated with their makers’ lives and communities.

Contemporary Wendat makers continue to practice this craft and assert its value as a connective form. The Gros-Louis sisters are known for their work with these materials and frame it in terms of intergenerational connection. Hélène, Fernande, Monique, Christiane, and Françoise work to continue to transmit this skill and form of embodied knowledge. In the spring 2015 issue of Yakwennra, the journal of the Huron-Wendat Nation, Christiane says, “We did it to perpetuate a tradition and we would like young people to take over to work on the embroidery” (author’s translation).

Moose hair embroidery is a practice, a technique, a repository of knowledge and history, and a form of connection. It bears within it information about local flora and fauna, technical understanding of complex materials and stitches, histories of commercial and political networks, and a story of continuous presence and meaning-making.