150-year-old Dance Mittens

Women’s dance mittens, circa 1865 (MacFarlane Collection, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution).

Words by Charles Arnold

INCLUDED IN A COLLECTION OF CLOTHING, TOOLS and other items purchased from Inuvialuit who traded at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Anderson post in the 1860s, and now held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is a pair of caribou skin mittens – but not ordinary ones.

They have no separate thumbs, and sewn to the back and at the top are tassels made of fur strips that have been dyed red. The cuffs are decorated with shorn white and dark bands of skin and a strip of leather that also has been dyed red. They are trimmed with wolverine fur. When they were purchased, they were simply listed as ‘a pair of women’s dance mittens.’ We are left to imagine the rest of their story. The people who traded at Fort Anderson during its brief (1861-65) operation spent most of the year in the Liverpool Bay area, several hundred kilometres to the north. It is perhaps unlikely that mittens as special as these appear to be were taken on the long journey to the trading post specifically to sell.

Instead, it is easier to imagine that they were proudly worn by their owner to draw attention to her hand movements while participating in a drum dance to celebrate a successful trading trip, and that they caught the eye of the fur trader who was told by his superiors at the Hudson’s Bay Company to be on the lookout for cultural objects for the newly opened Smithsonian Institution.