Clothing, Regalia, Textiles


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These photos mostly reside elsewhere, on remote servers -- parts of various museum or gallery collections which you may explore. But to follow this subject of Native clothing and regalia, return here with the BACK or HISTORY key (from NetScape's GO menu). If you find good illustrations of clothing, regalia, or footgear not included here, please notify me. Bookmark the page where you saw it, and send me the URL of that page, so I can link specifically to it, rather than to larger collections that contain it.

CREDITS: : The logo of these art pages is "Two Fish" by Manitoulin Island Ojibwe-Odawa Martin Panamick, as explained in the Art Contents Menu page credits.

PAGE LOGO -- Intricately cut, woven and beaded buckskin shirt by an unidentified Northern Great Plains artist, late 19th century. Collection of the Glenbow Art Museum, Alberta, Canada, whose opening page has a lovely big photo of it, but no more info.

SMALL PIX: Each of these is a reduction from the museum exhibit it serves as a clickbutton link to; sometimes more information about the items is given on their own pages, often I've supplied it from my own books and knowledge.

MAYAN WEAVING:now is illustrated only by photos taken by Jeffrey J. Foxx used at the Science Museum of Minnesota's interactive Maya web site. I have drawn heavily on the beautiful book Living Maya by Walter E. Morris, Jr. and Foxx. Harry N. Abrams Inc, NY: 1987. This book was the result of Morris spending more than 10 years among the Chiapas Maya, where he learned the Tzotzil language and made many friends. It shows their daily life, legends and myths, symbolism, and overall istory back through ancient times, as well as Foxx's beautiful photos, and many drawings by local artists. This photo is a reduction of one linked to above, a Mayan spinner, who is accumulating white cotton thread around the stone-weighted spindle in the foreground.

Though the book had many financial sponsors, the Science Museum of Minnesota's anthropology director, Louis Casagrande, was instrumental in working with Morris and Foxx to organize many Mayan exhibits over the years, including the construction of a replica mountain thatch-roofed hut in the main hall, part of the largest exhibit. The Museum brought Zinacantecan Mayan elder and curandero Anselmo Perez to Minnesota in 1986 to dedicate this house and attend an honorary banquet, and there have been many other contacts and travels.

Until the recent Canadian Museum of Science exhibition in conjunction with the feature film about the Mayans created jointly by Canada and Mexico, Minnesota had the best north American collections and exhibits that cover Mayan daily life, not just archaeology, and this may still be true. It is a valuable local resource for schools and teachers interested in the beauties and mysteries of this ancient indigenous civilization many of whose modern descendants are exiles and refugees in the U.S. For those who cannot visit, the Morris book is an invaluable educational resource, a good read, and though beautiful enough for a coffee-table status symbol, should not sit around there, but be looked at and read.

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Explanatory text and graphics copyright 1995.

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 19, 1995 - 4:50:02 AM