Blackened deerhide, deer dewclaws, silk tape (faded blue); size 8 white pony beads, quills (natural white, dyed red, yellow, black, blue); feathers (appear to be raven or crow), leather (not blackened but smoked) thong, metal cones, red-dyed hair (deer/moose?). Small piece of cotton tape on one garter (appears to be means of tying the garter on)

Hide bands with edges bound with silk tape and beaded-edging stitch; with three quillwork techniques: two-thread rows; quill-wrapped thongs, and running stitch (two rows, red and white). Central two-quill sections bordered in yellow running stitch. Dewclaws attached to bottom edge and short sides with hide thongs that pierce garter and silk-tape edge. Pairs of dew claws are strung on thongs (knotted at ends) that pierce the garter and silk tape and are made to look like a visible line of running stitch sewing on long edge of garter; on short edges this thong is hidden on underside and not visible on front. One garter has dewclaw attachment, other has feathers; both made of a single piece of leather cut into diagonally slashed fringes with either dewclaws or feathers attached. Dewclaws on attachment are slightly smaller than those on garter proper and have cut, zigzag edges. Feather attachment tangled but also cut from a single piece of leather fringed on both sides of central solid piece: fringes cut at varying widths/intervals. Fringes also twisted. In construction, bases of feathers are stripped and threaded with short sections of white quill (possibly bird quill), then folded over on themselves to create a loop of stripped quill secured with the short sections of white quill. The feather-quill loops are then threaded with the end of each fringe which is knotted in turn. Once secured, these folded quill attachments are secured with short sections of white quill that are slid down to cover the fold.

AC points out that the appendages of dewclaws on the left and crow feathers on the right may stand for earth and sky respectively. The centrual quillwork pattern is of five red portions interspersed with four portions of blue surrounded by black and then yellow stripes. AC suggests that these may refer to the four layers under the earth and four layers above the sky.

AC, CW and AM.

Collected between 1793 and 1795. Materials and style suggest no earlier than 1750 for place of acquisition (CW).

The items in the Foster Collection were collected by Lieutenant (later Captain) Andrew Foster of the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Foot, while posted at Fort Miami (Detroit) and Michilimackinac, between August 1793 and August 1796, at which time the Regiment was withdrawn to Montreal. During this period Lieutenant Foster was instrumental in surveying and building the British fort on St. Joseph Island, among other duties. The collection remained with the Foster family until 1936, when they donated it to the Wells Museum (Wells, Somerset, UK), which then sold it to a Mr. Robert Abels on an unrecorded date. Some time “recently” prior to August 1966, Abels sold it to George Terasaki, a New York dealer. In 1968, the Museum of the American Indian (George Gustuv Heye’s museum in New York) made an exchange of selected artifacts with Terasaki in order to acquire the, now well-documented, Foster Collection. In 1990, it became part of the holdings of the Smithsonian’s newly established National Museum of the American Indian in Washington along with the rest of the Heye Foundation Collections.

This record was created on site at NMAI by the GRASAC members listed below. Ann McMullen and Pat Nie(?) of NMAI supported the research onsite. Cory Willmott''s research was funded by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville provided Cory with an RA, Ceara Horsley, in Fall 2008 to work on GRASAC data entry. (CH)