Smoked deer hide, porcupine quills (natural white, brown, and dyed), metal cones, deer hair, silk tape (faded navy blue), dyes (orange, blue faded to aqua/teal on quills and red for deer hair). Mostly sinew sewn but row of metal cones sewn on with linen thread and loomed quillwork also done on linen thread warp.

Appear to be cut from existing sinew-sewn garment (some pre-existing seams appear on cuffs), then sewn with linen thread. Center back seam (no tab inserted at heel); center front seam covered by loomed quillwork (no extra vamp piece); slight pucker apparent around edge of applied quillwork on vamp. Flat pieces of woven quillwork applied to cuffs and edged with two-thread folded rows. Cuffs edged with tin cones folded over red-dyed hair (deer hair?), sewn onto cuffs with linen thread. Two cones with hair applied to each side of top of moccasin outside vamp area. Front and back edges of cuffs bound with silk tape. Leather thongs at front of cuff/top of vamp appear to be decorative since they do not loop around the cuff or function in any apparent manner.

Concentric diamonds on cuffs and vamp. Cuff designs are assymetrical (inside versus outside) with orange design on blue ground on outside cuffs and reverse on inside cuffs. Woven quillwok on each vamp also varied: two sets of concentric diamonds, one with dark at center flanked by white, and the other white at center flanked by dark natural quills. AC suggests blue and orange symbolize night and day (compare with Caldwell moccasins; Caldwell loincloth was front and back assymetrical red and blue).

CW, AMcM, AC examination. Soles show signs of wear; right and left moccasins are clearly apparent based on footprint visible on soles. Quillwork shows slight insect damage.

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posted at Fort Miami (Detroit) and Michilimackinac, between August 1793 and August 1796, at which time the Regiment was withdrawn to Montreal.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 Nietfeld 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)