false wampum (glass--darkest blue and white, medium green and black); hide thongs; natural white and dark brown and dyed red porcupine quills; metal cones, deer/moose hair dyed red, red pigment

Bias woven/diagonal weave tile beads on cord create a neckband, from which are suspended in this order: a woven bead panel depeicting thunderbird; quill wrapped thongs with metal cones hanging in sets, from which is suspended a second woven thunderbird tab, and then a final set of quill wrapped fringes with metals cones.

Thunderbirds

AC, CW, AMcM exaqmination

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at Fort Miami (Detroit) and Michilimackinac, between August 1793 and August 1796, at which time the Regiment was withdrawn to Montreal.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