The pipe is made from a fire-blackened wooden stem (type of wood unknown – possibly sumac, willow or red osier dogwood), stone (the type of stone is unknown), eagle feathers, porcupine quills, duck skin including down, red wool, sinew, and commercial thread.

The wooden stem has a channel bored through it, is decorated with quill-wrapping, wild duck skin, and strands of red wool. The group of five eagle feathers hanging in a fan shape, are threaded together with skin thong. Each feather has a quill-wrapped wood splint attached to the central shaft with a tuft of down feathers encased in rawhide attached at either end of the splints. Each set of the twenty five bands comprises of individual quills, with duck skin attached at the end of the set. Sinew and commercial thread were used in the quill wrapping.

The stone bowl is "L" shaped with raised grooves which could possibly be functional “flanges”. A group of five eagle feathers hang in a fan shape attached to the underside of the stem. The length of the stem exhibits a distinct pattern of four sets of bands made from quill-wrapping. Each band has twenty five bands of individual quills in the colours black, white, blue, yellow, red and orange.

The relative is listed as Ojibwa in the CMH records; it bears some resemblance to Cree and Sioux pipes made in the same time-range.

According to Christian Feest, the pipe is presumed to have been collected by Duke Karl Bernhard of Saxen-Weimar-Eisenach on his American tour of 1825-1826. Dr. Ted J. Brasser has provided the same information. (transmission dated October 13, 1987) based on his own archival research and interviews with Arthur Speyer(III). However, a previous catalogue listing for the item (CMH archival file # B719.G7, entry 55- "Calumet") states that the pipe was in the collection of Duke von Coburg-Gotha. The variety of sources makes precise dating impossible.

In 1973, under the Honorable Gerrard Pelletier’s “Democratization and Decentralization” policy, the Consultative Committee on National Museum Policy (then under the National Museum of Man, now the Canadian Museum of History), established an Emergency Purchase Fund that included a mandate for repatriation purchases. Through this fund, as well as the efforts of many individuals working at the National Museum of Man, the museum purchased the Speyer Collection of artifacts, which comprised some two hundred and fifty Native North American objects, dating from the 1760s to the 1860s. As specified in a memorandum written in 1971 by Dr. Ted J. Brasser, Plains Ethnologist at the NMM, the “majority of the specimens originated from the Great Lakes area, the Boreal Forest, northern plains and Mackenzie-Yukon area…”. Dr. Ted J. Brasser was one of the key figures involved with the acquisition of the Speyer collection, having known Arthur Speyer Jr. (III) from his years working at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden Holland in the 1960s. During those years, Brasser cultivated a mutual friendship with Speyer through his travels to Germany. The relationship was crucial in the NMM’s acquisition of the Speyer collection, as Brasser would go on to negotiate the purchase, along with his colleagues, while working for the NMM in Canada. In April 1970, Brasser joined the NMM and for the next two years worked alongside Dr. Barrie Reynolds, Chief Ethnologist, to maintain a relationship with Speyer which would lead to the eventual purchase of the collection in 1973. The process was supervised by then Director of the NMM, Dr. William E. Taylor, Jr. .
This history of how Arthur Speyer, Jr. (III) came to own such a collection is tied up in the tradition of European nobility collecting pre- and post-contact Indian “curiosities” in the Americas. Speyer was the third generation of men in his family to have an interest in collecting such objects. Arthur Speyer (I) (1858-1923) was a German entomologist and minerologist who also had an interest in natural history and ethnography. Responsible for starting the Museum for Natural History and Ethnology near Ostende in 1898, Speyer (I) collected objects from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, though North America seems to have played only a small role in his collection. Arthur Speyer, Sr. (II) continued in his father’s tradition and began exchanging artifacts for North American Indian objects, with a focus on the Plains, often acquiring from German museums. Arthur Speyer, Jr. (III) then acquired the collection (numbering on hundred and eighty objects) at the time of his father’s death, editing it and acquiring so as to ensure that other Northeastern and Subarctic groups were included, though limiting it to those objects made following 1760.

CMH records, including “The Speyer Collection.” CMC File #B798.f1 and #B798.f4

In regards to the provenance of this pipe, it is notable that most of the objects in Speyer III’s collection “came from eighteenth-century aristocrats’ cabinets of curiosities and from collections made by members of the German and British nobility in the nineteenth century…”.
Considering the great number of sources of the Speyer collection, coupled with the amount of exchange, trading and purchasing which occurred over three generations of collecting, it is unsurprising that specific knowledge of the provenance of each object is rather rare. In fact, we have only Speyer III’s personal knowledge and records to situate and date each piece in the collection. Commenting on Speyer’s catalog which accompanied a 1968 exhibition of the objects in Offenbach, Germany, William C Sturtevant notes, that Speyer did not state in the catalog his source for the data on provenience that accompanied the object, and he was not very precise in indicating the sources for his own determinations of the cultures of origin. He never included information on the original or subsequent collections through which an object had passed. He concealed his sources partly, no doubt, to avoid competition, and because most museums and some private collectors would have been embarrassed to have it known that they were divesting themselves of fine objects. Since these records have one source only – Speyer III – one must be careful whilst researching and bare in mind that the provenance can, at best, represent an educated guess.

William C Sturtevant, “Documenting the Speyer collection,” in Studies in American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute to Norman Feder, ed. Christian F. Feest (Location Unknown: European Review of Native Studies, 2001): 163-4.

Unknown. "Ojibwa Pipe" GRASAC ID 1503. Located in the Canadian Museum of History, catalogue number III-G-826 a,b.

This record was augmented by Shamina Vastani in January 2024.