Great Plains
Plains Indians are most well known for their beadwork. Beads on the Great Plains date back to at least to 8800 BCE, when a circular, incised lignite bead was left at the Lindenmeier Site in Colorado. Shells such as marginella and olivella shells were traded from the Gulf of Mexico and the coasts of California into the Plains since 100 CE. Mussel shell gorgets, dentalia, and abalone were prized trade items for jewelry.
Bones provided material for beads as well, especially long, cylindrical beads called hair pipes, which were extremely popular from 1880–1910 and are still are very common in powwow regalia today. These are used in chokers, breastplates, earrings, and necklaces worn by women and men, and in ceremonial headdresses as well.
Porcupine quillwork is a traditional embellishment for textiles on the northern Plains, but quillwork is also used in creating bracelets, earrings, hatbands, belt buckles, headdresses, hair roaches, and hairclips, as well as umbilical cord fetishes. Glass beads were first introduced to the Plains as early as 1700 and were used in decoration in a manner similar to quillwork, but they never fully replaced it. The Lakota became particularly adept at glass bead work, especially the members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in the Western Dakotas. Several award-winning quillworkers are active in the art world today, such as Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine-Sioux).
Metal jewelry came to the Plains through Spanish and Mexican metalsmiths and trade with tribes from other regions. Southern Plains Native Americans adopted metalsmithing in the 1820s. They typically cut, stamped, and cold hammered German silver, a nickel alloy. Plains men adopted metal pectorals and armbands. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, members of the Native American Church revealed their membership to others through pins with emblems of peyote buttons, water bird, and other religious symbols. Bruce Caesar (Sac and Fox-Pawnee) is one of the most prolific Southern Plains metalsmiths active today and was awarded the NEA's National Heritage Fellowship in 1998. US Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) is an accomplished silversmith.
Read more about this topic: Native American Jewelry
Famous quotes containing the word plains:
“The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water—will dry up and blow away.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)