Decoratie voor knieband

Garter appendage; Great Lakes region; ca. 1800 Wool, glass beads, porcupine quills, tin cones, red-dyed deer hair, silk ribbon; 65 x 9 cm. RMV 695-33; purchased from widow of Baron C. B. H. von Rosenberg, 1889 Fingerweaving encompasses plaiting and braiding techniques, in which the yarns run diagonally to the length of narrow textiles. Threading white beads on the yarns as they were plaited mostly produces diagonal or zigzag lines on a plain background design on early examples. Originally black bison wool was used as yarn, but by the second half of the eighteenth century this material began to be substituted by European wool, which permitted the use of usually two contrasting colors. In the early nineteenth century, fingerweaving techniques were increasingly replaced by weaving on the hole-and-slot heddle, which had been introduced from Europe. Fingerweaving only permitted the manufacture of relatively small textiles, such as pouches, bag straps, belts, garters, and appendages. Given the small number of surviving specimens and their insufficient documentation, attempts to assign a specific ethnic origin to the types and styles of artifacts that can be defined on visual grounds are problematic. Like most similar pieces in other museum collections, the small band was acquired by the Museum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology) in the late nineteenth century without a documented history. It conforms to a special subtype of garter appendage distinguished by an unusual feature: No glass beads were threaded in a horizontal stripe below the upper edge (probably where the appendage was attached to the garter), but since the yarn is light-colored, the pattern nevertheless remains faintly visible. At least four of these garter appendages have documented late eighteenth-century dates and three specifically came from the collection of Sir John Caldwell, a British officer at the time of the American Revolution. Based on Caldwell’s close association with the Ojibwa these and similar other textiles were attributed to this tribe when they were briefly part of the German collection of Arthur Speyer in the 1960s, while being reattributed to the eastern Great Lakes after part of the collection went to the Canadian Museum of Civilizations (now in Gatinau, Québec). Another single garter appendage in the Speyer collection, whose origin and present whereabouts are unknown, is obviously the matching piece to form a pair with the one in Leiden. It had a feather attached in the unbeaded area, but it is unknown whether this was an original feature. Christian Feest Helga Benndorf and Arthur Speyer, Indianer Nordamerikas: 1760–1860; Deutsches Ledermuseum; Offenbach a. M., 1968.