Blanket Strip
Unknown Artist
c. 1900
Medium
Native-tanned hide, glass beads, yellow trade cloth, brass beads, sinew thread
Dimensions
182.9 × 13 cm
Classification
Leather
Department
Textiles
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Educational Purchase Fund
Accession Number
1927.260
About this artwork
The animal-hide robes basic to Plains attire were often ornamented with quilled or beaded strips, which also were stitched to the blankets that replaced robes. This beaded example carries the cross-in-a-circle motif that symbolizes the world, the four directions, and the sacred center, concepts central to Plains worldviews. In the 1932 words of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) holy man, “[T]he power of the world always works in circles. . . . The flowering tree was at the center of the hoop,...