The Dawes Act of 1887 disposed of more Sioux territory by the passing of ‘excess’ (unoccupied) lands on The Great Sioux Reservation to whites. This process did not stop until the 1934 Indian Reorganisation Act, which allowed self-governing tribal councils on each reservation to handle internal affairs. Such councils inevitably fell under the control of acculturated mixed-bloods, leading to factionalism between them and traditionalists. By 1900 the Eastern Sioux were largely living like ‘poor whites’, often as farmers. A large proportion of them were of mixed blood, having intermarried with fur traders – mostly French – since the mid-18th century. The Western Sioux had partly intermarried with the Missouri River traders during the 19th century, and 1,000 mixed-bloods were settled at the Whetstone Agency alone by around 1870. Conditions on the Western Sioux reservations were, and often still are, characterised by poverty. By 1890 log cabins were replacing tipis, food including beef was distributed by the Indian agencies, but diet was poor, resulting in widespread ill-health. Most Indians joined Christian denominations, and Indian dress and native practices were discouraged or actually banned by government officials. However, native language and religion survived amongst the predominantly full-blood tiyospaye communities such as those at Pine Ridge.
Reservation populations have evolved into a number of social groups divided by economics, religion, social achievement and blood quantum. During the first half of the 20th century many Western Sioux retained their skills in horsemanship, becoming ‘cowboys’ as western culture integrated with tribal life. Young Sioux men served in the US armed forces in both World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. In 1973 the American Indian Movement (AIM), initially founded in the cities by acculturated and college-educated Métis of many tribes, was successful in bringing to the attention of the general public the wrongs perpetrated against the Native American by US government policies over many years. In a confrontation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wounded Knee, site of the massacre of 1890, two people were killed during a stand-off which has become a symbolic statement of continued Federal injustices to all American Indians.
American Horse, Oglala. Probably the son or nephew of the American Horse killed by Captain Anson Mill’s 3rd Cavalry detatchment at Slim Buttes, South Dakota, on 29 September 1876 following the battle of the Little Bighorn. This American Horse signed the treaty in 1887 by which The Great Sioux Reservation was reduced by approximately one half. He visited Washington on several occasions, and in 1891 obtained a commitment to fairer ration distribution at the agencies. (Postcard, author’s collection)
Kicking Bear and Short Bull, Minneconjou and Brulé Sioux, leaders of the Ghost Dance cult who brought the religion from the Paiute in Nevada to the Sioux reservations. Photograph by John Grabill, 1891. (Postcard, author’s collection)
The economic situation on many reservations is still very depressed; people still receive commodities from the Federal government, and health conditions generally fall below average national levels. Today, however, the Sioux promote special classes for their language, arts, music and dance, and colleges have been established at Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Standing Rock, one of which has received university status. Indian culture survives in revived Sun Dances (somewhat shortened versions), vision quests, sweat lodges, memorial feasts, wakes and Yuwipis. The Pan-Indian powwows are popular on all reservations, with changing forms of social dance costume and songs, and prizes for the best performers in various categories. A revival in craftwork augments the powwow scene. On the downside, the regular use of native language by the younger generations is rapidly decreasing; it will probably not survive long into the 21st century as a first language, and is already almost wholly lost amongst the Santee. Unfortunately, problems with alcohol still abound, causing family breakdown; and average family incomes are far below national levels.
Santee
During summer the Santee lived in large wooden pitched-roof lodges -‘House-big’- with sleeping platforms inside; in winter small wigwams of bark or cattail mats were used. Some western Santees, closer to the High Plains, used the tipi. It is likely that the Santee at one time used bark canoes, but only dug-outs were noted by white traders after they had moved from their original forest homeland to the prairies where bark was scarce. Food was derived from hunting, fishing, gathering and horticulture. They collected wild rice, maple sugar and wild turnips and grew corn, beans, squash, pumpkin and tobacco.
Their dress more closely resembled Algonkian and Siouan neighbours to the east and south than their own kinsmen to the west. Santee headmen wore buckskin shirts of two skins (deer, elk, antelope) similar to those of the Yanktonai to the west, somewhat more close fitting than those of the Teton, with quilled strips (sometimes of bird quills) along the arms and shoulders. Later cloth shirts decorated with beadwork were used. Leggings were sometimes buckskin, tightly fitting, with a seam at the front, held by a belt and by garters at the knee. Santee women wore the two-piece dress, consisting of a wrap-around skirt ornamented with ribbonwork and a loose-fitting blouse with silver brooches or beadwork after the appearance of white traders. Moccasins were soft-soled, originally with a single seam over the instep, with ankle flaps; later a style with a vamp was adopted.
Santees were frequent visitors to Fort Garry and the Métis settlements in Manitoba during the 19th century, and no doubt adopted from them one form of floral beadwork after glass beads became plentiful from white traders. Another beadwork style resembled Chippewa work; yet another, the large stylised floral forms of the Winnebago, who lived in close association with the Santee during the 19th century.
Bows were long, about 3½ feet. For close fighting clubs were used, both the ball-headed type known and used by all the eastern tribes and the ‘gun-stock’ warclub. The explorer Jonathan Carver reported in the 18th century that Santee men also wore a triangular chest-piece sheath with a dagger, as shown in the oldest known sketch of a Sioux Indian. Santee warriors usually went into battle naked except for breechcloth, leggings and moccasins, preferring ambush tactics to open warfare. The highest acclaim for warriors was to touch an enemy (counting coup), a trait shared with all Sioux divisions. Success in warfare required the use of war bundles, and was celebrated with victory and scalp dances.
Burial was either in the ground with a small wooden house built over the grave, or corpses were placed on raised scaffolds or in trees, the latter a custom shared with the Western Sioux. The ceremonial life of the Santee was derived from both Woodland and High Plains cultures, as their intermediate geographical position would indicate. From Woodland sources came Vision Quest, Medicine Feast, Adoption Feast, and Medecine Lodge – a graded curative society similar to that of the Ojibwa. From High Plains influences came the Sun Dance (used by some groups), Horse Dance, Warrior Society dances and the Grass Dance. The latter, after shedding some of its original religious associations, was carried to Canada where a newer form evolved to become a Pan-Indian movement, the northern Grass Dance. The Santee transmitted the older form to their eastern neighbours in the 19th century.
Mr & Mrs Blackshield, Santee Sioux, at Fort Totten (Devil’s Lake) Reservation, c1910. Note the floral beaded bandolier bags worn by the man, of a style usually associated with the Ojibwa. They were worn by the Santee on ceremonial occasions, and probably made by them. (Photograph courtesy Alvina Alberts & Louis Garcia)
Yankton
The Yankton and Yanktonai, together forming the Yankton division of the Sioux, used both the skin tipi and the earth lodge, although probably only the Yanktonai built earth lodges similar to those associated with the Mandan and Hidatsa. Bullboats, a type of coracle similar to those of the Mandan, were also used. The economy of these middle branches of the Sioux resembled other Missouri River groups, being based upon hunting, gathering and river-bottom horticulture. Great tribal bison hunts took place twice a year, in mid-summer and fall. Fishing was not so important as it was to the Santee, but the gathering of turnips, chokecherries and other wild foods was important. As with the Teton, government was by chief and council assisted by akicita members or soldiers. Chieftainship tended to be hereditary.
Men wore hair-fringed buckskin shirts with porcupine-quilled strips over the shoulders and along the arms similar to the northern Teton (Saone), with square or triangular neck flaps. Leggings were originally buckskin with quilled strips, or later of trade cloth with a box design of a contrasting material. Women wore the classic two-skin hide dress, in later times extended with a yoke or cape to become a three-skin dress similar to those of the Teton, the cape covered with dentalium shells or, after their introduction, with small glass beads. Women also wore vertically strung traded bone ‘hairpipes’, again similar to Teton women. Cradles resembled the Plains type, unlike the cradleboards of the Santee.
Shields were made from the neck of a bull bison, treated by a process of heating and shrinking until convex and half-an-inch thick, and painted with protective designs. The Middle Sioux employed the short bow adapted for use on horseback, and stone-headed war clubs of the High Plains type. During the mid- to late 19th century they developed beadwork which was geometrical in design, but floral work was adopted from their eastern neighbours. Men often wore fur turbans and huge grizzly bear claw necklaces, or later loop necklaces. In later years leading men wore eagle feather ‘warbonnets’, and the young men wore the costume associated with the northern Grass Dance. The Sun Dance was the most important religious ceremony, and shamans with ‘bear power’ were skilled with herbal medicines. The Yanktonai were at the centre of a trade system which connected the Sioux with British, American and other native goods, resulting in a mixed material culture from the late 18th century.
Teton
The conical buffalo (bison) skin tipi or lodge was the universal dwelling of the nomadic Teton after crossing the Missouri River into the High Plains during the mid-18th century (see Plate C4). In the early decades of the reservation period tipis were largely replaced by log cabins or government buildings, although tipis were still erected for special occasions or used as summer homes, though now made out of canvas duck of Army issue. White canvas tipi lodges can still be seen at modern Indian gatherings and are still sometimes used for Peyote and Yuwipi meetings. Large tipi covers and household belongings could be transported easily and quickly by travois, a platform mounted on a frame of poles dragged behind a horse. Rawhide parfleche cases decorated with painted geometrical designs were used to store clothes and meat.
Most male and female clothing was originally made from untailored deer or antelope hides prepared by women. Bison robes with hair left on one side, painted on the other with warrior scenes and feather circle designs, were worn by men; women wore robes painted with symbolic designs in so-called ‘box-and-border’ styles. Authorities have disagreed on the interpretation of symbolism in much of Plains Indian art, which quickly lost its function during the dramatic changes of the second half of the 19th century. Bison robes were replaced by blankets, and selvedge-edged wool trade cloth with beaded strips added was popular in the late 19th century.
Certainly the spread of and ultimate dependence on fur trade goods can be considered as an east-to-west advance, the Teton being the last to become associated with white traders. (The Santee, when first visually recorded by visiting government officials in the early 19th century, had already adopted European dress. Both male and female dress consisted of traded cloth, printed cotton blouses, shirts of broadcloth, and chiefs’ coats – special coats distributed by traders. However, for ceremonials and treaty gatherings chiefs reverted to skin shirts and leggings resembling those of their western cousins, although more tailored.)
Medicine Bear (Mato-wakan), Upper Yanktonai Sioux chief, 1872. He is wearing a fur headdress, bear claw necklace, and buckskin shirt with quillwork strips; and holds a decorated pipe, with a feather fan in the crook of his arm. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.
The bison, essential to Plains Indian life, supplied the Sioux with the materials for tipis, glue, rope, fuel, household implements, tools, bladder pouches, shields and food. From elk antler and horn were fashioned hide-scrapers, spoons and dippers. Bison meat was cut in long strips and hung up to dry; some was pounded and mixed with crushed berries to make into pemmican which could be stored for winter.
The Sioux kept records of important happenings in their tribal or personal history by means of so-called ‘winter counts’, Waniyetu Wowapi. These were records of the events of each ‘winter’, painted on hide (or later on canvas or muslin), which became calendrical chronicles of events stretching back many generations.
Horses became integrated into Sioux life from about 1750. In the warrior society, based on individual prestige gained through war, raiding for horses was one of the primary causes of intertribal clashes, as horses were a symbol of a man’s wealth. Warriors decorated horses with eagle feathers or painted their flanks with designs to lend them speed and courage. Women’s wooden saddles and stirrups were of a type derived from a Spanish (or perhaps ultimately, Moorish) style. Men rode bare-backed or used pad-saddles (traded from the north) or saddle blankets, and kept control with horsehair bridles; their horses were bedecked with face masks and headstalls for ceremonials and celebrations.
Smoking customs involving the spiritual use of pipes, or originally so-called ‘calumets’ with feather heraldry, were certainly pre-European and possibly ‘Mississippian’ (a prehistoric farming culture) in origin. The pipeheads were often made of a steatite called ‘catlinite’ (a red stone from a quarry in present-day Minnesota), and the stems were of carved ash decorated with quillwork or beadwork.
The most popular weapons for close fighting were stone clubs with long wooden handles. The stone head was grooved around the centre to take a rawhide band which was bound to the handle with sinew. The handle was then covered with buckskin sewn with heavy sinew and sometimes decorated with beadwork and a pendant of bison- or horsehair. Other so-called ‘slung-shot’ clubs had buckskin-encased stone heads at the end of buckskin-covered wooden handles. Later ornamental clubs had handles inserted in drilled stone heads. The Santee used gunstock-shaped clubs with traded metal blades, and iron axes and pipe-tomahawks became available through the English fur trade from the 18th century onwards. Bows were made of hardwoods – yew, ash, hickory – 3ft to 4ft long, sometimes painted, or decorated with brass tacks, beads or red trade cloth. Arrows with triple fletchings of hawk feathers, with inserted stone or, later, metal points, were carried with the bow in combined quivers and bowcases of buckskin. Traded percussion rifles were common by 1820. Shields were made from thick bison hide and painted with protective designs, and were sometimes kept in a secondary cover.
Horizontally-strung ‘hairpipe breastplates’ were very popular amongst Sioux men and vertically-strung ones amongst their women. The manufacture of commercially made shell hairpipes began in the 18th century, perhaps to replace Wampum, silver and brass ornaments in the eastern Indian trade. The term ‘hairpipe’ probably refers to their early use as hair ornaments. Their manufacture began amongst the Dutch settlers in New Jersey who sold them to the great trading companies, who in turn sold them to groups involved in the Indian fur trade. The Western Sioux got their first shell hairpipes in about 1800, along with trade silver arm bands, gorgets, brooches, ear wheels, finger rings and ear bobs. In the early 19th century hairpipes were used to make necklaces, chokers and hair ornaments, and it was probably the Comanche who invented the hairpipe breastplate by stringing them horizontally on buckskin cords. The earliest photographs of Western Sioux men wearing hairpipe breastplates are among those taken in Washington in 1872 during a visit by Sioux leaders, although they had earlier made dentalium shell necklaces, ear ornaments and breastplates. In about 1880, as the demand for large numbers of hairpipes for use in making elaborate breastplates was increasing, the Sioux began to obtain a cheaper and less fragile type made of cattle bone. The Sioux used bone hairpipe breastplates of two or three rows wide, each about 4in to 4½ins long, extending to the waist, usually spaced between rawhide strips and brass beads. Hairpipes are still used today, although usually of composite materials. Women strung the hairpipes vertically into complex necklaces reaching almost to their knees.
Sioux moccasins were probably originally of the single-piece side seam or centre seam type used by the Santee, which reflect a Woodland/Prairie form. However, the Western Sioux developed moccasins with separate, hard soles in about 1840 – probably due to European influence – and these proved sturdier for High Plains terrain. Moccasins were quilled or beaded with geometrical designs.
Cradles were made in the form of rectangular hide bags, fastened with buckskin thongs at the front and heavily beaded. A variant with a beaded cradle hood and supporting wood lattice frame, more usually associated with the Cheyenne, was also sometimes used by the Sioux. The Eastern Sioux used a cradle made from a wooden board fitted with a protective bow for the child’s head and a place to hang trinkets – a style they shared with the Pawnee, Oto and Osage; the baby was wrapped and held against the board.
Afraid-of-Hawk, Oglala band, Teton Sioux, 1898. He holds a typical stone-headed club, the handle decorated with beadwork. He wears in his hair a quilled ‘circle of the world’ with a trailer of beads (probably brass) and eagle feathers attached. Probably photographed by Heyn during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska. (Author’s collection)
The Eastern Sioux began to obtain European trade goods well before the turn of the 18th century, but it was not until the early 1800s that the Western Sioux became involved in the fur trade and received trade goods in exchange. By 1850 great changes were taking place in Sioux art and design. Porcupine quillwork and painted designs had been the principal means of artistic decoration of religious objects and ceremonial dress. Flattened quills were dyed with natural pigments, plaited, and sewn down in lanes with sinew thread to produce areas of solid quillwork in simple geometrical patterns. Sometimes bird quills or maidenhair fern were also used.
The first European beads obtained by the Teton and some branches of the Santee, Yanktonai and Yankton for embroidery were so-called ‘pony beads’, usually blue, red and white, and quill designs were adapted for these earliest beadwork elements. Earlier only large necklace trade beads had been used. Pony beads have been so named because they were carried by the traders’ ponies in back packs. Shells, mostly dentalium shells, were also brought to the Plains by traders, and the Sioux used them for earrings and chokers.
From about 1860 huge quantities of glass ‘seed beads’ in a wide range of colours became increasingly available, produced in Venice and Bohemia. These allowed the transformation of Sioux decorative art and design from simple squares, rectangles and triangles to highly complex geometrical shapes. Some art historians believe this was an indigenous development using new materials; others, that it was influenced by designs on imported multi-patterned Middle Eastern rugs and carpets or copies seen at Army posts or traders’ stores.
Beadwork ultimately covered moccasins, dress yokes and storage bags and was used on shirts, leggings, tobacco bags, horsegear and weapons.
Tetons became the most prolific beadworkers on the Plains, possibly because the new way of life on the reservations afforded women more spare time. Their technique of beading is called ‘lazy stitch’: eight to ten beads are strung on sinew into a row, stitched only at the ends, and built up to cover large areas in lanes.
The Western Sioux continued to dress in their Indian clothes for tribal gatherings and Fourth of July celebrations long after white man’s clothes were commonplace for everyday wear. These social gatherings were an outward display of continuing Indian life acceptable to the white agency officials and missionaries who had driven native religion and ritual underground. (Even in displays of the Grass Dance in specially constructed dance halls men were required to don ‘long john’ underclothes under their regalia.) The Grass Dance became so popular – displacing society dances of a more religious type, yet incorporating features of old warrior rituals – that it has become the basis of the modern Indian powwow. The northern form (Canadian Grass Dance), the Sioux form (sometimes called the Omaha Dance), and the southern form (the Hethuska) all descend from the old Omaha-Ponca prototype.
A Teton Sioux shirt, now in the collection of University of Cambridge, UK, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Acc.No.219215 – an earlier assession number (3312) suggests a transfer from another museum, probably an exchange with either the old Heye Foundation in New York or the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The style and decoration appear to be typically Teton Sioux and probably either Oglala or Brulé, made some time between 1885 and 1895. Despite its fairly late date, suggested by the use of metal beads, it retains much of the important Teton symbolism of older shirts such as those worn by delegates of the Oglala chiefs’ society.
The shirt is constructed with two large deer or elk skins forming the front and back and smaller skins forming the arms, with extensions under the arms added to resemble the older untailored shirts of the early 19th century. The colour symbolism is old: an upper area painted blue (here a greenish-blue shade), representing sky and the presence of the Great Spirit, the lower half painted yellow to symbolise earth or rock.
The beaded strips are typically Teton, executed in lazy stitch seed beadwork of lanes each eight beads wide (approximately 0.5in/ 1.27cm). On white panels, the major motifs seen here (front, top to bottom) are light blue crosses edged with red, with black and white central blocking; black bars crossed by light blue stripes edged red, bearing yellow blocks; yellow crosses edged black, with white and red central blocking; and a repeat of the second motif.
The use of hairlock fringes, either human or horse, suggests the original owner may have been a warrior of note. Triangular neck flaps, characteristic of Oglala and Brulé warrior shirts, may represent the skinned-out heads of the animals used in the construction of the shirts; or, as Taylor (1988) has suggested, may symbolise the knife sheaths worn around the neck by 18th century warriors. (Author’s photograph)
By the mid-20th century the generation born within the old culture were passing on. Now poverty, inertia, and the appalling mismanagement of Indian affairs by the government bureaucracy which ran the reservation services and policies (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) found the Indian people at their lowest point. However, the gradual rejuvenation of Indian culture which has occurred since World War II is a powerful mixture of various tribal customs, dress, ethnic symbols and political awareness. Called ‘Pan-Indianism’ by social anthropologists, it finds its outward expression in the revival of Indian celebrations on all Sioux reservations – the ubiquitous powwow. Male dancers – known as ‘Fancy Dancers’ or ‘Traditional Dancers’ – wear baroque regalia using roaches, huge feather bustles, beadwork in matching sets of armbands, cuffs, aprons, and moccasins in various forms, and perform to the songs of specialist singers (see Plate H). Women have revived full-beaded yoke dresses in multicoloured beadwork and younger girls sport the popular ‘jingle dress’, an adaptation of the Chippewa (Ojibwa) form. The powwow involves parades and formally organised categories of male and female dances which show their Indian dress to advantage.
Layout of the Teton Sioux man’s buckskin shirt, c1885, now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. (Author’s drawing)
Members of the Strong Heart and No Flight military societies wore headdresses consisting of buckskin skullcaps covered with ermine skin fringes. At each side split buffalo horns were attached, and beneath them were bunches of owl feathers. At the back was a feathery rudder of black and white eagle feathers. Some of the members carried ring-shaped rawhide rattles, and straight lances decorated with a row of eagle feathers attached to a strip of red trade cloth. The society names refer to the bravery in battle of their members, who did not retreat when attacked.
The old Grass Dance Society adopted from the Omaha Indians probably during the 1860s seems to have incorporated strong elements of older Sioux ceremonialism, with appointed officers and distinctive dancers’ dress. Some dancers were entitled to wear a type of back bustle, attached at hip level with a belt which was sometimes a Hudson’s Bay Company yarn sash. The bustle consisted of a rawhide base surmounted by two eagle wing feathers standing upright or outwards. Hanging down were two pieces of heavy red or blue trade cloth with eagle tail feathers attached so that they would flutter gracefully when the dancer moved. On the base, crow, owl or hawk feathers or skins were attached to give the bustle-like effect. Crows, being the first bird to scavenge a battlefield, were thus symbolically associated with warfare, and their use in the construction of these ritual belts has given rise to their alternative name ‘crow belts’, the crow being one of the guardians of Sioux warriors. The name Grass Dance itself derives from the use of sweetgrass braids worn or tucked in the belt.
From the old Grass Dance dress has descended the modern male powwow dancers’ dress with their huge back bustles, but the porcupine and deerhair headroach is a survival from the past. The headroach probably preceded the Grass Dance amongst the Teton and had been reported in use amongst the Santee from the early days of European contact. The fur fillet head-dress was also used by Santee and Yankton men. Sometimes Warbonnet and Buffalo Dances were performed with the old Grass Dance. Both male and female leaders wore eagle feather warbonnets (a ritual probably descended from the older Scalp or Victory Dances), and in the Buffalo Dance men and women wore headdresses of bison scalps with horns. In the Heyoka Dance, usually performed during the Grass Dance, clowns dressed in ragged costume, sometimes with masks, performed strange antics, dancing backwards, carrying crooked bows or bent arrows. These ‘clowns’ were usually men who had dreamed of the Thunderbird and were holy with the power to heal. During the Sun Dance, male dancers were naked except for a deerskin or cloth kilt and breechcloth and their sacred ornaments, consisted of a chaplet of sage with horn-like feathers projecting at the sides and scratching sticks attached to the back. Sun Dancers wore their hair loose and unbraided. Other ornaments included wristlets of sage and rabbit fur anklets. Around the neck each carried on a cord an eagle bone whistle upon which he piped while dancing.
The basic construction of the Plains Indian ceremonial shirt required two large skins of elk, pronghorn or deer. The lower two-thirds of each skin (the back leg ends) form the main front and back sections, and the upper third (the foreleg ends) formed the arms. These skins were then sewn, laced or held together with buckskin ties. This form, with many variations, was used by all the Teton Sioux branches, as well as the Yankton, Yanktonai, Sisseton and Wahpeton, although examples from the latter three divisions tend to show more tailoring of the skins, even in early specimens. A secondary feature was the addition of neck flaps, perhaps based originally on skinned-out animal heads, or a derivative of the ancient custom amongst the Eastern Sioux of wearing a triangular-shaped knife sheath at the neck.
The outstanding characteristic of Sioux shirts was the use of porcupine-quilled strips, of separate hide, sewn on along the arms and over the shoulder in a vertical plane; this runs contrary to the tradition of horizontal painting on some Subarctic and Woodland attire. Some authorities speculate that this might be traceable to an early European influence on Indians and Métis on the north-eastern margins of the Plains, where the use of European-style epaulettes on the shoulder seams is known in examples of marginal Cree and Métis coats of the late 18th century. Diminutive strips fixed along the shoulder seam of shirts attributed to the Assiniboine, Yanktonai and Santee tend to support this theory.
Ceremonial shirts from the Oglala and Brulé show a predominance of human- and horsehair lock fringes, indicating a strong association with war, rank and status, as also recorded by the use of such shirts by the Chiefs’ Societies (Wicasas). Many were painted, the lower half of the front and back in yellow or red to symbolise earth or rock, and the upper half in blue or blue-green, representing sky. More typical of northern Teton, Yanktonai and Sisseton shirts of the early to mid-19th century were the use of painted warrior figures and equestrian battle scenes. Quilled chest discs, the use of blue pony beads and red flannel cloth neck flaps reflect a mixed style, perhaps shared with the other riverine groups involved in the 19th century Missouri River trade. By about the 1870s the ceremonial shirt had lost its important military status and was replaced gradually by more tailored forms, or by the use of fully beaded vests of Euro-American form.
Sioux women c1920. The women on the left are wearing cloth dresses with belts decorated with German silver; two seated women wear buckskin dresses with beaded capes.
Early male leggings were also constructed from a complete skin for each legging. The bottom tabs derived from the shape of the skinned-out head of the animal. Later deerskin leggings cut in rectangular shapes and folded to form a tapered tube with flaps – based on the ‘cowboy’ chaps of the Spanish-Americans – became popular. These were replaced in their turn by similarly constructed leggings of blue or red trade cloth. Along the folded seams were added strips of quillwork (porcupine and bird quills) and hairlock fringes, or strips of beadwork on later leggings. Buckskin shirts and leggings are rarely made today.
Teton women were the makers of the magnificent ceremonial male and female attire, work which included tanning deer and elk hides, sewing and decorating – except when painted pictographic warrior figures were used, which seem to have been the preserve of men. There is little evidence that Western Sioux women wore the shoulder strap or single-seam side-fold dresses associated with the Santee and Yankton respectively, at least not for long after their arrival on the High Plains. The oldest known Teton form of skin dress was the full length two-skin form in the original animal shapes, simply folded at the top (the tail end) to give a cape-like effect when the excess flaps were folded down. The classic form of the period before 1850 was similar, but the yoke was a separate piece of skin covering the shoulders and cut to follow the shape of the top or tail edge of the main front and back skins. This so-called ‘three-skin’ dress was known with variations throughout the Plains and Plateau areas. These dresses give a cape-like shoulderpiece falling over the arms. The side seams were usually sewn and fringed, the forelegs and bottom edge also fringed.
Later, perhaps beginning about 1860 and coinciding with the wide availability of seed beads, the shoulderpiece or yoke became larger, adjoining the skirt skins in a straight line below the bust, and became the fields for exquisite decoration in beadwork. Surviving museum examples have been interpreted as containing symbolical elements from Sioux beliefs. The beadwork in ‘lazy stitch’ tended to follow the contours of the shoulder yoke in horizontal lanes. As examples of old Sioux dresses with fully quilled yokes are unknown, we have little knowledge about the origins of the beaded designs; but the early ‘pony’ beaded designs were simply blocks, triangles and diamonds from which complex geometrical seed bead designs later developed. Today Sioux women still make and wear fully beaded yoke dresses, but have added huge amounts of long fringe under the arms, which sway gracefully when dancing.
From around 1880 Sioux women began to wear blue wool trade cloth dresses having large square wings or open sleeves and long triangular insets in the sides of the skirt, which projected below the bottom edge in the manner of the animal leg projections on skin dresses. The shoulders were sometimes sloping to accommodate concentric lanes of dentalium shells. The belts usually worn with cloth dresses had large German silver conches attached, with a tapered pendant. Beaded belts often had a knife case, an awl case, and a strike-a-light pouch and whetstone pouch hanging from them. During the late 19th century Sioux women’s leggings of buckskin were tied below the knee, and were often solidly beaded, with a vertically beaded area in front or slightly towards the outside of the leg. Moccasins were of the hard-soled type, usually solidly beaded and occasionally matching the leggings.
Warbonnets
The eagle feather warbonnet has become strongly associated with the Western Sioux, probably because a number of Teton men joined the ‘Wild West’ shows of Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill and others in the late 19th century and wore them in their circus performances of mock battles. However, by this time they had lost their political and military symbolism and emerged rather as an emblem of ‘Indianness’, and as such were adopted by many tribes as an ethnic badge.
Eagle and other feathered headdresses were used by many eastern tribes, but they seem to have been constructed by fixing the feathers to a headband to hold them rigidly upright – a form that continued amongst the Blackfoot, Cree and Flathead until reservation days. The bonnet style with feathers sloping backwards, fixed by lacing the feathers to a skullcap, with another control thong passing through each quill in a circle, seems to have developed amongst the Missouri valley tribes and the Crows in the early 19th century. Certainly, by the time the artists Catlin and Bodmer were making their records in the 1830s they had already developed into their flaring style.
Paul Strange Horse, Brulé Sioux c.1905. He wears a quilled shirt, a hairpipe-breastplate, and holds a beaded pipebag. His war-bonnet of eagle tail feathers is of the typical Sioux flaring or sloping back style.
The Sioux and other central Plains tribes had a complex feather heraldry. Some have suggested that each feather represented a man’s scalplock, and certainly each feather did represent some war honour. Most bonnets had between 26 and 36 eagle tail feathers (although sometimes primaries and secondaries). The skullcap used as a basic foundation was originally made of skin, but later cut-down white men’s felt hats were used. Each feather was prepared by forming a loop by cutting and turning the thick end of the quill inside itself; in later times an attached rawhide loop was substituted. Near the quill ends were attached eagle ‘fluffy’ feathers, and red trade cloth wrappings then covered the loop and fluffy bindings. At the tip of the feather horsehair was attached with gypsum or later with sealing wax. Each feather was then laced to the skull cap; a second lacing controlled the feathers to create a flared profile and prevented them blowing forward over the wearer’s face. A browband of quillwork or beadwork was usually sewn along the front. Sometimes, from the centre of the back, a stripped quill decorated with fluffy eagle feathers was attached. Sometimes enough feathers were awarded to enable single or double trailers to be added at the back of the bonnet, laced to a red cloth base which was attached to the skull cap, and reaching the ground. However, many such magnificent headdresses were made after the loss of feather symbolism.
Even today warbonnets are still vaguely associated with war, and only chiefs and military veterans are regarded as rightful wearers at today’s powwows and Indian celebrations. Ironically, they have decreased in popularity amongst the Sioux, and are rarely seen today at the ceremonials of the people who once made them so popular. However, the Crow and Blackfoot continue to wear them on special occasions.