From Clothing to Culture: Shaping Identities Using a Sioux Beaded Vest

From Clothing to Culture: Shaping Identities Using a Sioux Beaded Vest

By Crystina Friese

The year is 1893. You are a hardworking, middle class citizen. You only have one day off per week and you are excited to use it to attend the World’s Fair. For the first time ever, you have food, objects, and people from all over the world at your fingertips. You pass by the lively beer gardens of Germany, the stoic Irish Castles, and the peaceful Japanese gardens with awe. Finally, you arrive at the Midway. You see indigenous peoples from across the United States and the world for the first time. You are shocked by the magnificent clothing and adornments they wear. You pass by a little Native American child in a beaded vest and they look almost sad. You do not quite notice this look because you are marveling at the beauty of the mix of cultures around you. What you do not realize is that little kid did not get to pick what they are wearing. All the indigenous peoples present at the fair were dressed deliberately by the exhibitors. They did not have a say about how their culture would be represented and as a result, would grow up with portions of their history erased.

Flash forward to today, the year 2019. When you get up in the morning, you tend to deliberately pick your clothing, right? Clothing is the immediate representation of a person’s identity and culture. This idea may manifest itself in different ways across the world like a Japanese kimono, the Indian sari, or a Scottish kilt. No matter where you are in the world, it is clear that people pick what they wear with a sense of purpose. Well, what if one day someone took you from your home, dressed you, and put you in a room for millions of people to watch you over the course of six months? That was the experience of the Sioux tribe and other indigenous peoples at the World’s Fair.

The reason this happened is because of the patrons who funded the exhibits. They often donated money towards specific exhibits and displayed other cultures with an entertainment factor in mind. A patron of the fair, Edward E. Ayer, who became a patron to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as well, funded the display featuring the Sioux beaded vest. He is credited with gifting the child’s beaded vest to the Field Museum after the end of the fair. 

On the museum’s website, the vest is listed as an “Iconic Artifact” with six other artifacts that are cherished from the World’s Fair. These artifacts include Javanese masks, botanical samples, fossils, a taxidermied lion, a “cursed” meteorite, fairground tickets, and the Sioux beaded vest. Even though the vest is part of this list of treasured artifacts there is no contextual information associated with it. The little description listed under the image describes it as a “Sioux Child’s Beaded Vest” which can be seen below.

 

Sioux Child’s Beaded Vest (Field Museum, n.d.). Photograph taken in curation at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Taking what we know from 1893 in the context of what we know today, some things just do not add up. Why is this vest hanging in a museum if it is not necessarily representative of the Sioux tribe’s culture? Why is it an “Iconic Artifact” if there is no story associated with it? I asked myself these questions and here is what I found in an attempt to answer them.

            This beaded vest originated from the Sioux tribe, which is an extensive and encompassing name for a large group of indigenous people. They covered a large portion of land in what is now known as North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in the Great Plains region of North America. The Great Sioux Nation is comprised of seven Sioux tribes that have differing cultural and linguistic practices that are represented by the categories of Lakota, Western Dakota, and Eastern Dakota. The tribe had very diverse cultural practices across its territories as well. They interacted with European colonizers and had cultural exchanges, which created the practice of beaded clothing (Lakota and Dakota Facts 2015). Because of their heritage, the Sioux tribe suffered great violence from participating in wars with Europeans. The child that wore that vest in 1893 probably fought hard to protect the Sioux identity in a never-ending battle that is still being faced by many indigenous groups today.

While the United States has made progress from 1893 to now in terms of repatriating goods to Indigenous peoples, there is still much work to be done. Institutions like the Field Museum work to decolonize the history Americans are taught during school. The lack of specific information regarding the origins of the vest hint at the European erasure of the subtleties of Native American culture; however, the museum actively works with Indigenous groups to make sure their cultures are being represented in ways that they approve of. Working with communities to properly display their cultures is a critical aspect of museum work in order to avoid disconnecting objects from their original significance. While patrons like Edward Ayer may not have realized it at the time, their collections of indigenous artifacts preserve the culture, but with each time it passes hands, the object becomes further and further removed from its context. 

After learning all of this, the beaded vest becomes so much more than just a piece of clothing. It is a symbol of identity that has fought a long battle to exist, and with that in mind, is being preserved. No one can fix the errors of the past, but we can fix them for the future. Even as simple museum goers, it is important to be critical of the museum curations we see to make sure we do not perpetuate stereotypes presented by the people who have power over minority groups. The whole context of the artifact can be misunderstood without knowing some of the Sioux’s complicated history and how the manipulation of wealth created power over indigenous peoples. While signifying the Sioux identity may not have been its original purpose, this vest has morphed into a symbol of strength, perseverance, and hope for future Sioux children to not experience the difficulties of their ancestors’ past. 

To learn more about clothing and how it shapes identities check out: 

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143805?casa_token=aRI5GN2eF74AAAAA:aNafwINhyeOG4YT-3rVUwJdIYSuSQtkWdvUldsUW4c6SR5rRYuOXPcvqw1iQMiLo8PAaw_o1sxNd 

For more about the dangers of museum contextualizations in relation to Indigenous clothing see:

http://www.mcgilltribune.com/a-e/wearing-our-identity-article-20112018/

References

Bank, Rosemarie 2002. “Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition.” InRe-Thinking the Real Vol 54, No 4. Pp. 589-606. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069139.

Field Museum, n.d. http://worldsfair.fieldmuseum.org/explore/photo-galleries/gallery2. (Accessed October 16, 2019).

Lakota and Dakota Facts 2015. http://www.bigorrin.org/sioux_kids.htm. (Accessed October 16, 2019).