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Sioux Beaded & Quilled Pictorial Pipebag

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Western Americana Start Price:2,000.00 USD Estimated At:4,000.00 - 6,000.00 USD
Sioux Beaded & Quilled Pictorial Pipebag
Preview: Phoenix Marriott Mesa - 200 N Centennial Way, Mesa, AZ 85201
Preview Period:
Thursday January 27 -- 3:00 pm-7:00 pm
Friday January 28 -- 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Saturday January 29 – 9:00 am -4:30 pm
38” total length, including fringe. Multicolored beadwork on white field. Front: Mounted Indian warrior wearing full headdress and holding shield in one hand, coo stick in other. Back: Mounted Indian warrior wearing full headdress and holding coo stick, on native-tanned hide. Multicolored, quill-wrapped slats, and fringe. Fine condition, c 1890 Sioux Pipe Bags by Benson L Lanford Pipe Bags as a genre of American Indian material culture were indispensable objects for the Lakota / Western Sioux, other Plains Indian tribes and those of other cultural areas. The term, “Tobacco Bag”, is also current in the vernacular of the ethnology and art collecting worlds for in part the term describes their primary purpose— that of storing various tobacco mixtures, pipe tampers, perhaps matches, pieces of wood punk (used to make coals to light the pipe), and sundry other things that are essential to smoking the pipe. Pipe bags as well as other objects functioned not only as personal belongings, but as gifts to family members, friends, visitors, and even dignitaries in many situations. They figured as highly prized presents in Give-Away ceremonies- those ever present events among virtually all Indian people. As well, particularly in the reservation period, Indian women made pipe bags and other items for sale to the outside to help support their families. Three parts typically comprise the Sioux tobacco bag—the pouch proper of native-tanned leather, a decorative section of rawhide slats wrapped with porcupine quills, and fringes of tanned leather. Various ornaments are seen fastened to the bags-- including hawk bells, metal cones, horse hair tassels, and downy feathers. Porcupine quillwork or beadwork customarily covers both sides of the lower portion of the bag itself, with all manner of motifs, either purely decorative ones imbued with symbolic meanings. Abstraction is a key aspect of the designs, indeed frequently resembling their given themes not in the least. The makers’ intentions figure heavily in the meanings implied therein, including such things as geological features such as mountains, buttes and open areas between, trees, as well as buffalo, turtles and other animals greatly stylized or abstracted. (READ MORE p 131)