Deer Hide Strap Dress

Deer Hide Strap Dress

The Jarvis Dress

50.67.2

Home tanned hide dress with two side seams, added yoke and peplum. Decorative treatments include scalloping and fringing, beaded running stitch, quill-wrapped fringes and pairs of tassels terminating in tin cones.

1833-1835, or before

Possibly Yanktonai, Nakota, Sioux, Cree or Anishinaabe.

Pembina, North Dakota

Unsmoked deer hide; glass seed and cut beads; glass pony beads; metal cones; dyed porcupine quills; red ochre or vermillion pigment; cotton or linen thread.

Collected by Nathan Sturges Jarvis when he was stationed at Ft. Snelling, Minneapolis, MN, c.1833-35. Purchased by the Brooklyn Museum with the Henry L. Batterman Fund and Frank Sherman Benson Fund.

hide strap dress

Feder, Norman. 1964. Art of the Eastern Plains Indians: The Nathan Sturges Jarvis Collection. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum.

-------- 1984. The Side-fold Dress. American Indian Art Magazine 10(1):48-55 and 75,77.

Maurer, Evan M. 1977. The Native American Heritage: A Survey of North American Indian Art. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago.

Hail, Barbara. 2011. “’To Honor Her Kindred’: Women’s Arts Centered In the Tipi.” In Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains. Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller, eds. Pp. 119-39. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Willmott, Cory. 2022. Decolonizing the Museum to Reclaim and Revitalize the Anishinaabe Strap Dress. Winterthur Portfolio 55(2):121-185

Heritage Item

46 x 21 in. (116.8 x 53.3 cm)

dress