Native American dressmaking is a Folk Art and a Storyteller's Art. Covering a dress in elk's teeth was once a way of showing off the hunting prowess of male family members. Ceremonial garments were brought to life with dazzling colors and the tinkling of metal baubles, feathers plucked from eagles and fringes that swayed like prairie grass.
They embodied the dreams and memories of generations of women. Patterns and skills passed from mother to daughter extended a tangible record of tribal traditions, family honor and spiritual awakening. After tribes were confined to reservations, Ghost Dance dresses were painted with Thunderbird and new moon symbols that evoked yearnings for a new life.
Indian dresses made generations ago also reveal how widespread intertribal trade was in early America. Seashells from the Pacific Northwest, for example, were exchanged for buffalo robes from the Great Plains. When European goods such as glass beads and dyed wool cloth, appeared, women simply added the new colors and textures to their palettes. Patterns became bolder, but they never lost the unique markers that identified the cultural roots of their creators.
PLAINS STYLE: A Sioux wool dress, choker and earrings from South Dakota (circa 1890-1900) use delicate seashells from the Pacific Northwest to great effect. Brass tacks transform utilitarian harness leather into a bold belt and knife sheath.
Tin cones sewn onto the bottom of a Cheyenne hide dred (circa 1930) made it come alive with sound and would have boldly announced the approach of its wearer.
For Native American women of the nineteenth century, expressing their identities through what they wore was a considerably more serious enterprise, and a more challenging one. They made their clothes themselves out of whatever materials were available, primarily animal hides and, later, woolen and cotton cloth woven in England expressly for trading with Native Americans. And, in Native cultures where a girl or woman might wear the same dress for years, dresses were designed and decorated not only to be aesthetically pleasing but also to give specific information about the wearer.
Certain symbols on a dress referred to the woman's tribe, her marital status, and, for example, the prowess of her husband or father as a hunter or trader. Since elk have at most two eyeteeth, a dress adorned with dozens or even hundreds of elk eyeteeth signaled that the men in the family were skilled hunters.
To make some of the oldest dating from the early 1800s, a single animal hide was folded in half. The two edges were then sewn to create a straight tube dress. Practical as they were, the straight, relatively narrow dresses made it difficult for women to ride horses, and by the early 1830s women in nomadic tribes began making two-hide dresses. The hides came from elk, deer and big horn sheep and by sewing two together along the edges of the hides with the tail end of the animal at the top of the dress, the garment resembled a loose, A-line dress. Designers of hide dresses left the tail of the animal intact and the tail became a highly desirable embellishment at the wearer's neckline. Later in the century it became fashionable to remove the tail from the hide and to replace it with intricate beadwork at the neckline. Two-hide dresses eventually evolved into three-hide dresses, in which a third hide was folded like a short cape over the A-line, two-hide garment.
The dresses were utilitarian. They were warm, tough and relatively weather-hardy. But to create style, both tribal and personal, the women used porcupine quills, bits of tin, carved bone, animal sinew, coins, animal teeth, fossilized shells, and the brightly colored glass beads that traders brought from the glass factories of Venice or what is now the Czech Republic. Thousands of hours went into the embellishment on many of these dresses, and by the late 1800s, the entire yoke of a woman's dress was sometimes covered with beads. One of the most glorious dresses in the show is a Sioux two-hide dress from about 1865 with a fully beaded yoke in an abstract yellow, white, black, blue, and red pattern.
The same Cheyenne dress reveals a shift from porcupine quillwork to glass beads. But Southwestern tribes retained the tradition of stringing native dark red mescal beat
American Indian dressmaking is a storyteller's art. Covering a dress in elk's teeth was once a way of showing off the hunting prowess of male family members. Ceremonial garments were brought to life with dazzling colors and the tinkling of metal baubles, feathers plucked from eagles and fringes that swayed like prairie grass.
They embodied the dreams and memories of generations of women. Patterns and skills passed from mother to daughter extended a tangible record of tribal traditions, family honor and spiritual awakening. After tribes were confined to reservations, Ghost Dance dresses were painted with Thunderbird and new moon symbols that evoked yearnings for a new life.
Indian dresses made generations ago also reveal how widespread intertribal trade was in early America. Seashells from the Pacific Northwest, for example, were exchanged for buffalo robes from the Great Plains. When European goods such as glass beads and dyed wool cloth, appeared, women simply added the new colors and textures to their palettes. Patterns became bolder, but they never lost the unique markers that identified the cultural roots of their creators.
A Kiowa girl shows off her dress festooned with rows of elk teeth at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1895. Elk teeth signified prosperity, but as elk became scarce and Indians could no longer hunt freely, imitation teeth were carved from bone.
WAR STORIES: A warrior probably painted this Sioux muslin dress (circa 1890) for the wife or sister of a man killed in battle. Painted bullet holes and blood indicate where the man was shot. 
String fringes on a Comanche hide dress (circa 1890) and rows of metal buttons on the moccasins accentuated the graceful swaying dances of the Southern Plains women.
A Blackfoot dress (circa 1900) made of trade goods, including a row of thimbles, is paired with a more traditional bonnet (circa 1890) of eagle feathers and ermine pelts.