This mask from the Northwest Coast features one of the more fantastical beings in the Northwest Coast: Dzunuk’wa, or Wild Woman. In legend, she was twice as large as a human and rumored to carry a large basket of captured children who had wandered into her woods. She was also […]
Monthly Archives: July 2014
4 posts
While it looks like a woven doughnut, this ring shaped basket played an important role in the lives of many women in the Southwest. Water was often quite a distance from the home, so the women would have to gather water and materials each day. This was done with large […]
Birch bark has a wide variety of uses due to its unique nature; it peels off! Some European countries used it as paper! But many tribes used the birch as basket making material. Similar to the Swedish Easter basket, the basket featured above is woven out of strips of birch […]
How did natives make their beads? It is a question we often hear from visitors to the museum. The beads pictured above are made of clay, one of the easiest materials to use for bead making. Each tribe had access to different types of clay, so the particulars of the […]