Bandolier Bags and Indigenous Modernism

Abstract

This is a material culture-based case study of two bandolier bags dated to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in the Agnes Etherington Art Center collection in Kingston, Canada. The floral motifs that decorate these two bags are not made from porcupine quills, nor are all of them bilaterally symmetrical as in “traditional” Indigenous art. Instead, they are made from glass beads, and most of the floral designs are asymmetrical. The bags’ surface patterns and materials were made possible through international trade, which facilitated the merging of European and other global designs, materials, and forms with Indigenous visual and material culture. Contemporary Western anthropological discourse framed these Indigenous objects as “hybrids” and alleged that they distorted the original meaning of such styles in a European context while simultaneously “corrupting” traditional Indigenous art and culture. Such art forms were denied a place in modernity due to their supposed inauthenticity. Ironically, “authentic” Indigenous art and material culture was likewise barred from being considered “modern” due to its hand-made, “preindustrial” nature. Connecting North American historical developments with discourse on Indigenous modernisms, I argue that on the contrary, these bags evince their makers’ conscientious engagement with modernity and can be considered modern Indigenous art.

Keywords:

• Indigenous
• modernism
• bandolier bags
• beadwork
• material culture studies

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally submitted as an assignment for ARTH 864 – Studies in 20^th Century Art I (course topic: “Indigenous Modernism(s) in North American Art and Abroad: Re-mapping the Twentieth Century”), a class led by Prof. Norman Vorano at Queen’s University in 2015. I thank Prof. Vorano for directing my attention to the bags studied in this paper, and Alicia Boutilier and Jennifer Nicoll of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre for their advice and assistance.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted that Nicholas Thomas has indicated problems with consistently reading hybridity as a sign of “creative subversion”; however, Thomas states that the notion “is valuable for its contradiction of an essentializing order, and not because ‘hybrid’ framing is necessarily apt to the historical context of the notionally hybrid objects.” Nicholas Thomas. 2000. “Technologies of Conversion: Cloth and Christianity in Polynesia.” In Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes, 199. London: Routledge.

2 On the role of international cross-cultural exchange in Indigenous modern art, see Norman Vorano. 2011. “Travelling Prints: James Houston, Un’ichi Hiratsuka and the Early Cape Dorset Print Studio,” in Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic, 31–67. Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. As Vorano notes, the introduction of Japanese printmaking to Cape Dorset was facilitated by the cultural brokerage of white settler James Houston.

3 Laura Peers similarly deals with scarce information regarding a bag’s maker and exact provenance in her examination of a mid-nineteenth-century embroidered and beaded “octopus” bag made by a Métis woman in the northwestern interior of North America. Peers, “Material Culture,” in Women and Things.

4 For another example of Stinton Bros.’s work (for the furniture printers John Lowe & Co.), see The Metropolitan Museum, 26.265.18: Stinton Bros. (designer) and John Lowe & Co. (manufacturer), Piece, 1831-51, Shepley Hall, Lancashire, England, cotton, 66 × 73.7 cm.

5 The differing gender ideologies attached to floral imagery are also discussed in Phillips, Trading Identities, 182–190.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sheilagh Quaile

Sheilagh Quaile is a white settler, early-career art historian who specializes in transnational nineteenth-century textiles and design. Funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and a Bader Fellowship in Art History, Quaile’s PhD thesis, “Paisley, Scotland’s Nineteenth-Century Shawl Designers: Innovators or Imitators?” (Queen’s University, 2020) investigates the sources, methods, and training of nineteenth-century Scottish designers who emulated Kashmiri textiles. Quaile’s research has been published in the Journal of Design History. [email protected]