Cleveland Museum of Art

Blanket Strip

Date

c. 1900

Medium

Native-tanned hide, glass beads, yellow trade cloth, brass beads, sinew thread

Culture

Native North America, Plains, Tsitsistas (Cheyenne)

Department

Textiles

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

The animal-hide robes basic to Plains attire were often ornamented with quilled or beaded strips, which also were stitched to the blankets that replaced robes. This beaded example carries the cross-in-a-circle motif that symbolizes the world, the four directions, and the sacred center, concepts central to Plains worldviews. In the 1932 words of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) holy man, “[T]he power of the world always works in circles. . . . The flowering tree was at the center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. . . . Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle.” This beaded strip was stitched to a hide or a blanket.

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