Uncommon Threads

Wabanaki Textiles, Clothing, and Costume

Bruce J. Bourque and Laureen A. LaBar

• $45.00 paperback (9780295988702) Add to Cart
• hardcover not available

• Published: June 2009
• Subject Listing: Native Studies, Textiles
• Bibliographic information: 192 pp., 164 illus., 104 in color, map, notes, bibliog., index, 8.5 x 10 in.
• Territorial rights: World rights except Canada
• Published with: Maine State Museum, Augusta, Maine
• Contents

Uncommon Threads celebrates the textile arts of the Wabanakis, the indigenous people living between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine. Known geographically as the Maritime Peninsula, the region falls in both the United States and Canada. For millennia, textiles have played a vital role as Native communities have expressed and maintained their identity. This large and distinctive body of Wabanaki artifacts challenges stereotypes about Native textiles and clothing that are based on more familiar styles from better known regions of North America.

For Wabanakis, textiles have long been a rich and important medium. They record how, beginning in the seventeenth century, an indigenous people coped with a rapidly expanding alien culture that surrounded them. The Wabanakis defined their view of this new world through their clothing and costume. For all cultures, important occasions and life events demand special clothes that communicate messages to the viewer. By examining Wabanaki costume, including specific styles and decorative ornament, one can find information that illuminates the history of the Wabanakis, their means of communication, and the ways they coped with a rapidly changing world.

Bruce J. Bourque and Laureen A. LaBar are curators at the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

"In a remarkable display of indigenous textile technology and textile arts, Uncommon Threads shows how Native peoples of the Maritime Peninsula blended tradition and innovation to create enduring expressions of Wabanaki identity in a rapidly changing world." - Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

"Beautiful objects, beautiful book! It is a joy to see textiles assume their rightful place in the Wabanaki story and in the larger history of an almost forgotten borderland." -Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

Preface
Introduction
1. The Native Peoples of the Maritime Peninsula
2. Wabanaki Textiles: Legacy of an Ancient Woven World
3. Layered Colors, Layered Cultures: Wabanaki Costume in a Changing Environment
4. Textiles and Tradition: The Survival of Native Forms After 1850
Appendix: Historical Origins of Chief 's Coats, by Linda Baumgarten
Notes
References Cited
Index