This small, tapered basket sold at our downtown Beehive storefront was designed to be hung up; if set down, it tips over. It is a “Burden Basket”, most likely Apache-made of mulberry bark and split willow canes. When woven with the outer side of the bark showing on the outside of the basket, that part of the pattern is dark, when woven with the inner side of the bark showing, the light part of the pattern is created. Thus, the baskets’ insides and outsides are not patterned identically. Burden baskets come in all sizes, with larger, plain versions being used for everyday work such as gathering berries, harvesting corn or carrying things. However, smaller, more decorative burden baskets like this one are an important part of a 12 year old girl’s coming of age ceremony, so this basket is trimmed with streamers of suede tipped in special tin cones. The coming of age ceremony is celebrated with four days of community feasting, dancing and blessings. This is followed by a four-day teaching period where the now young woman is instructed in all things that a woman will need to know.
It’s the dangling tin cones that give this ceremonial basket its special charm. About 1.5″ long, they are rolled, but not soldered and when the basket moves, they jingle. However, the hollow cones are not bells. They don’t have internal clappers, instead they function like wind chimes, only sounding when they strike each other. The cones on this basket are plain, but it is possible to buy them from crafts suppliers embossed with designs or in fancy tints like ‘gold’ or ‘copper’.
Burden baskets are not the most common Native American use of ‘jingle’ technology, however. That would be the Jingle Dress, developed by the Ojibwe (and Chippewa) tribes in Wisconsin around 1900, the result of a healer’s (or medicine man’s) visionary dream when seeking a cure for an ill child. Although different individuals have laid claim to the story of the first jingle dress, tradition agrees that the special garment was originally used for healing dance rituals. The specially choreographed dance was performed by four women, each wearing a jingle-adorned red, black, blue or green cotton dress, since those colors signify good health. The dancer’s steps were kept small and low, causing a gentle, hypnotic ringing rather than a cacophony of noise.
By the 1920s both the jingle dress and its dance traditions had spread from the Ojibwa tribes to the Lakota peoples in the Dakotas. By the 1980s, more energetic forms of the dance had been developed, with a broader and brighter range of dress colors worn, and with each dancer wielding a ceremonial feather fan. Today you can see multi-color, shiny satin and be-ribboned versions of the jingle dress dazzling audiences on the Pow-Wow circuit.
Jingle dresses are important dance regalia, with many dancers investing time, skill and money in making their own. There are also seamstresses who maintain a cottage industry constructing both custom-ordered and ready-to-wear jingle dresses. And although there’s no technical reason a guy couldn’t adorn his clothing with the melodic cones, traditionally the softly ringing garment is associated with femininity; male dancers wear Ribbon Shirts. On a traditional jingle dress cones dangle from the fringed sleeve caps, and from three tiers circling the skirt, while the more showy modern dress can have a heavily jingled yoke and as many as 6 tiers of cones on the skirt. Although individual cones are light, en masse they add substantial weight and in action, every step the dancer takes causes cascades of sound. When these traditional but also highly individualistic dancers mass together at Pow-Wows, the effect is spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iArcG-S3_QM
Tuesday Treasures was started by our staff member, Jeanne Lusignan. Each week she will be featuring items that have been found at our estate sales. If you would like to submit a treasure for Jeanne to feature in a future installment of “Tuesday’s Treasures”, please follow the button below and send us an email! Please attach a few photos of your treasure in a beautiful setting as well as any details you have about your item such as manufacturer, use, age, region of origin. If you don’t know about the piece, that’s okay! We still might be able to research it for you! Don’t forget to tell us what makes this item such a treasure to you!