Preserving A Seneca Dress


BY SUSAN HEAL D AND NICOL E PA SSEROTTI E


Seneca Clan Mother outfit for Nation to Nation, including dress, leggings, moccasins and earrings. National Museum of the American Indian – Smithsonian (00/9469, 06/1097, 20/0609, 02/9714).


42 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2015


very year, the federal govern- ment sends bolts of treaty cloth to the Nations of the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois, thus fulfilling a provision of the 1784 Treaty of Canandaigua. The women of


the Haudenosaunee have shaped and sewn the calico cloth into many significant and beauti- ful items. One, a rare Seneca woman’s dress, is now featured at the new exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, which opened at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in September. The dress is faded but remarkably intact,


with decorations of silver brooches, red silk ribbon and white seed beads. Although from a later period, it closely resembles what Seneca Clan Mothers would have worn at the council meetings for the Treaty of Canandaigua. Wit- nesses at treaty councils in the 1770s describe Seneca people dressed in calico with profusions of silver brooches. The Seneca are matrilineal;


traditionally,


Clan Mothers were responsible for nominating, installing and removing chiefs. Then, as now, Seneca Clan Mothers were highly respected and their council was heeded by all community members. Tribal authorities of today concur that the


dress makes a fitting centerpiece for the major exhibit celebrating the treaties that lie at the heart of the relationships between Indian Na- tions and the United States. But first the dress had to be conserved to prepare it for exhibition.


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PHOTO BY ERNEST AMOROSO


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