ABORIGINAL DECORATIVE AUT — KRIEGER 539 



With the Sioux, the picto^raphic designs are symbolic and are 

 applied by the men of the tribe, while the women care for the purely 

 decorative embollishnionts. Complex (lesi<j:ns are built up from rec- 

 tan«:;les, diamonds, triangles, and line patterns. They have names 

 which they apply to the designs they make, but the names do not 

 signify that the design rei)resents the object named. For example, 

 the turtle design does not look like a turtle and does not represent 

 a turtle. This design is a conunon one and resembles rakes attached 

 at right angles to one another by their handles where they are 

 covered with a lozenge-shapeil design. Undoubtedly several formerly 

 symbolic devices have deteriorated, and are now applied simply be- 

 cause it is the style. Thus, the turtle device much simplitied ap- 

 pears as a design embroidereil on the back of a woman's dress, also 

 on the front as a U-shaped semisacred device. 



While on the Pacific coast realism tends to express itself in the 

 delineation, modeling, or etching of human and animal figures, the 

 art of the western plains is characterized by the employment of 

 geometric design. Tribes occupying the plateau area beyond the 

 Rocky Mountains and east of the Pacific coast tribes, occupy a middle 

 fiosition in which geometric designs predominate. Designs formerly 

 embroidered with porcupine quills are, since the coming of the 

 trader, now worked out in beads. Painted designs appear on raw- 

 hide shields, saddle bags, decorative skin and tipi covers, and on 

 other materials of rawhide, while the quills of the porcupine are 

 sewn on tanned skins in geometric patterns. Use of porcupine quills 

 lias not entirely given way to trade beads of glass, but the early 

 (luilled, small checker patterns as shown in collections made by Lewis 

 and Clarke, by George Catlin, and by the early explorers generally 

 have gone. Painted parfleche or saddle bags are still fashioned and 

 decorated, and the anrient art has not entirely disappeared from the 

 l^lains and plateau tribes. 



Tipi covers are decorated with realistic and symbolic designs such 

 as stars or eagles. There is also incised work on wood. 



The Sauk and Fox Indians, like the Plains tribes and the Pueblos 

 follow definite patterns in decorating the walls of their rawhide 

 vessels. Decoration of the several fields is planned on a yet un- 

 folded piece of rawhide. Painted designs, although symmetrical, 

 are lost when the rawhide box has been folded. The elements of 

 the design, when not hidden by the folding process appear as acute 

 triangles with oblique spurs, Maltese crosses, hourglass forms, loz- 

 enges, and isolated obtuse triangles. 



Symbolism. — Symbolism includes abstract ideas as well as re- 

 ligious motives. Kroeber's study of Arapaho symbolism is im- 

 portant in arriving at a conception ol" what, in (he mind of thu prim- 

 itive artist, is back of apparently simple geometrical patterns of 



