214 
stores, especially since the natives liave adapted their shapes to Euro- 
pean requirements and equipped them with lids and handles. No 
baskets were made on the plains, and those of the northern and 
eastern tribes were much inferior to the western baskets, although 
the Labrador Eskimo now produce some graceful forms through 
instruction they have received at the Moravian missions. The 
Ojibwa, however, wove soft bags of elm bark that rivalled in work- 
manship and beauty the splendid bags made by several tribes in 
British Columbia, or the bags, manufactured by the Nez Perce 
Indians in the United States, that circulated among the Blackfoot. 
An art very similar to basketry, but confined to the Canadian 
aborigines and to adjacent tribes in the Uniterl States and Alaska, was 
embroidery ” with porcupine quills, goose quills, or moose hair.^ 
Here the Indians obtained their finest results by using a small bow 
as a loom and locking the quills within a simple checker weave. The 
strands of the warj) hardly showed in the finished article, and the 
weft was totally invisible, being concealed by slight corrugations in 
the quills where it cut across them.- The natives coloured the 
quills with their usual vegetable dyes, and although these colours 
were limited in number they were softer than the aniline dyes that 
have now replaced them in everything except some basketry. The 
designs were exclusively geometrical and of necessity angular forms 
such as crosses and diamonds, but their rhythmical repetitioii and the 
harmony of the soft colours gave a very ]:)leasing effect. Unfortun- 
ately, the art has now disappeared entirely except in one or two 
remote districts in the basin of the Mackenzie.'^ Silk work 
replaced it for a time in certain regions, and Indian women, some 
of whom were trained in Quebec convents, decorated coats, gloves, 
and moccasins with floral designs skilfully embroidered in silk on the 
soft moose skin. This art in turn is vanishing, leaving only the 
beadwork that still persists among most Indian tribes aiifl even 
among the Eskimo of the Arctic. The beadwork patterns are mainly 
floral, owing probably to the strong influence of early French-Cana- 
1 Many of tfie “ moosn-liair ” specimens are really of horse-hair, sold for this purpose to the 
Indians hy the Hudson’s Bay Company. 
2 C/. On liard, W, C. : “ Tlie Technique of Porcupine-quill Decoration Among the Xorth .American 
Indians”; Cont., Mus. of the American Indian, Hcye Foundation, vol. iv, No. 1 (New York, 1916), 
3 Some of tlie eastern .Algonkians, e.g. the Ojibwa, decorate birch-bark baskets with porcupine 
•quills, which, however, are not woven, but merely laid side Viy side with the ends pu.slied tlirough holes 
in the bark. 
