Beaded Belt

Label

The Anishinaabe woman who stitched this belt acquired the beads from a boarding school on the White Earth Indian Reservation, a site where children were separated from their families to forcefully assimilate them into White society. Missionaries first introduced European-style flower imagery to Native women in the 1600s, who adapted Euro-American realism into their beadwork. For colonizers, this signaled Indigenous conversion, whereas Anishinaabe women used flowers to embed important cultural messages within their works. Flowers could lead to roots, bark, seeds, or fruits that could nourish the body as food or medicine. Even under devastating circumstances, floral designs preserved traditions that remained hidden from European and American colonizers.

From the 2024 exhibition Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art, curated by Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Exhibition History

Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 18, 2024 - late 2025.

Provenance

Unknown Maker (beads purchased at the Wild Rice Indian School, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota); collected by Clara G. Corser Turner Churchill (1851-1945) and Frank Carroll Churchill (1850-1912), White Earth Reservation, Minnesota, 1906; bequeathed to present collection, 1946.

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