Tab Bag, ca. 1800. Unknown artist (Native American, Great Lakes, Ohio region). Black-dyed native tanned leather, natural and dyed porcupine quills, metal cones, dyed animal hair, and silk ribbon. Purchase: Donald D. Jones Fund for American Indian Art.
Black-dyed deerskin bags embroidered with porcupine quills were created throughout the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes and Prairie regions. They were used as containers for objects and materials associated with sacred power, healing and ritual societies. This rare example depicts various spirit beings, or manitous, joined with abstract representations of supernatural power. Together they form a cosmological diagram—the visualization of a complex world alive with both visible and unseen forces. The manitous, represented as thunderbirds, turtles and humans, are conceived in perpetual conflict, a metaphor for the universal struggles inherent in the natural world, but their interaction also represents the essential balance formed within a cohesive universe. An early form originating prior to European contact, few bags of this type were produced after 1830.
