Trading Identities

This book examines a range of art forms produced by Indians in northeastern North America for sale to travelers and tourists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Aboriginal peoples of the Woodlands were the first in North America to experience economic and social marginalization and, in consequence, the first to rely on the production of commodities for the tourist trade. These hybrid art forms combine indigenous materials and techniques such as quillwork, moosehair embroidery, birchbark, and basketry with Euro-American genres and styles. Tourist art of the period is generally…