Native American Star Quilts Feature of Talk

The Brinton Museum hosted a members-meetup on Saturday, March 9, and Kim Taylor, the Registrar at the Brinton, gave a presentation about “Star Quilts as a Native American Symbol.”

In her introduction, Carrie Edinger, Membership and Sponsorship Coordinator, said that Taylor moved to Sheridan from Lincoln, Nebraska, where she worked as collections manager at the International Quilt Museum for six years. She has degrees in Studio Art, as well as French and Cultural Anthropology. She has almost 40 years of museum experience, and fabric, fiber and fashion from cultures around the world are her personal passion.

Using her master thesis research with Sioux and Assiniboine quilters in Fort Peck Reservation, Taylor discussed the importance of stars in traditional stories and used as motifs in historic artistic designs. She talked about how star quilts turn into a veritable industry across the Northern Plains and become prominent items in traditional giveaway ceremonies.

Taylor said she learned to sew as a girl, and she considers herself a seamstress rather than a quilter. She said she loves fabric and color.

“When it was time to do my thesis,” Taylor said, “I was interested in fabric, but I also wanted to highlight something in the state of Montana, where I was living at the time.”

She decided she wanted to learn more about the star quilts. She chose the Fort Peck Reservation, and she said that the quilters in Fort Peck used solid colors, rather than patterned material, which makes the colors more intense.

Before they were making quilts, Taylor said, they would paint the star patterns on buffalo robes. In the 1830s Prince Maximilian came to American and brought with him a Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer, who painted the Native Americans in their native dress, and one painting shows that the buffalo robes were decorated with star-like patterns. Maximilian described it as a sun-burst or star-burst pattern.

This type of decoration carried over into their quilt making. She said the women did the leather tanning and the painting, and often the buffalo robe would be presented to a warrior when he returned from battle.

As the quilts replaced the buffalo robes, Taylor said that she talked to several native American women who make quilts. She said some of the quilters sell their quilts in gift shops to tourists, but most were made for ceremonial uses.

She talked about the give-away ceremony, which might happen after family member died, where the family gives items, such as the quilt, to the community.

She talked about several of the women she talked to about quilts, and some were reluctant to talk about their quilting, “I was the white girl that nobody knows,” she said. A friend in art school had an aunt that lived on the reservation, and she introduced Taylor to other quilters.

One question that Taylor asked, was how they choose the colors. One woman said she dumps out all the material pieces on the floor and then finds those she thinks will go together the best. Another one said the colors and patterns come to her when she is almost asleep, and another said she took her colors from the natural world.

Today, many of the quilts are made for the give-away ceremony, for men returning for military service, a throwback to the buffalo hide that was made for a returning warrior, and many other ceremonies.

The next event at The Brinton Museum will be March 15 from 5:00 pm – 8:30 pm “Navigating Narratives: The Corps of Discovery in Titonwan Territory Educational Talk by Dr. Craig Howe”