Mi'kmaq Quillwork on Birch Bark
This saddle-shaped birch bark panel is elaborately decorated with geometric designs fashioned from dyed porcupine quills. It is a stunning example of traditional Mi’kmaq Indian quillwork dating from circa 1850-60, and has the provenance of past ownership by a distinguished British collector of tribal art. That this graphic artwork was fashioned as a seat for a formal Victorian chair, and that it ended up in the hands of a European, both make perfect sense in light of the history of how this Native North American Indian craft evolved.
A Bit of History
Mi’kmaq in the Nova Scotia region of Canada have used dyed porcupine quills as decorative ornamentation for hundreds of years, practicing this art long before their contact with Europeans. Explorers and fishermen who first encountered Mi’kmaq recorded observations of decorative quillwork, such as in this sailor’s account written in 1606: “…the maids and women do make matachias (bracelets) with the quills or bristles of the porcupine, which they dye black, white and red colours, as lively as possible may be.” (Whitehead, 1982)*
Given that there are 20,000-30,000 quills on a single porcupine (yes, somebody counted them), they were an abundant source of raw material for handicrafts.
Illustration by Adelaide Tyrol (northernwoodlands.org)
Not long after white people started living and trading among them, Mi’kmaq people turned their craftsmanship skills to making objects to sell to Europeans. They had traditionally used techniques such as stitchery, loom weaving, wrapping and plaiting of porcupine quills to decorate objects for their own use. They also decorated their birch bark canoes with porcupine quills, so inserting quills into birch bark to make decorative designs was another technique within their traditional repertoire. By the mid-1700s, when the souvenir industry was in full swing, the bark insertion technique had become the Mi’kmaq’s dominant form of quill ornamentation.
Birch bark boxes decorated with geometric mosaics of dyed porcupine quills were a staple of the Mi’kmaq’s trade with French and English settlers. European entrepreneurs began buying up these crafts, and ships’ captains would resell them at their ports of call. By the early 1800s, the sale of quillwork and other Indian crafts in Great Britain had become lucrative enough that their importation was taxed by the British government.
As the fur trade declined throughout the early 19th century, quill work became a primary source of Mi’kmaq’s income. This explains their motivation to adapt quickly to European tastes, which during the Victorian era included fancifying even everyday household items such as tea cozies, straight-edge razor cases, comb boxes and napkin rings.
Sometime around 1840, a European fad for furniture inset with panels of quilled birch bark emerged. Mi’kmaq women began to add chair bottoms made of birch bark ornamented with dyed porcupine quills to their wares. In 1851, the Nova Scotia Industrial Exhibition offered a prize for “the best quill work chair bottoms.”
Solitary chair seats were produced for years prior to the production of matching sets of chair seats and chair backs, which helps us date our lone chair seat to the earlier production timeframe of the mid-1800s. Single quilled chair bottoms sold for $2-$5 to homeowners and merchants, as well as directly to the cabinetmakers who mounted them on hand-crafted chairs.
The chairs into which quilled panels were inserted were fashioned in styles popular among Europeans of the time. Several years ago, we sold a formal hall chair that had both a quilled back and a quilled seat to an American museum. That chair (pictured below), had been purchased by James Du Pres, third Earl of Caledon, on a trip to Nova Scotia during the 1800s – an example of the vibrant trade that existed between the Mi’kmaq and enthusiastic British collectors.
Features of the Quilled Chair Seat
This chair seat (13" x 15.5") is made in the traditional manner from two sandwiched pieces of birch bark – a decorated top piece and a plain piece as backing. The design incorporates a variety of geometric forms, including halved star-like patterns which in their entirety form what the Mi’kmaqs called eight-legged starfish.
This seat has an especially nice edge treatment, being lashed with split Black Spruce root in alternating dyed black and natural brown colors. Mi’kmaq used similar spruce root lashing across the inner and outer gunwales of their birch bark canoes, but it was an uncommon treatment for chair seats.
The corners of the panel are undecorated, perhaps so that the seat could be attached to a chair frame in those spots. Although there are small tack holes in three of the corners, they do not go through to the back panel, so this seat was most likely never used on a chair. The excellent color retention and good condition of the quillwork (there are only 5-6 missing strands) are further evidence that this chair seat was not used for its intended purpose.
The quillwork color scheme is very similar to that of a Mi’kmaq birch bark box (below) that was decorated around 1810 in quills colored with organic dyes - Bloodroot for the golden brown, Logwood for the lavender blue, and Goldthread for yellow.
In pre-contact eras Mi’kmaqs extracted natural substances from plants, minerals, insects and shellfish to make their own dyes, but by the time this box was made in 1810 they were able to obtain natural dyes from European settlers through purchase or trade. Beginning in 1856, Mi’kmaqs would also have been able to obtain newly discovered synthetic aniline dyes. The brighter blue/purple quills in the center of our chair seat may have been colored with an aniline dye, as Mi’kmaqs used both natural and synthetic dyes for quills during the third quarter of the 20th century, until transitioning entirely to commercial dyes by the 1890s.
For fine quillwork on bark items such as this chair seat, Mi’kmaq women extracted the longer (up to 5”) and thinner hollow quills from the nape of the porcupine’s neck down to the base of its tail.
North American Porcupine quills are white with black tips that are covered with fine black barbs.
Before scratching or using a compass to etch a design on birch bark, the bark was warmed slightly by a fire or with warm water. Both the bark and the dyed quills were worked while damp, with the quills moistened one at a time as they were used. The artisan used an awl or darning needle to make an insertion hole for the base of a quill, and then another hole where the barbed end was inserted until the entire darker tip was hidden within the hole rather than visible in the design. The extra quill length was then cut off from the back. As the bark dried and shrank and the moistened quill barbs swelled within the small holes, each quill became held tightly in place.
This chair seat incorporates three techniques of bark insertion quillwork. The mosaic technique in which quills are laid side by side creates the primary pattern, with most of the quills laid vertically. The fill technique, which was used to fill transition areas between segments of the design, is evident in the cross-hatch stitches around the central medallion and in chain stitches along borders between different geometric shapes. Finally, the overlay technique is present as small triangles worked over areas that were already solidly quilled behind them.
From a Past to a Present Collection
In addition to the appeal of its colorfully graphic artwork, this chair seat has additional importance because of its provenance. It was once in the collection of Harry Geoffrey Beasley (1881-1939), an English aristocrat who together with his wife Irene Marguerite Beasley amassed and meticulously documented a huge collection of tribal art over his lifetime.
Harry Geoffrey Beasley
Over 6,000 pieces from Beasley’s collection now reside in five Great Britain museums, and many others are owned by private collectors (Waterfield & King, 2010).
Beasley Collection label
The back of the chair seat retains the distinctive “Beasley Collection” label – a printed white oblong label with cut corners. Curiously, the handwritten portion of the label says “Plains Indians Micmac.” Perhaps because Beasley’s primary collecting focus was on Pacific tribal material rather than Native American art, he or someone working with him mistakenly associated Mi’kmaq, a Woodlands tribe, with Plains Indians. Also written on the label is “3-1-35” which is the date in 1935 when Beasley added this chair seat to his collection.
Although Beasley sought and collected tribal material all around the world, he might very well have obtained this piece right in his home country of England, given the quantities of Mi’kmaq quillwork that his countrymen had imported in earlier eras. As goes the flow of desirable antiques over the course of decades and across centuries, this chair seat is now available back in North America to enhance a new owner's art collection or enrich their personal living space.
References
Waterfield, Hermione & J.C.H. King (2010). Provenance: Twelve Collectors of Ethnographic Art in England 1760-1990. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Whitehead, Ruth Holmes (1982). Micmac Quillwork. Halifax: The Nova Scotia Museum.
*Information throughout this article was derived primarily from Whitehead's exhaustively researched and profusely illustrated book, written while she was a curator at the Nova Scotia Museum.
