Museum accessions.

The firebag illustrated above is a fine example of the exceptional beadwork created by Athapascan women. Specifically, it was made about 1875 by a member of the Tahltan nation, located in northwestern British Columbia and southern Alaska, one of the subarctic Athapascan peoples, which also include the Dene and Kutchin, among others. In addition to glass beads, the bag is adorned with dentalia, prized horn-shaped shells traded by the inhabitants of Vancouver Island.

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In the 1800s Tahltan men used firebags to store tobacco, ammunition, and fire-making equipment, but by the early twentieth century firebags had become ceremonial appendages. George Thornton Emmons wrote in his comprehensive study, The Tahltan Indians, in 1911: "In every household these were found in great abundance, as many as ten or twelve in the possession of an individual. Indeed these bags from their number and ornamentation seem to mark the measure of the wife's affection for her husband, for in no other product of the Tahltan (save the knife case, which forms a companion piece) is so fully expressed a sense of the aesthetic both in elegance of design and in harmony of color" (quoted in Kate C. Duncan, Northern Athapaskan Art: A Beadwork Tradition [University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1989], p. 168). The bag was collected in the early twentieth century by Gregory Charles, a teacher in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, where the Tahltans and Tlingits conducted trade with each other and the outside world.

The firebag is one of several new additions to the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of North American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Other new acquisitions include an eighteenth-century Nootka wooden bowl in the shape of a seated figure and a Nootka float basket of about 1910, both from Vancouver Island; and four Hopi kachina figures, dating from between about 1895 and 1910.

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In the past the Design notes column of this magazine has informed our readers about Waterhouse Wallhangings, a company in Chelsea, Massachusetts, that reproduces historic wallpaper designs (September 2001), and ...