View 2 - Weaving and Unraveling Relations
The basswood bags in the MSU Museum collection were among the items received from the Chamberlain museum of Three Oaks, Michigan in 1952. The Chamberlain Museum opened in 1916 as a “Pioneer Museum” and featured items representative of settler exploits such as farm tools, war uniforms and guns, Native American artifacts, and other ethnological items collected from around the world. Three Oaks is located in the heart of Pottawatomi territory on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. The Pokagon Band’s original village occupied what is now Bertrand Township adjacent to Three Oaks and Sawyer, the home of Mrs. E. J. Dolezel who collected these two bags. More research is underway regarding the Dolezels and others of the area who were struck with the “fever” (Smith-Ferri) of collecting Indigenous peoples’ material culture during the era of the Chamberlain Museum. At this time the town was flourishing around the Featherbone Co. which manufactured the stays for women’s corsets from turkey feathers, replacing the expensive and disappearing whalebone originally used in these garments. This industry, symbolic of female domesticity also literally generated the middle class society that rose around it, increasingly restricting and negatively impacting Indigenous peoples’ way of life. By the 1930s, when these bags were possibly collected, the Pottawatomi were impoverished and turned to selling items like these bags to earn a living.