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Provenance:

Private Collection, Nova Scotia

Note:

We are pleased to present an important lifetime collection of over 35 objects of Mi’kmaq quillwork, assembled over 30 years of dedicated collecting. Items in this remarkable collection span over 125 years of production, with the earliest forms typical of the 18th century examples.

Some of the first items manufactured for trade with English and European travellers, quillwork could be found in early homes of settlers in the maritimes, as well as in collectors’ cabinets, and on fireplace mantels of soldiers, sailors, and other early visitors to North America from England and France. Items in the present collection came from all of these sources. Diligently, and lovingly, they were sought out and purchased in back country yard sales, and antique shops, as well as in print catalogues—and later online auctions in English and European sales rooms. Items were acquired from environments of care and stewardship, and occasionally disinterest and neglect.

Passion, curiosity, dedication, and a belief in the importance of stewardship, have all been factors in the collector’s acquisitions, and in the preservation of the items over the past 30 years while in the collector’s care.

Some of the earliest and most popular Mi’kmaq items manufactured for trade with English and European travellers were made from quilled birchbark. Numerous quilling techniques pre-dated sustained European settlement in the maritimes, including plating, wrapping, and weaving, however it was so called bark-insertion techniques used to make semi-ridged goods such as boxes, which outlasted other methods of quillwork among the Mi’kmaq. The need for large quantities of trade goods to barter with Europeans, and the gradual decline in the profitability of the fur trade were primary factors in a period of florescence in Mi’kmaq quillwork beginning in the 18th century.

Quills, collected from porcupines, were conducive to retained dyes, and offered a flexible and resilient canvas for exploring complex compositions, and interplay between colours. Versatile and abundant birch bark, cut and peeled away from the trunks of trees, had long been bent and stitched into pliable wares for cooking, storage, and transportation in the form of watercraft. The material lent itself well to the insertion of quills, and provided Europeans with an exotic substitute for leather and fabric construction familiar to them.

While the overall form of quillwork items made by the Mi’kmaq for trade were often derived from European goods, such as travel chests, fancy boxes, and purses, the elaborate quilled motifs on the objects are rich with traditional Mi’kmaq designs. While their designs may appear to the novice viewer as pure abstraction, many elements were drawn from a body of pre-contact symbolic devices, markers of meaning legible to Mi’kmaq makers. The symbols aspect of the designs seems to have been largely unknown, or at the very least undocumented by most European purchasers of the period. However, a study of the few early sources discussing the designs reveals a richness and depth of meaning in historical Mi’kmaq quillwork imagery.

Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Micmac Quillwork: Micmac Indian Techniques of Porcupine Quill Decoration: 1600-1950 (Halifax: The Nova Scotia Museum, 1982)