Tlingit people chiefs at the Dakl’ aweidi HÍt (clan house) raising ceremony 3 from the Raven moiety, (from the left) and a Wolf moiety, (far right) – Sitka Kaagwaantaan Naa Shaa dei hani, in Alaska
The leftmost and right center figural robes are woven in a technique called Chilkat weaving - it’s on the standard grid, but Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida women figured out how to weave circles into them, which is kind of a feat. Each of these robes easily takes a year to complete. They’re traditionally made from mountain goat wool and have an otter fur strip at the neck - they’re heavy, and you get the overwhelming sensation of being around a virtuoso object when you’re in the same room as one. They’re part of a category of object called at.oow in Tlingit traditional law - what other people might call an object of cultural patrimony. I can only imagine what it’s like to be Tlingit and wear one of these.
The left center geometric piece is called a Ravenstail robe - it’s made in the same way and of the same materials as a Chilkat robe, but is an older form of the robe. There are a handful of robes out there circa around 1800, I think mainly in European anthropological collections, that are called Transitional robes because they’ve got both Ravenstail and Chilkat elements, like these:
The robe on the right is a form that’s usually called a Button Blanket. Like the Chilkat robes, these tend to display clan crests. I can’t tell what that one’s made of but, before the introduction of European or Canadian or American made pearl shell buttons, some of those robes were made out of dentalium shells traded all the way up from Native California. Using those old school materials has made a comeback in the past thirty years in the Northwest Coast, which is awesome to see.
Evelyn Vanderhoop (Haida) is a major force in the renaissance of woven robes. Here’s a photo of her with a Transitional style tunic she wove:
