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    Contribution to the study of wooden pipes made by indigenous peoples of eastern North America. It focuses on three closely related examples without adequate documentation of their origins. Their final attribution to the Eastern Ojibwa living on both sides of the Canadian-American border in the Great Lakes region of North America and to the second quarter of the nineteenth century is based upon upon stylistic comparisons with other wooden, stone, and metal pipes of the region.

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    Contribution to the study of wooden pipes made by indigenous peoples of eastern North America. It focuses on three closely related examples without adequate documentation of their origins. Their final attribution to the Eastern Ojibwa living on both sides of the Canadian-American border in the Great Lakes region of North America and to the second quarter of the nineteenth century is based upon upon stylistic comparisons with other wooden, stone, and metal pipes of the region.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    24 views18 pages

    Eastern Ojibwa Wooden Pipes

    Uploaded by

    Christian Feest
    Contribution to the study of wooden pipes made by indigenous peoples of eastern North America. It focuses on three closely related examples without adequate documentation of their origins. Their final attribution to the Eastern Ojibwa living on both sides of the Canadian-American border in the Great Lakes region of North America and to the second quarter of the nineteenth century is based upon upon stylistic comparisons with other wooden, stone, and metal pipes of the region.

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    Eastern Ojibwa Wooden Pipes Christian Fest This paper is a contribution to the hitherto neglected study of wooden pipes made by indigenous peoples of ‘eastern North America. It focuses on three closely related examples that have surfaced from private collections within the pas fifty years without adequate documentation of their origins. Their final ativibution to the Eastern Ojibwa living on both sides of the Canadian-American order inthe Great Lakes region of North America and to ‘the second quarter of the nineteenth century is based upon stylistic comparisons with other wooden, stone, ancl metal Pipes of the region, many of them also without reliable ‘information on provenience and date ‘Wooden tobaceo pipes made by indigenous peoples of easter North America from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the Prairie Plains have never been the subject cof much scholarly interest, especially in a comparative perspective. The only example illustrated in the carly survey of Native American tobacco pipes by McGuire (1899) was described as a ‘unique type’, the even more extensive survey by West (1934) did not refer 10 or illustrate wooden pipes from eastern North America, and they are mentioned only in passing in a well-illustrated ‘book on Native American sacred pipes by Paper (1989, 79). In his catalogue of the Native American pipes of the British Museum, King (1977, 16, 18, 37, $0, no. 42) listed only one of three such pipes in the collection and mentioned their existence only in passing (for the other two, soe King 1982, 71; a fourth one, no. Am1982,0.853, ‘was acquired in 1982, too late for inclusion in either publication). They are indeed very rare when compared to pipe (bowis) made of stone or clay (with which some of them share certain iconographic features) in a region overlapping the known distribution area of wooden pipes. Most of the extant specimens are pipe bowls, whose stem is now missing; in a few cases bowl and stem are carved from one piece of wood: where bowls are now associated with a stem, the original association of the 1wo pars is, often doubtful. OF the fewer than eighty examples presently known, by 1970 less than fifty were found in American and European museum collections and nearly half of these had been collected in the twentieth century. Only five had been the subject of publications, including three with a documented seventeenth or carly-cighteenth-century collection date ‘and unconvincingly attributed to the Iroquois (Birket- Smith 1920, 160-9, pl. Il, figs 4, 7, 8); the remaining ‘wo were attributed (or are attributable) to the Wyandot (McGuire 1899, 606; Dockstader 1960, no. 240). Most of the documented wooden pipes, however, were collected among the Eastern Ojibwa (including the closely related Mississauga and Odawa), the Southwestern Ojibwa, the Norther Ojibwa (Northern Saulteaux), and there is at ural ofthe Acadiie Inernationale de la Pipe, Vol. 12 (2019) least one documented Delaware wooden pipe collected before 1769 (Augustin and Stolle 2016, 163, figs 1-2, 160-1), Many ofthese objects were atributed to specific indigenous _groups, often without supporting evidence and sometimes ‘based on erroneous interpretations of the records. Thus, the provenience of the specimen illustrated by MeGuire (National Museum Natural History, Washington, DC, cat.no, E10080) was given as Rhode Island, apparently because the father of the donor, Geonge Gibbs, who was the original collector, ad been born in Rhode Island, This attribution has been patiently accepted in the literature (eag., Feder 1971b, no, 221; Maurer 1977, 103, no. 85), although the practice of placing the opening in the back rather than in the head of an effigy bow! is a hallmark of pipes attributed, probably correctly, to the Wyandot. Pipes collected among specific groups were thought to represent local styles even if they were in fact of exotic origin, such as a wooden pipe bovl from the Ortoman Empire collected in 1916 from a Wyandot (National Museum Natural History, Washington, DC, cat.no. E10080) or a European pipe bow! thought to have been collected before 1774 among the Delaware of Pennsylvania (Augustin und Stolle 2016, 157-8, 162, figs 10-11, 162). The Ojibwa (Anishnaabe), who sinee the seventeenth century had expanded their territory from the Great Lakes region of North America to the north and west, appear to have developed some regionally distinctive forms of wooden pipe bowis. The only presently known Northern Ojibwa wooden pipe, collected by Alanson Skinner in 1909 (American Muscum of Natural History, New York, NY, no. 50/7970), consists of an undecorated cylindrical bow! into which an equally simple round stem is inserted, Inthe publication related to his research, Skinner (1911, 143-4) unfortunately makes no reference to this or other Northern Ojibwa wooden pipes. On the best attested type of wooden pipes among the Southwestern Ojibwa of Minnesota, the bowl in the shape of a reclining male head with painted face is carved at the end of a short shank (Feder 197la, 97, no. 122; Casagrande and Ringheim 1980, $4, no. 13; National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, no. £204956; Minnesota Historical Society St, Paul, MN, no, 302.E98.A). While this type appears to have been distinctive for the Southwestern Ojibwa, this is not the case for two other forms with a documented provenience from this group whose basic shapes (‘elbow pipe’, see Fig 28 below; ‘elbow pipe with pointed projection’, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN, no. 6507.25.A; for the terminology of shapes see Paper 1989, 68-70) and other features have a wider distribution. Three wooden pipes are documented as having been collected among the Easter Ojibwa: an elbow pipe with an animal effigy in front ofthe bow! and facing the smoker (collected among the Odawa, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, no, F215513), an elbow pipe with an effigy bowl depicting «human head facing the smoker and an effigy facing the ‘bow! on the shank (collected on Manitoulin Island with its ‘mixed population of Ojibwas, Odawas, and Potawatomis, 357 Fest, C.- Easier Ojba Wooden Pipes see Figure 15 below), and an elbow pipe withthe effigy of « curved-neck animal behind the bowl (collected among the Mississauga; Fig. 2) Figure I: Curved-neck animal pipe, catlinite, Collected by Arent Schuyler DePeyster probably between 1774 and 1785, possibly at Fort Michilimackinac or Fort Detroit. World Museum, Liverpool, no. 58.83.6.4. (Jones 2007, 35, fig, 5d). No measurements available. Photograph: World Museum. Liverpool, There are about twenty other wooden pipes that are said to have been collected among the “Ojibwa” (without further specification) or have been attributed to the ‘Ojibwa’, “Easter Ojibwa’, ‘Mississauga’ or “Odawa’ with less convincing or no explicit arguments. The present paper attempts to provide comparative and to some extent documentary evidence for the attibution of some of these undocumented pipes. Others, for which no strictly applicable comparative evidence is presently available, will not be considered at this time. This essay will focus fon two presumably Eastern Ojibwa wooden pipes that have emerged from private collections in 2019 and a close relative, whose study provides the basis fora comparative analysis, ‘Three wooden curyed-neek animal pipes Pipes, carved of wood or stone, featuring a curved-neck animal at the distal end touching the bow] mouth, were made in the Great Lakes region from at least the late ‘eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The earliest dated, ‘examples, one of stone and one of wood, were collected respectively along the British-American frontier in the Great Lakes region atthe time of the American Revolution and among the Mississauga in 1796 (Figs | and 2). Others ‘were collected in the 1830s and 1840s among the Easter Ojibwa/Odawa of Manitoulin Island, Ontario. Brownstone (2011, 63, note 6) has provided a neatly ‘complete list of the known curved-neck animal pipes and 58 Figure 2: Curved-neck animal pipe, wood. Collected in 1796 by Moses Cleaveland from Pagua, a Mississauga chief. Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, (OH, no, 43.2872. Lengih 23.0em. Note that in these two earliest dated examples the curved-back animal has no serrated ridge on its back and cannot be clearly identified, Photograph: WRHS database. has offered an analysis and interpretation of the specimens from Manitoulin Island. For the vast majority of the known, examples, no date or provenience has been documented, ‘The same is true for the three pipes to be discussed here. The Woodside pipe (Fig. 3) This pipe was sold at the ‘Canada Select’ avetion at Waddington’s, Toronto, on 27 June 2019. It was identified by the consigner as having been owned by her maternal srandfither, the Rev. George Alexander Woodside (1871- 1955), a Presbyterian (and subsequently United Church ‘of Canada) minister, and later by the consigner’s mother. Biographical information on the Rev. Woodside was subsequently obtained from the consigner and will be discussed below. Carved from a single piece of maple wood, the bowl is in the shape of a man’s head facing the smoker, with a curved-neck animal arching from the distal end of the shank to the back of the head, where its mouth is pressed against a rectangular carved representation of hair. A scalloped ridge extends from between the animal’s ears down along its neck and along the underside of the shank to its proximal end. Carved on top of the shank and facing the effigy bowl is the figure of a long-tailed quadruped, ‘whose head has been broken off ‘The bow is inlaid with a metal for which the terms “lead and ‘pewter’ have been used interchangeably in the literature in its use for inlays of wooden and stone pipes or in the manufacture of ‘base metal” pipes. Since pewter is an alloy of lead and tin, identification on the basis of visual inspection alone is difficult (Veit and Bello 2004, 186-7). On the bowl, the inlay extends across the flat top of the buman head and, below a circumferential groove, to nine triangular extensions on the forehead and temples. Shrinkage of the wood has caused the inlay to stand out. ‘The conical inside of the bowl is continued atthe bottom in sheet meta. It shows no residue of carbon but notable corrosion, which is absent from other parts of the inlays. Figure 3: The Woodside pipe. Length 19.0em. Photograph: courtesy P. Jarvis, The inlay of the hole for the insertion of the stem has six triangles projecting to the round shank. The eyes of the hhuman head are also inlaid with lead or pewter. ‘There are considerable signs of handling and wear as well as patination and possible traces of black pigment. A loosely twisted multiple-strand cotton cord attached to the

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