Arapaho (Inunaina, Hinono'ei), Southern Search this
Object Type:
Shield
Place:
United States, North America
Accession Date:
18 May 1927
Notes:
From card: "Old rawhide shield with circlet of eagle feathers on red strouding around margin. Cover bears portion of "vision" of owner." SEE ALSO REMARKS FOR 336865.
George Levi and Max Bear of the Cheyenne delegation from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma made these comments during the Recovering Voices Community Research Visit November 3-6, 2015. On the imagery- there is lightning coming out of his eyes. Max believes the design could be an insect and George thinks it might be a water monster. He describes that the water monster has horns in the Cheyenne story. The sun and moon are both there, depicting the day and the night. All of the feathers are from golden eagles.
The original listing in the accession file does not give a tribal designation for this shield. At some point Cheyenne was added as the tribal attribution. The design is not otherwise known for Cheyenne shields (see In Sun's Likeness (P. Powell, 2013) and A Typology of Cheyenne Shield Designs (I. Nagy 1994). Two small holes at the top for attachment of an outer cover (now mistakenly numbered as part of E336865) indicate that the shield should be oriented with the animal form on the right and the crescent on the left. This positions the feathered cloth border around the bottom of the shield rather than the top, an arrangement that James Mooney reported as distinctive of Arapaho shields. Identification has been changed from Cheyenne to Arapaho, 2021, per C. Greene.
