Native American

The traditions grouped here are not one culture and do not share a style. What they share is a relationship to material: baskets woven from what grew nearby, pottery dug from local clay and fired in the open, carvings cut from soapstone and argillite. The object's form follows the material's limits, which is why regional attribution is possible from the object alone.

Function comes first and beauty follows. A basket is judged by whether it holds water before it is judged by its pattern; a pot by whether it survives the fire. The decoration is usually a signature of the maker or the community rather than ornament applied for its own sake.

Collecting here carries obligations the rest of the museum does not. Much of what circulates was made for sale in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of it by communities under pressure, and revived traditions continue today. Attribution and consultation matter more than condition.