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PrintLittle People: Native Dolls Live On
Perhaps the most appealing of all American Indian objects are dolls, those miniature versions of real people which have been part of human history for thousands of years and are as widespread as human life on earth.
The earliest known dolls in the Americas are the 4,000-year-old Valdivia figures of coastal Ecuador, while in North America—our focus here—we find dolls more than 2,000 years old. Made within specific cultural traditions and often of local materials, dolls reflect not only wide cultural diversity but many different natural environments. Fur and walrus ivory in the Arctic, cornhusks and birch bark in the Northeast, clay in the Great Basin and Southwest, and hide and horsehair in the Plains and Plateau all were—and still are—used in dollmaking. Historically, as new materials became available through trade or commerce—trade cloth, glass beads, sequins, silk ribbons, and china heads and limbs—they were also incorporated into dolls and doll clothing. Fashioned to depict miniature people and dressed in culturally specific styles, dolls represent a singular interpretation of what it means to be human to a particular people.
From the beginning, it seems that there were two main types of dolls: those made for ceremonial and medicinal purposes, such as curing; and dolls created as playthings for children. Medicine dolls are a separate topic outside the scope of this article, but the toy dolls considered here had their own complex purposes, being both objects of delight and tools for teaching children about their world. Ojibwe girls cradled their dolls in toy baby carriers hung with miniature webbed hoops to capture evil spirits. Seneca Iroquois girls played with cornhusk dolls dressed in brightly colored trade cloth and made with no faces, in tribute to the story of a vain girl who learned humility when the Great Spirit took away her beautiful features. Playing with dolls allowed little girls to learn the womanly skills they would need as wives and mothers, especially the making of clothes for the family. Inupiaq Eskimo girls carefully stitched the skins of small animals to create furry parkas and boots. Little Lakota girls, while making doll clothes, learned to dye porcupine quills and to decorate dresses with beaded designs—and to put up toy tipis for doll houses, as their mothers set up the family tipis.
At the time of Contact a new kind of doll entered the scene: the doll made for sale as a souvenir, and for the 19th- and 20th-century tourist trade. The visitors who began arriving in North America in the 1600s began by collecting dolls to take home for their curio cabinets or as toys for their own children—at first everyday dolls, and later more elaborately fashioned versions, some as gifts for officials. The growth of tourism in the 19th and 20th centuries stimulated a demand for souvenirs, such as Iroquois cornhusk dolls around Niagara Falls and Huron “trapper” figures from Québec. In the Southwest, eager purchasers traveling on the Santa Fe Railroad scooped up pottery dolls from the Mojave people and from the Rio Grande pueblos—especially of Cochiti and Tesuque. Zuni beadwork dolls became popular in the 1920s, and by the 1930s Pima and Tohono O’odham basketmakers had entered the market with coiled basketry dolls. In Florida, Seminole dollmakers created dolls of palmetto fiber dressed in striking patchwork appliqué, which were distributed as far away as New York City to become an icon of Seminole culture. In some areas dollmakers worked in a production line, each person being responsible for one portion of the work and making possible the manufacture of a large quantity of merchandise.
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