From the Collections: A Study of Eastern Woodlands Twined Bags By Stephen Cook Mr. Cook is Head Curator of Ethnology at MPMRC. For the past 18 months the curation and collections departments have been honored to host and assist Dr. Margaret Ordoñez, visiting scholar from the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Ordoñez approached the museum in the fall of 2001 with a research proposal to study Eastern Woodlands twined bags in the museum’s collections. This study focuses on three different types of twined fiber bags that were commonly made in the great lakes region of the Eastern Woodlands; basswood fiber bags, panel bags and yarn bags. All three involved slightly different materials and methods of construction that vary over time and locality. Dr. Ordoñez is investigating the specific plant and animal fibers used to construct the bags, their construction and the design elements woven into them.  This is painstaking work conducted one fiber at a time, usually under the microscope. Dr. Ordoñez has been a professor at the University of Rhode Island in the Textile, Fashion, Merchandizing and Design Department for fifteen years and is the director of the University’s Textile Conservation Lab and the Historic Textile and Costume Collection. Her work has included the identification of seventeenth century Native American textiles from Connecticut and Rhode Island, the analysis of textile fibers from a seventeenth century privy unearthed at the “Big Dig” in Boston and service as a member of the Smithsonian’s Textile Advisory Group for the Star Spangled Banner. She is also currently working with the FBI to develop a forensics textile database. To date her findings have shown a rich complexity of Native weaving arts used in the construction of these bags. This is especially true in the yarn bags, made from commercial wool yarns. She has uncovered as many as twenty different yarns used in a single bag. Many of these appear to have been spun by hand from other sources, possibly unraveled trade blankets.  Dr. Ordoñez has also identified the use of woodland bison or American buffalo wool in some of the panel style bags. This study is ongoing and Dr. Ordoñez hopes to widen her database by studying bags in other museum collections around the country. Ultimately the hope is that the results of this work will provide some valuable information for museums and native cultural centers to assist them in identifying and dating similar bags in their own collections. This is the second large scale study conducted on the MPMRC collections. In the spring of 2001, Blair Gagnon, then a masters student at The University of Rhode Island, analyzed the textiles used in the manufacture of a group of Iroquois beaded “whimsies.”  Ms. Gagnon has since gone on to become a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department of the University of Connecticut. A copy of her report is available in the library.