Decorative Art of Indian Tribes of Connecticut

by Frank G. Speck

As to the materials, the Mohegan and Niantic, like the northern New England tribes, used prepared splints of the brown ash. Next in importance is the white oak. Here the pounding is unnecessary, the splints being more easily freed from the log. Swamp maple is also commonly used by the Mohegan basket-makers, although it is not as durable as either the oak or the ash.

All these materials go through the same processes of preparation before the splints are ready to be woven. The first stage in the process consisted in pounding the ash log all over, and then separating the layers of wood. Next, the lengths of splints were shaved smooth with a spoke-shave, which looks like a European tool. Hand gauges were then used to cut the splints into strips of uniform width. These gauges (Figure [1]), not unlike those of the Penobscots, were provided with teeth made, in recent days, of clock springs; the width of the splint depending upon the distance at which the teeth were set in the end of the gauge. Another small implement, a sort of hand planer through which the splint was drawn to make it finer, was also obtained at the Mohegan village (Figure [2]). The knives of the crooked type, bən·ī·´dwaŋg (Figure [3]), used by the Mohegans for woodworking in general, have a very pronounced curve, and are usually mounted on wooden or sometimes buckhorn handles. While not necessarily used directly in basket making, these knives are indispensable to the Indian workman. A very old bone pointed tool, probably a punch (Figure [4]), seems to have been used in some way, perhaps in weaving the basket rims.

The ordinary weave among these tribes is the common checker-work. The basket bottoms are of two kinds, rectangular and round. In the rectangular bottoms the checker-work forms a foundation, the same process continuing up the sides. In the round-bottomed forms the splints are arranged like the spokes of a wheel crossing and radiating from a centre. These splints turn upwards around the bottom, and form the standards around which the side filling is woven, in the under-one-over-one-process. Among the Mohegans a certain feature of the round-bottomed types occurs which has not yet been found in other tribes making similar baskets; that is, the broad flattened centre standards of the bottom, appearing in Plate [III], figure b. The ordinary New England oak or maple hoops, one inside and the other outside, bound down by a splint in the ordinary manner of wrapping, constitute the rims of all the baskets. The second type of round baskets is called “gizzard” basket by the Mohegans (Plate [III], upper right hand corner). These are generally made of oak, and their weave, although shown plainly in the illustration, is almost impossible to describe.

The decorations upon baskets are produced in two ways, either by running variously coloured splints into the weaving as fillers round the sides, or by painting with pigment upon broad splints various patterns extremely free in outline and quite independent of the technique. It is with such painted designs that we have chiefly to deal, because they perpetuate the native decorative art of these Indians. The colours appearing upon the baskets are red (skwa´yo), black (sug·a´yo), and indigo (zi·wamba´yo), the commonest being red and black. The red is obtained by boiling down cranberries. The black dye has now been forgotten, although some think that it was either ‘snakeberries’ (or ‘poke-berries,’ termed skuk), or perhaps huckleberries. In later times they have used either water colours or blueing. The colours were applied by means of crude brushes, made by fraying the end of a splinter of wood, or by using a stamp cut from a potato, which is dipped into the colouring matter and then stamped on the splints.

The designs themselves in the field of basketry decoration are pre-eminently floral, the figures being highly conventionalized. The main parts of the blossom are pictured. The corolla of the flower forms the centre, surrounded by four petals, and commonly augmented by four corner sprays apparently representing the calyx from underneath brought into view. There is a fundamental similarity in these pseudo-realistic representations occurring on all the different baskets, which shows that this was the prevailing motive in this kind of decoration. The corolla usually occupies the exposed surface of one splint, and the four petals occupy the surrounding ones, as is shown in the natural size illustration (Figure [5]). The colours in this specimen are limited to blue and red. Cynthia Fowler, a Mohegan informant, named the flower the “blue gentian”; but how generally this name was used in former times it is impossible to say. These flowers are usually found enclosed within a larger diamond-shaped space, on one side of the basket, the enclosing border consisting of a straight line or chain-like line edged by dots. These dotted borders and the flower elements are very characteristic of Mohegan and Niantic work. The corners of the baskets from top to bottom also constitute another favourite field of ornamentation. Here vertical alternating chain-like curves of several types appear. Examples of the available designs of both sorts are shown in Figures [6] to [14]. The solid black in the sketches represents either black or dark indigo of the actual design; the lined spaces represent red.

Turning to the design reproductions (Figures [6], [7], [8], [9]), we observe a most consistent similarity in all those of the rosette type, to wit, the conventional centre, the radiating petals, and the enclosing diamond or four-curve, recurring with modifications in practically all of such designs. Some are very handsome, a few rather colourless. The dotting is very distinctive. Next are the line or border patterns, which, although adapted to linear spaces, are characterized, like the rosettes, by intertwined lines, dots, and petals. Frequently different rosettes appear on each of the four sides of the same basket; and the sides are also occasionally quartered diagonally by one of the border or line patterns, and are thus divided into triangular areas, each containing a rosette. Unfortunately none of the painted figures show in the photographs, on account of their having become quite faint through age and wear.[4]

In this whole series of conventional painted patterns a general resemblance to northeastern Algonkin designs, as far north as the Naskapi of Labrador, is very noticeable. It is, moreover, quite likely that similar designs among the Narragansetts were referred to by Roger Williams when he wrote, “They also commonly paint these (skin garments, etc.) with varieties of formes and colours.”[5]

A further extension of the ubiquitous splint basketry of the New England tribes, and the decorative work connected therewith, is furnished by another Connecticut tribe—the Scatticook, of the Housatonic river, near Kent. Their art is especially interesting, because it has also just become extinct among their descendants here. As a tribe the Scatticook (Pisga´‛tiguk, ‘At the fork of the river’) were composed of exiled Pequots, Mohegans, and the remnants of western Connecticut tribes who formed a new unit in their new home.[6] Their type of culture was accordingly intermediate in some respects between the eastern Connecticut tribes and those of the Hudson river.

To judge from a vocabulary which I obtained at Scatticook about ten years ago, they had closer linguistic affinities with the Hudson River (Delaware) group.