67: A CHILD'S SIZED PLATEAU PARFELCHE ENVELOPE

A diminutive painted parfleche envelope with label from 1933 written using a fountain pen from that period reads: Baby trunk made by Mary (Aspum?) George, and given to her sister, Kate Williams for her baby, which only lived to be three years old. Presented at the Puyallup, Washington Fair by Kate Williams, 1933. Pallyup, Washington is within the region of the Plateau tribes who are most associated with the Columbia Plateau that lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Mountains.

The parfleche 'envelope' made by Plateau region tribes and others was essentially a carrying case, a wallet or purse made exclusively by and for the women of various Native American tribes. As author, painter and curator American Meredith (Cherokee Nation) points out in her article PARFLECHES How Native Women Pushed the Envelope of Abstraction, the women who painted these utilitarian objects of high art employed abstraction and the tenets of non-objective composition hundreds of years before the earliest of 20th century Modernists. In the exhibition catalog for The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky, Gaylord Torrence wrote of parfleche envelopes, 'The containers were lightweight, unbreakable and weather-resistant, and their creation afforded women an important means of artistic expression.'



These expandable cases were used to carry food, clothing, tools, utensils (like perhaps a horn spoon) - various odds-and-ends of the day, some sacred. With the re-introduction of the horse to Native American culture in the 16th century, these large decorated carrying cases would hang displayed from a horse when traveling, or hung from their twig stand when in camp, again on display. So always they were projecting the creator's abstracted impression of her surroundings, perhaps in this instance, a bird in flight. Scholars believe Plateau examples like this were displayed horizontally, whereas Plains examples were utilized displayed vertically.
Measures 12 x 7 inches.
Provenance: The Susan Koehn Estate Trust Newton, Kansas
$300 - $500