Because moccasins have always been the type of Indigenous American object most collected by Europeans, Indigenous women in the eighteenth century produced thousands of pairs of shoes per year for family use and for trade, supplying their families with a steady source of income. Moccasins also carry substantial cultural significance. The deliberate and precise pleating on the toes and the obvious enjoyment of color and pattern in the stitching confirm the regard that makers, wearers, and collectors had for this art form.

“They’re moose hair–embroidered. So the colors and the patterns you’re seeing […] are moose hair. Small bundles of two or three hairs at a time being stitched as a surface embroidery on the leather,” Talon Silverhorn, an interpreter for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and Citizen of The Eastern Shawnee Tribe, notes in describing this pair. “This is one of those kinds of styles that becomes popular enough that there’s even European copies in European materials of these types of shoes. There’s English slippers in black silk that are embroidered that look very, very similar to this. You’d almost at a distance mistake it for one of this style of moccasins.”

Ancestral Wendat or Huron Artist, Moose Hair–Embroidered Black-Dyed Buckskin Moccasins. Hide, silk, moose hair, and natural dye, mid-18th century. 8 3/4 × 5 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (22.2 × 14 × 6.4 cm) each. Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, by exchange, 2023.371a–b. On view in Gallery 18 in Return to Turtle Island: Indigenous Nation-Building in the Eighteenth Century.