Eighteenth-century Eastern Woodlands women produced thousands of pairs of moccasins per year for family use and for trade. Because moccasins were the type of Indigenous American object most collected by Europeans, this supplied the women’s families with a steady source of income. Moccasins also carry substantial cultural significance.

Talon Silverhorn (Eastern Shawnee Tribe, Raccoon Clan) observed of this pair of moccasins, “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. […] 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. Each: 8 3/4 × 5 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (22.2 × 14 × 6.4 cm). Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, by exchange, 2023.371a–b. Not on view.

Image Description: A pair of brown-gray, animal-hide moccasins with colorful floral patterns embroidered in orange, blue, and white. A red silk border runs around the flaps that fold down from the shoes’ openings.