Arts of Life: Dress
The standard clothing of California, irrespective of cultural provinces, was a short skirt or petticoat for women, and either nothing at all for men or a skin folded about the…
From: Unknown To: 1922 C.E.
Location: California
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Arts of Life: Dress” from Elements of Culture in Native California by Alfred Louis Kroeber, 1922.
The standard clothing of California, irrespective of cultural provinces, was a short skirt or petticoat for women, and either nothing at all for men or a skin folded about the hips. The breechclout is frequently mentioned, but does not seem to have been aboriginal. Sense of modesty among men was slightly developed. In many parts all men went wholly naked except when the weather enforced protection, and among all groups old men appear to have gone bare of clothing without feeling of impropriety.
The women’s skirt was I everywhere in two pieces. A rather narrow apron was worn in front.
A larger back piece extended around at least to the hips and frequently reached to meet the front apron. Its variable materials were of two kinds: buckskin and plant fibers.
Local supply was the chief factor in determining choice. If the garment was of skin, its lower half was slit into fringes. This allowed much greater freedom of movement, but the decorative effect was also felt and used. Of vegetable fibers the most frequently used was the inner bark of trees shredded and gathered on a cord. Grass, tule, ordinary cordage, and wrapped thongs are also reported.
As protection against rain and wind, both sexes donned a skin blanket. This was either thrown over the shoulders like a cape, or wrapped around the body, or passed over one arm and under the other and tied or secured in front. Sea otter furs made the most prized cloak of this type where they could be obtained. Land otter, wild cat, deer, and almost every other kind of fur was not disdained. The woven blanket of strips of rabbit fur or bird skin sometimes rendered service in this connection, although also an article of bedding.
The moccasin which prevailed over central and northwestern California was an unsoled, single-piece, soft shoe, with one seam up the front and another up the heel. This is the Yurok, Hupa, and Miwok type. The front seam is puckered, but sometimes with neat effect. The heel seam is sometimes made by a thong drawn through. The Lassik knew a variant form, in which a single seam from the little toe to the outer ankle sufficed. The draw-string varied: the Miwok did without, the Lassik placed it in front of the ankle, the Yurok followed the curious device of having the thong, self-knotted inside, come out through the sole near its edge, and then lashing it over instep and heel back on itself. This is an arrangement that would have been distinctly unpractical on the side of wear had the moccasins been put on daily or for long journeys.
Separate soles of rawhide are sometimes added, but old specimens are usually without, and the idea does not seem native. The Californian moccasin is rather higher than that of the Plains tribes, and appears not to have been worn with its ankle portion turned down. Journeys, war, wood gathering, are the occasions mentioned for the donning of moccasins; as well as cold weather, when they were sometimes lined with grass. They were not worn about the village or on ordinary excursions.
The Modoc and Klamath moccasin stands apart through Eastern modification. It appears to have without stiff sole, but contains three pieces: the sole and moccasin proper, reaching barely to the ankle; a U-shaped inset above the toes, prolonged into a loose tongue above; and a strip around the ankles, sewed to the edge of the main piece, and coming forward as far as the tongue. The main piece has the two seams customary in California, except that the toe seam of course extends only to the bottom of the inset. The ankle piece can be worn turned down or up; the drawstring passes across the front of the tongue.
Southern California is a region of sandals; but the desert Cahuilla wore a high moccasin for travel into the mountains. The hard sole curls over the thick but soft upper, and is sewed to it from the inside by an invisible stitch. The upper has its single seam at the back. The front is slit down to the top of the instep, and held together by a thong passed through the edges once or twice. The appearance of this moccasin is Southwestern, and its structure nearly on the plan of a civilized shoe. It reaches well up on the calf.
Moccasins and leggings in an openwork twining of tule fibers were used in northeastern California and among the Clear lake Pomo as a device for holding a layer of soft grass against the foot.
The skin legging is rarer than the moccasin. It was made for special use, such as travel through the snow.
In southern California, the sandal of the Southwest begins to appear. In its most characteristic form it consists of yucca fiber, apparently folded around a looped frame or string. The Colorado river tribes have abandoned the use of this form of sandal if ever they possessed it. In recent years they have worn simple rawhide sandals; but their very slender opportunities to hunt render it doubtful whether this is a type that antedates the introduction of horses and cattle among them. The Chemehuevi are said to have worn true moccasins. There is no clear report of any sandal north of Tehachapi.
The woman’s basketry cap, a brimless cone or frustum, is generally considered a device intended to protect against the chafe of the pack strap. That this interpretation is correct is shown by the fact that in the south the cap is worn chiefly when a load is to be carried; whereas in the north, where custom demands the wearing of the cap at all ordinary times, it is occasionally donned also by men when it becomes of service to them in the handling of a dip net which is steadied with the head. The women’s cap, however, is not a generic Californian institution. In the greater part of the central area it is unknown. Its northern and southern forms are quite distinct.
Their distribution shows them to be direct adjuncts of certain basketry techniques. The northern cap coincides with the Xerophyllum tenax technique and is therefore always made in overlaid twining. The range of the southern cap appears to be identical with that of baskets made on a foundation of Epicampes rigens grass and is thus a coiled product. There can be no question that tribes following other basketry techniques possessed the ability to make caps; but they did not do so. It is curie s that an object of evident utilitarian origin, more or less influenced by fashion, should have its distribution limited according to the prevalence of basketry techniques and materials.
Two minor varieties of the cap occur. Among the Chemehuevi the somewhat peaked, diagonally-twined cap of the Great Basin Shoshoneans was in use. From them it had spread in some measure to the typical southern California tribes as far as the Diegueño. This is likely to have been a comparatively recent invasion, since the two types are found side by side among the same people—a condition contrary to prevailing precedent.
The Modoc employ but little overlay twining, and most of their caps are wholly in their regular technique of simple twining with tule materials. The Modoc cap averages considerably larger and is more distinctly flat topped than that of the other northern Californians.
Inasmuch as woven caps and hats are worn all along the Pacific coast to Alaska and through a great part of the Plateau and Great Basin area, the two Californian types are but occurrences in a larger continuous area, and can therefore scarcely be interpreted as having originated quite independently. Rather is central California to be looked upon as a tract that once had and then lost the cap, or possibly always resisted its invasion.
The hair net worn by men clearly centers in the region of the Kuksu religion, but its distribution seems most accurately described as exclusive of that of the woman’s cap. Thus the Kato probably used the net and not the cap, the adjacent Wailaki reversed the habit. There are a few overlappings, as among the Yokuts, who employed both objects. The head net is also reported for the Shasta of Shasta valley, but may have penetrated to them with the Kuksu elements carried into this region in recent years by the ghost dance.
Kroeber, A. L. Elements of Culture in Native California, University of California Press, 1922.
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