Model cradle
consisting of a wood board, bent hoop for protection to head, and quillwork and other decoration.Ojibwa/Chippewa/Anishnabe people. Before 1825. Mullanphy collection
This model of a tikanagan, well illustrates the basic principals of a cradle type used over much of the North American Woodlands and Plains. Cradles were used particularly in day time, for transporting and moving children around, providing a safe and reassuring environment. Newborn babies would be swaddled in moss in a birchbark and wrapped in a deer skin before being tied on a board; they could then be carried on the back, or placed somewhere near - outside for instance when winnowing wild rice, making bark trays, or picking berries. Boards kept the back straight, and ensured the baby was safe, both from dogs, and from falls, the foot rest and bow protecting the head and feet.
Swamp or sphagnum moss was widely used. One elder told ethnologist Imez Hilger in the 1930s: 'When moss was used for diapers (nappies) the baby seldom became chafed, and when it was unwrapped you could smell only sweet moss'. Rabbit skin was also used as nappies, ash or powdered rotten wood as powder, and deer fat as cream.
A full sized cradle might be 60-80 cm long, tapering in width from 30 cm at the top and 24 cm to the bottom, with a 40 cm high bow. One of the materials used for the bow was a splint of ash wood; this same material is still much used in the Woodlands for basketry, and for lining canoe models.
The board is here decorated with red pigment, pyrography, and with cut and incised designs including hearts. Toys and amulets were traditionally attached to the bent bow; the attaching cord might be quite loose so that the baby could slip the toys back and forth. These might include the crania of duck, duck feathers, animal teeth, navel bags, porcupine bones, and what are now called Dream Catchers. The anthropologist Frances Densmore was told in the 1920s that these 'catch everything evil as a spider's web catches and holds everything that comes in contact with it'.
Another possible ornament was a little birchbark cone filled with maple sugar for sucking. Here the main toys are bunches of bells; this indicates that the babies father was a proficient fur trader, exchanging pelts and skins, laboriously and carefully prepared by the child's mother, for luxury manufactured goods such as cloth and beads. Further to the north and west moss bags without boards were used by First Nations to swaddle babies.
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Baby in a cradle with dream catchers or rattles hanging above the head.
George Catlin 'Ju-ah-kis-gaw woman with child in cradle', 1835.
Smithsonian Institution: National Collection of Fine Arts.
Gift of Mrs Sarah Harrison.
Cree beaded velvet baby bag
Western Canadian Subarctic, c. 1890. Collected by Lt.-Col. W. T. Pares. Department of Ethnography, the British Museum.
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