FLORAL JOURNEY: Native North American Beadwork is the compelling story of why Native floral beadwork became both a major means of artistic expression and a symbol of cultural resilience. It is also an important example of how two differing cultures--Native and European--established a common ground of economic and creative exchange. Prior to European Contact, most Native designs were geometric and abstract. Flower imagery, introduced to seventeenth-century Northeast Indian groups by the French Ursaline nuns of Quebec, gradually spread across the continent with the fur trade. Through instruction provided in the mission schools, at trading post centers, and as the Native Americans across North America observed flowers ubiquitous in Euro-American fabrics, furniture, dishes, and paintings, Native-made clothing decorated with an array of floral imagery emerged as a distinct and beautiful American Indian art form. For native North American women, quilling, embroidering, and beading floral motifs provided inventive strategies for coping with the forces of changes thrust upon them. The flower designs that replaced (or continued in tandem with) earlier geometric and spirit imagery expressed beliefs in the spiritual powers that inform the natural world. Although many items with floral designs were made by Native women for sale to non-Natives during the nineteenth century, exquisite floral beadwork equally adorned sacred and ceremonial Native regalia throughout the Woodlands, Subarctic, Prairie, Plains, and Plateau.

Most striking is the originality of the designs, and their adaptation with each region's unique aesthetic. Rather than copying European prototypes, Native artists made floral imagery--whether interpreted in quillwork, moosehair, silken threads or glass beadwork--their own.