By Maureen Matthews 

Past Curator of Cultural Anthropology 

We would love to know who made this beautiful beadwork. 

A few years ago, Mrs. Arlene Kolb purchased this beaded panel in the Value Village shop on Regent Street because she loves handmade things. “I feel that the people making these items were content and focused on what they were doing. They put the effort into making something special,” she told me. After a year of enjoying it, she brought it to the Museum and it happened that there were a couple of Manitoba’s finest beading experts in the museum, Dr. Sherry Farrel Racette of the University of Manitoba Native Studies Department and Jennine Krauchi, one of our foremost beadwork artists. They took one look at the colours, the size of the beads and the pattern and confidently dated it to the 1830s or earlier and were pretty sure it was a Metis woman who made it. The colours of beads and fabric changed after the 1850′s with the introduction of analine dyes. The telltale beads on this piece are are a muted pink, a colour they call greasy yellow and facetted metal beads all of which predate analine dyes.