Indian Clothes
Wouldn’t it be funny to see the looks on the faces of the earliest European explorers and settlers as they encountered Native American Indians for the first time?
Imagine what these prudish, stuffy Puritans must have thought of Indians clothes. Primitive? Unrefined? Ugly? Absent, maybe?
Regardless of what the Puritans thought, Indians clothes served the Indians just fine. That’s all that really mattered.
And Native Indians clothes were not primitive. They were made by highly skilled hands that probably made not just the clothes but the tools that were used to make the clothes, too. How many Italian tailors were doing that?
Native Indians clothes were not unrefined either. They were intricately tailored from materials much harder to manipulate than the silk, satin, and linen the Europeans wore. And they were constructued and fitted without the help of scissors and spinning wheels, too.
As far as aesthetics is concerned, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and American Indians clothes are no exception to that universal law of attraction. Sometimes, when we find ourselves mentally disparaging someone else’s attire, we should stop and try to see things from the other person’s eyes. They may be wondering why on earth did he or she put on that ugly old thing to wear today. The American Indians probably had those thoughts about the fussy clothes worn by the Pilgrims, too.
And what may have seemed like an absence altogether of American Indians clothes was really no more than a cultural difference. The Puritans just didn’t celebrate the beauty of the human body in the same comfortable manner that many Native Americans did. They didn’t have the same lifestyles, either, so they couldn’t possibly guess what type or style of clothing worked best in the everyday life of a Native American.
Wouldn’t it be funny to see the looks on the faces of the Native Americans when they encountered the earliest Europeans for the first time?
Please send any comments directly to the author, Joseph Paige.