- I'm Emily Buermann from the Becker County Museum in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.

And this is our Artifact Spotlight.

(soft upbeat music) I am the programs director here at the Becker County Museum and I'm also a citizen of the White Earth Nation.

And I am a traditional Ojibwe beadwork artist.

And so, the artifacts in the collection here at the Becker County Museum that are of the bead work artist genre are of particular interest to me.

And so, I've spent a lot of time with some of these items and I'm going to tell you about some of them today.

All of the items on this table are Woodlands beadwork of design.

And you can tell if it's Woodlands because it would be beaded with all of the most beautiful florals and leaves and vines and medicines of the Woodlands area.

So, you can think about our local Ojibwe Anishinaabe population as folks who are living here in our area.

So where winter is six months long and you go with six months with snow or it's gray, or everything's brown, and it's just dried and covered in snow.

And the most beautiful thing that you see all year are those first flowers that come up in the spring.

You know, those first leaves, the first buds on the tree, And that's when you know you finally get to see some green and some color.

So the Woodlands tribes, majority of their beadwork is going to be floral inspired.

So the big piece here is a bandolier bag.

You can see that it's got flowers, it's got vines, it's got leaves.

A lot of these are stylized.

They've also got some berries here on their vines, and we've got some berry motifs down here.

And the leaves in particular, in this piece here, you can see that the artist really took care to bead in the veins on the leaves and really make them a little more realistic, even though some of the flowers are a little more stylized.

This whole bottom section here is a pouch for the purse to keep all of your important items that you want to have with you in your bag.

And this would have been worn across your shoulder here with the bag hanging down on your hip.

If you were very fancy or very important, and you had two bandolier bags to wear, you would crisscross them and have one on each hip.

These are very important as traditional pieces of regalia with the Woodlands tribes.

And the cliche kind of saying about the bandolier bags is that "it's a bag that's worth a horse."

So you could trade one of these and get yourself a horse or more, depending on how intricately it's beaded.

We also have a few of these cinch top bags.

These, sometimes they're called tobacco bags, but of course they could hold a lot more than just tobacco.

So these bags are leather and they've got leather fringe on the outside.

And now that you know it's Woodland and it's floral you can tell that it's got this beautiful orange flower here and it's got some blue bell type flowers here and it's got a really nice maple leaf.

And then we've got some moccasins.

So moccasins are the shoes the footwear of the Woodlands tribes.

And we've got a pair here of baby moccasins.

They are so adorable, they're teeny tiny, and they've got a distinctive Woodlands pucker toe design.

So it's got a pucker all the way around the toes and that's really a distinctive Woodland tribe design.

And this pair has a cuff of black velvet around the outside and it's beaded all the way around and making a pucker toe Moccasin is not easy.

I've tried several times and I've been beading for about 30 years and I still haven't perfected the technique of making a pucker toe moccasin that's quite as cute as this.

And it's not easy to make moccasins and it's gotta be particularly difficult to make it in miniature size.

So these cute little newborn moccasins were made with love and care.

Lovely.

So this is an adult size of the Woodland moccasin.

It does have the pucker toe design, but it also has this pointed toe pucker toe design.

So you can see there's a seam running here through the front of the foot, and it's stitched very close and very tight and a very careful pucker toe around this design.

And these have the attached cuff all the way around, but in that traditional floral Woodland design.

These ones have a little sparkle with a little silver-lined glass beads.

So these are some of my favorite pieces in our collection.

We do have a larger collection, however, items that have the glass beads or are made of leather or on delicate fabrics we do need to change those exhibits out from time to time because any amount of light, even artificial light, any amount of light starts to break down the materials in these items.

And so these get switched out from time to time in our exhibit gallery at the Becker County Museum.

[Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.