Shoulder Pouch

Much is often made of the idea that Indian people developed so many specialized bags, pouches, and other leather containers to assist them in their nomadic wanderings from place to place. A leather bag is better suited for carrying certain objects than a pot or basket is, and native North Americans tended to place great importance on how well-matched a carrying case was to its contents. Not only were native bags specially sized and shaped to hold an individual type of object, they were often decorated to indicate precisely what belonged inside of them.

There were two very basic styles of American Indian bags: soft pouches, made of tanned animal hides (usually deerskin or elkskin), and parfleche, made of stiff rawhide. Some modern Indian artists blur the two traditions by creating tanned buckskin purses with rawhide siding on the inside to give it the boxy parfleche look. Regardless of their material, Native American bags were often painted, beaded, or quilled with the characteristic tribal designs of the craftsperson (usually a woman) who made it--particularly if the bag was designed to hold something sacred, such as a medicine bag or tobacco bag, or was being made as regalia for a fiance, daughter or son.

Today, both specific and possible bags are still being made and decorated by artists from many different tribes, and they continue to be a lively and practical part of native life, much more so than baskets or pottery (which are generally treated only as artwork these days).

This particular pouch/bag is fully beaded in the front and has a yarn weaving at the bottom. It is a Potawatomi pouch/ bag that was collected in Kansas. It is 85 cm in length and 28 cm wide including 6 cm of fringe. It was collected in 1910 but is likely to be older than that.

Source: http://www.native-languages.org/bags.htm