Following the Black Hawk War of 1832 the United States government enacted policies to forcibly remove American Indians from their Wisconsin lands. By 1854 the once vast territories occupied by the Menominee and the Ojibwe were reduced to small reservations in northern Wisconsin. The federal government allowed the Ho-Chunk small homesteads beginning in 1881, while the Potawatomi were without official land holdings until 1913.

In the face of this upheaval, many Native people chose to keep intact traditional ways of life. These finger-woven storage bags made by Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe women represent the persistence of a traditional craft, but one that was transformed repeatedly in response to new cultural influences. Early bags were made using locally available materials such as basswood, nettle fibers and buffalo hair. When fur traders brought wool blankets into the region beginning in the eighteenth century, Great Lakes Indian women adapted this new material into the bags they made. The first bag shown here is woven from yarn unraveled from trade blankets that has been respun and colored with natural dyes. By the 1870s, brightly colored chemically dyed yarns spun by machines in eastern textile mills were widely available. The second and third bags show how weavers incorporated this product of American industry into their craft.