Image From “Rookwood and the American Indian” Gallery

About this image

Photograph by Frank Albert Rinehart, Oct. 7, 1898, taken during the Omaha Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska
(85–1401) National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The hair pipe neck ornament, with the pipes strung vertically around the neck, tells us that Sleeping Bear may be a woman. Plains men did not usually wear this configuration of hair pipes; they wore breastplates with hair pipes strung horizontally across the chest. However it is also unusual to see an Indian woman wearing a neck scarf and a eagle feather warbonnet.