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James Blake Historian and Artist, Private, Wheeling, WV (2026)

09/11/2026

Most people in Pittsburgh know the name Forbes but how many know where the man behind the name is actually buried?

Brigadier General John Forbes commanded the British expedition of 1758 that crossed Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War. His army forced the French to abandon Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio, where the British established Fort Pitt and the settlement that would become Pittsburgh,
But Forbes would not live long enough to see what grew from his campaign.

Already gravely ill, he returned east and died in Philadelphia on March 11, 1759, just months after the fall of Fort Duquesne.
He was buried at historic Christ Church in Philadelphia.

Think about that the next time you travel down Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh. More than two and a half centuries later, his name remains part of the landscape of western Pennsylvania while General John Forbes himself rests hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia.
Sometimes the names we pass every day have remarkable stories behind them.

Follow along as we uncover the people, places, objects, and forgotten stories hiding in plain sight.

09/10/2026

Finger weaving is an Indigenous North American textile tradition created entirely by hand, without the use of a loom. The technique is known as oblique interlacing sometimes simply called oblique weaving because the strands cross one another diagonally to produce strong, flexible fabric and striking geometric designs.

The pieces shown here represent many hours of carefully controlling the tension, counting strands, and building the patterns one crossing at a time. Although fingerweaving may appear simple at first glance, creating clean lines, balanced designs, and consistent edges requires patience, experience, and close attention to every strand.

These techniques were historically used to produce sashes, garters, straps, bags, and other practical and decorative objects throughout many Native communities in North America. My work is grounded in years of studying historic examples in museum collections and learning through hands-on experimentation.

I offer fingerweaving workshops, demonstrations, lectures, and commissioned work. If your museum, historic site, cultural center, or community organization would like to host a program, please contact me for more information.

09/09/2026

This remarkable late-eighteenth-century French engraving is titled "Iroquois Scalplant son ennemi mourant “An Iroquois Scalping His Dying Enemy.” The heading Amérique Septentrionale means “North America.”

The image is associated with Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s Encyclopédie des voyages, published in Paris in 1796. Grasset de Saint-Sauveur was born in Montreal in 1757 but spent most of his life in Europe. The engraving is also associated with the artist or engraver Labrousse. Related versions are sometimes dated 1787 or 1810, suggesting that the composition appeared in different editions or later reproductions.
The standing warrior is identified by the French caption as “Iroquois,” the historical European term commonly applied to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. He is shown holding a knife while removing the scalp of a wounded enemy.
The material-culture details are especially interesting. The warrior wears a feathered headdress with two tall upright ornaments, red-and-black facial and body decoration, a large blanket-like mantle, breechcloth, leggings, moccasins, and a highly decorated shoulder pouch. The pouch features a bold geometric design in red, blue, and white. A ball-headed wooden war club lies in the foreground, while another long weapon rests beside the fallen man. The defeated individual wears , a breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins, but the caption does not identify his people.

We must be careful, however, not to treat this print as an eyewitness photograph. It was created for a European audience and belongs to a genre of illustrated “costume books” that attempted to catalog the peoples of the world. These publications frequently combined authentic observations with borrowed imagery, artistic imagination, theatrical poses, and European expectations about supposedly “exotic” peoples.

Even though Grasset de Saint-Sauveur was born in Montreal, that does not mean every detail in the scene is ethnographically reliable. The clothing, weapons, ornaments, body decoration, and dramatic landscape may have been assembled from multiple sources. The print probably tells us as much about European ideas concerning Native warfare as it does about eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee life.
Scalping was practiced in certain forms of Indigenous warfare, but it was never an exclusively Native practice. European colonists, soldiers, and colonial governments also participated in it, encouraged it, and offered payments for enemy scalps. During the colonial wars, scalps could serve as trophies, evidence of a killing, or objects exchanged for bounty money. Images such as this one often removed that larger colonial context and placed the entire burden of violence upon Native people.
The print should therefore be examined on two levels: for the fascinating material-culture details the artist attempted to portray, and as an example of how European publishers constructed and marketed an image of the “Iroquois warrior.”

Historical images are valuable evidence, but they must be questioned, compared, and understood within the world that produced them.

09/08/2026

This Isosceles trapezoid-shaped bag is decorated with extensive porcupine-quillwork, including a striking Thunderbird design across the front. The broad wings, sharply defined body, and geometric interior lines create a powerful central image, while the quilled bands above it add color, rhythm, and movement to the overall composition.

The quills were colored with natural dyes, producing the softer red, blue, yellow, and earth-toned shades associated with early quillwork. Natural dye colors could be created from roots, bark, flowers, berries, and other plant materials, while certain colors were also obtained through Indigenous trade networks. Preparing these dyes and getting them to remain colorfast required considerable knowledge, patience, and experimentation.
The bag’s trapezoidal form, fringed lower edge, layered quilled panels, and Thunderbird imagery combine to make it an especially impressive example of how useful objects could also become powerful works of art.

The meaning of the Thunderbird varies among Native nations and communities, but it is widely associated with the sky, storms, thunder, protection, and extraordinary spiritual power. Its meaning should never be reduced to a single interpretation shared by all Indigenous peoples.

09/07/2026

I am pleased to share one of my previously published articles examining the remarkable art of false moose-hair embroidery and woven burden straps, or tumplines, among Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands.

Published in Whispering Wind magazine, Issue 327, Volume 48, No. 5, this article explores the materials, construction techniques, historical uses, and surviving examples of this highly specialized art form. The research includes Mohawk and Seneca burden straps, partially completed examples that reveal how they were constructed, and other rare objects decorated with what has been described as “false moose-hair embroidery.”

Much of my work is grounded in firsthand examination of original objects held in museum collections. Studying the backs, edges, unfinished areas, fibers, and construction details often reveals information that cannot be learned from photographs alone. Several of the objects illustrated here were personally examined and photographed by me during museum research appointments.

These pieces were not merely beautiful. They brought together extraordinary technical skill, visual expression, and practical function. They are important surviving records of Indigenous innovation and artistry.

If you enjoy evidence-based research into historic Indigenous material culture, please read the article, share this post, and follow my page for more original research and museum-based object studies.

I am available for museum consultations, lectures, speaker series, demonstrations, and hands-on workshops concerning Eastern Woodlands material culture and traditional technologies. If you would like to learn how to make a tumpline, please contact me about hosting a workshop. I make and teach a variety of historically based tumpline styles and can tailor a program to the interests and needs of your museum, cultural center, historical organization, or community.

09/07/2026

A simple woven strap capable of carrying an extraordinary weight the Native American tumpline is a remarkable example of practical engineering transformed into art.

Also known as a burden strap, the tumpline was used by many Indigenous peoples across North America to carry baskets, firewood, food, camp equipment, trade goods, and other heavy loads. The broad central section rested near the hairline or crown of the head, while the long ends were secured around the load. When properly positioned, it helped distribute the weight across the head, neck, back, and spine.

Tumplines were made from materials such as basswood fiber, elm fiber, nettle, Indian h**p, wool yarn, hide, and other locally available materials. Many were fingerwoven, braided, or twined. Although entirely functional, surviving examples demonstrate that utility did not exclude beauty. Some were decorated with dyed moosehair, porcupine quills, beads, geometric designs, fringe, and metal cones.

Period accounts help demonstrate their importance:

In his 1634 Jesuit Relation, Paul Le Jeune described the difficult seasonal travels of the Innu, during which food, household belongings, and other necessities had to be carried from camp to camp.

In 1724, Joseph-François Lafitau published illustrations showing Indigenous people transporting loads with carrying straps. His work provides important visual evidence for their early use in the Northeast.

During his 1793 journey across northern North America, Alexander Mackenzie recorded men carrying packs weighing approximately 45 to 90 pounds over difficult country. These accounts show how essential efficient load-carrying systems were to travel, trade, hunting, and survival.

In the mid-19th century, Lewis Henry Morgan documented Haudenosaunee burden straps with the assistance of members of the Seneca Parker family. His reports recorded both their construction and use. In the Mohawk language, the National Museum of the American Indian identifies the burden strap as gas-ha-ah.

These early writers observed only fragments of a much larger Indigenous tradition, and their descriptions must be read with an understanding of the biases of their time. The surviving tumplines themselves often tell the fuller story, technical knowledge, careful material preparation, skilled fingerweavingand twining, artistic expression, and generations of experience combined in a single object.

This is the kind of material culture that deserves more than a passing glance. A tumpline was not merely a strap it was an essential tool connecting travel, labor, family, trade, artistry, and the land.

Would you like to learn how traditional finger woven and twined tumplines were constructed? I offer hands-on workshops, lectures, demonstrations, and consultation covering tumpline making and a wide variety of other Eastern Woodlands material-culture arts. Programs can be customized for museums, historic sites, tribal cultural centers, schools, and community organizations.

Contact me directly to discuss bringing a tumpline workshop or material-culture program to your community or historic site and please share this post with someone who enjoys Indigenous history, traditional weaving, and historic craftsmanship.

09/05/2026

A reproduction loom-quilled knife sheath I completed, based on a historic example in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.

The museum’s catalog identifies the original as “Chipewyan.” Chipewyan is an older English name for the people who generally refer to themselves as Dënesųłiné also meaning approximately “the original or real people.” They belong to the larger Dene cultural and linguistic family.

The name Chipewyan comes from a Cree term commonly translated as “pointed skins” or “pointed hide.” It is believed to refer to the distinctive pointed cut of traditional Dënesųłiné skin clothing, particularly their parkas. Because the name originated outside their language, Chipewyan is considered an exonym, although it remains in official names such as the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

The original sheath features intricate porcupine-quill loomwork, geometric designs, quill wrapping, and suspended decorative elements. My reproduction follows the original sheath’s construction, colors, and overall decorative arrangement as closely as possible.

This was a commissioned piece, and the client specifically requested that the knife shown here be incorporated into the finished work. Consequently, the knife and the quillwork attached directly to it are not intended as reproductions of those belonging to the original museum example.

This is an important distinction when discussing any historically based reproduction: certain details may be adapted to meet a client’s wishes while the principal object remains closely grounded in the historic original.

Projects such as this require careful museum study, patience, and a working knowledge of traditional porcupine-quill techniques. Reproducing an object is not simply a matter of copying its appearance it means studying how it was constructed and understanding how its individual parts work together.

I accept a limited number of commissions for historically informed reproductions and custom pieces. If you are interested in commissioning a quilled sheath or another object based on a documented museum example, please contact me directly to discuss your project, timeframe, and pricing.

09/05/2026

Another post connected to my recent stroud cloth workshop post.

These remarkable Osage leggings, dating to approximately 1830, are constructed from red wool trade cloth and decorated with hand-sewn silk ribbon work appliqué. Layers of green, blue, and red silk ribbon were carefully cut, folded, and stitched into bold geometric designs along the outer seams.

The red cloth itself presents an interesting historical question. My examination of trade records, merchants’ account books, inventories, and correspondence indicates that blue wool cloth was traded in substantially greater quantities than red sometimes approaching a ratio of nearly three to one.

Yet when examining surviving garments in museum collections, red examples appear to outnumber blue ones. Why?

This difference may partly reflect the accidents of survival and museum collecting. However, it also raises a fascinating possibility: was red cloth more highly valued, more carefully preserved, or deliberately selected for garments carrying particular social, ceremonial, or spiritual importance?

Red held powerful associations among many Indigenous peoples across North America, although its meanings differed greatly among individual nations, communities, clans, and circumstances.

At present, this remains a theory rather than a proven conclusion. Nevertheless, the contrast between the documentary record and the surviving objects is striking. Trade records tell us what entered Native communities but the objects that survived may tell us something entirely different about what people valued enough to preserve.

Sometimes the most interesting historical questions begin when the written record and the material record do not agree.

I am currently available for lectures, museum and institutional speaker series, professional consultation, object-based educational programs, and hands-on workshops. If your museum, historical organization, educational institution, cultural center, or community would be interested in hosting a stroud making workshop, please contact me directly to discuss topics, scheduling, and fees.

09/04/2026

Traditional rattles are among the oldest and most enduring forms of sound-making instruments, created from materials gathered directly from the natural world.

These are some of the traditional-style rattles I produce, including bark rattles, deer-toe rattles, and dew-claw rattles. I try to keep the construction rooted in natural materials and traditional hand-working methods rather than relying on modern substitutes.

Depending on the piece, materials I work with include hickory bark, slippery elm bark, basswood, hickory, deer dew claws and toe bones, elk sinew, corn, and brain-tanned leather. Each material has its own characteristics the sound of dried corn moving inside a bark body is very different from the sharper rhythm produced by deer toes or dew claws striking one another.

The bark itself also requires knowledge of harvesting, preparation, shaping, drying, and assembly. These are the kinds of skills that connect an object to the landscape it came from. A rattle may appear simple when finished, but there is a great deal of work behind gathering and preparing the individual materials before the actual construction even begins.

I enjoy continuing to make these pieces and keeping the old hand skills involved in their construction alive.

If you're interested in purchasing a traditionally made rattle, commissioning a piece, or discussing a demonstration or workshop, please contact me directly. I am always glad to talk with people who appreciate historically grounded, handmade material culture.

09/04/2026

KUSKUSKIES TOWN AND THE MYSTERY OF THE STAG GORGET

Along the Mahoning River in present-day Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, once stood a group of important Native settlements collectively known as Kuskuskies. The name appears in historical records under several spellings, including Kuskusky, Kuskuskie, Kushkushkee, and Kaskaskunk.

Kuskuskies was not necessarily one fixed village. Historical evidence indicates that it consisted of several closely connected settlements whose locations and populations changed over time. During the eighteenth century, the region was home to Native people from several nations, particularly Lenape, as well as Seneca, Shawnee, and others drawn into the upper Ohio Valley.

One of the most important contemporary accounts comes from the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, who traveled through the Ohio Country in 1758. Post visited the Kuskuskies settlements while undertaking a dangerous diplomatic mission intended to encourage Native leaders to withdraw their support from the French during the French and Indian War. His journal provides a valuable description of the communities, councils, alliances, and political tensions he encountered.

The location continued to attract historical and archaeological interest long after the original settlements disappeared. During the late 1950s, John Zakucia, an avocational archaeologist and field associate of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, investigated the area in an effort to locate historic Kuskuskies. Limited professional work was subsequently conducted under the direction of Carnegie Museum archaeologist Dr. Don W. Dragoo.

The location has been associated with Native occupation extending approximately from 1703 to 1776, although the settlements and their populations changed considerably during that period.

EXAMINATION AND FINDINGS: THE KUSKUSKIES STAG GORGET

In 2009, while conducting research at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, I had the opportunity to examine an engraved silver gorget connected with this historically important location and investigate its unusual history.

The original gorget measures four inches in diameter and features an engraved stag at its center. Beside the left buttonhole is a cartouche stamped “NEW YORK,” while the maker’s touchmark, “AJS,” appears below and slightly to the right of the engraved stag.

The mark has been attributed to the New York father-and-son silversmithing team A. and J. Scrymgeour, who reportedly worked from approximately 1803 to 1814 and produced silver connected with John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company.

This is where the piece becomes especially intriguing.

The documented occupation of Kuskuskies had ended decades before the working period associated with the Scrymgeours. The dates simply do not correspond. If the attribution of the touchmark is correct, the gorget must have reached the location sometime after the town’s principal period of occupation.

The chronological discrepancy raises several important questions. Was the gorget carried there by someone who retained a connection to Kuskuskies? Did people continue visiting the former town after its principal occupation had ended? Could the object have been lost, intentionally placed, or brought to the location under circumstances that were never documented?

The surviving evidence cannot provide a conclusive answer, but the difference between the accepted site chronology and the silversmiths’ working dates strongly suggests that the gorget represents later activity at the location.

Objects such as this are rarely simple. A single maker’s mark can challenge an accepted timeline and open an entirely new set of questions concerning movement, memory, trade, and people’s continuing relationships with important places long after a town was abandoned.

Kuskuskies represents an important chapter in the history of western Pennsylvania. It was a Native community, a center of regional trade, and a meeting place situated within the contested borderlands of the eighteenth-century Ohio Country. Its history reminds us that the area surrounding present-day New Castle was once part of a much larger Indigenous political, cultural, and commercial landscape.

I ALSO COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR THE PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF THIS OBJECT. THE RESULTING IMAGES ARE REPRODUCED HERE UNDER THE RIGHTS GRANTED TO ME THROUGH THAT COMMISSION AND MAY NOT BE COPIED, REPRODUCED, ALTERED, PUBLISHED, OR USED COMMERCIALLY WITHOUT THE PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUMS COMMISSION PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION.

Historical references for this research include Christian Frederick Post’s 1758 journal, E. M. McConnell’s 1871 account of Kuskuskies, John Zakucia’s archaeological work, later archaeological studies of the Chambers Site, and my own examination of extant examples at The State Museum of Pennsylvania in 2009.

I am now opening my schedule for talks, lectures, and educational programs during the coming year. Several new articles based on my continuing research are also forthcoming, including work that will appear in one of the most respected and widely circulated publications in the field my most significant publishing opportunity to date.

Now, if I can only bring that persistent book project to completion, it promises to become another important milestone in this continuing journey of research, writing, and sharing the stories held within historic objects.

Museums, historical organizations, universities, cultural institutions, and other groups interested in arranging a lecture or educational program are welcome to contact me directly to discuss available topics and scheduling.

James Blake Historian and Artist

09/11/2026

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