Over two hundred years ago, when Europeans first visited the Northwest Coast of North America, the weavers of the area were making robes of exquisite beauty to adorn the wealthiest of their noble class. Patterned in bold black and white geometric designs streaked with scintillating dashes of yellow, these robes predate the better known Chilkat dancing blankets from the same area. Today only eleven of these robes exist, three of them as fragments. Another two are shown on Russian historical paintings by Mikhail Tikhanov. The only other known robes are found on an archival photograph and on two sketches by Pavel Mikhailof. To produce this book, Cheryl Samuel travelled to Leningrad, Copenhagen, and London to examine the six robes in Europe. She also studied the robes housed in museums in Canada and the United States. In 1985, she reconstructed Chief Kotlean's robe, using information she had gathered from her study of |