University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign history professor Robert Morrissey and members of the Miami and Peoria Nations traveled to a Paris museum to reconnect the tribes with 300-year-old ceremonial robes.
George Ironstrack, a Miami Tribe citizen and part of the Reclaiming Stories project, shows his tattoo that is based on a robe's imagery.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign history professor Robert Morrissey traveled to a Paris museum in November to see four ceremonial robes created more than 300 years ago by Native American tribes in Illinois. The research trip included members of the Miami and Peoria Nations and it was part of a collaborative project, "Reclaiming Stories: (Re)connecting Indigenous Painted Hides to Communities through Collaborative Conversations," to reconnect the tribes with their hide painting tradition.
Tribal citizens involved with the project made two trips to the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 2023, but this was Morrissey's first visit to see the robes, which he called "extraordinary."
"It was a really powerful experience of time travel, relating to the past across this massive gulf of time and culture," Morrissey said. "I spend a lot of time trying to relate to people in the distant past as a historian and to imagine individuals that I can only make contact with through reading texts. Somehow being with these objects in person really helped me imagine the people who made them."
History professor Robert Morrissey at Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris with a robe featuring one of the best examples of the tribes' hide-painting tradition.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
Through a revitalization movement during the past three decades, the Miami and Peoria Tribes have been teaching their native language, history and traditions, including artwork such as hide painting and tattooing.
The group examined other cultural items of Indigenous people in the Paris museum's collection.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
"Few groups lost more in the 19th and 20th centuries," including their land, languages and federal recognition of the Peoria Tribe, Morrissey said.
The goal of the Reclaiming Stories project is to support the revitalization efforts and to reconnect the tribes with the painted robes. The project supported workshops during the past three summers on hide painting techniques, hide tanning and tattooing in preparation for the visits to see the robes in Paris.
Morrissey said that, to his knowledge, an April 2023 trip of tribal citizens to Paris was the first time anyone from one of the tribal communities has interacted with the painted robes since they were collected in the 1700s.
"Especially for these communities that have had an extraordinary chapter of cultural discontinuity and rupture, to bridge that gap and reconnect with that earlier, long-ago culture is super-powerful. They are pulling all of that into the present, into their current revitalization programs and what it means to their nations today to connect to painting and tattooing traditions," he said.
George Ironstrack, left, with Jonas Musco, a researcher at the Paris museum, examining one of the ceremonial robes.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
In addition to continuing research on the painted robes during the November trip, the group traveled in the footsteps of Chekagou, a chief of the Metchigamea, a group later incorporated into the Peoria Nation, and one of the most important 18th-century tribal leaders in the Midwest. Chekagou and four other chiefs made a diplomatic visit to France in 1725.
"We were walking in the footsteps of the delegation through the sites they visited," Morrissey said. "We know where they went from the surviving documentation. They were kind of a spectacle in France, so the press took note. Newspapers covered their journey."
The group toured the Chateau de Fontainebleau, one of the places that Native American chiefs visited during their 1725 diplomatic trip.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
Among the places the group visited were the Château de Fontainebleau, where Chekagou gave diplomatic speeches, hunted with a 15-year-old Louis XV and possibly prayed at a Catholic Mass in his native language, and the Palace of Versailles, which was the seat of the French government at the time.
Curators from several French museums, including the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, are planning an exhibition at the Palace of Versailles this year to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the diplomatic visit. Two partners on the Reclaiming Stories project - George Ironstrack, a Miami Tribe citizen and the associate director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University of Ohio, and Elizabeth Ellis, a Peoria Tribe citizen and a history professor at Princeton University - are consultants on the exhibition.
This wampum belt may have been a gift of Peoria Chief Chekagou during his 1725 visit to Paris.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
Their participation will add an Indigenous perspective to the exhibition, Morrissey said. Their viewpoint is that Chekagou was important enough to the French to visit their country. His journey was a voyage of discovery to bring the French people into his world.
The Reclaiming Stories project will support another visit to Paris by tribal citizens for the opening of the exhibition in November.
The project organized its own exhibit at Miami University in 2024 that included replicas of the painted robes in Paris, hide paintings made by tribal citizens in the summer workshops and information about the materials, process and iconography of painted hides.
When the Versailles exhibition is finished, the group hopes to bring the 18th-century painted robes to the U.S. for an exhibition curated by the tribal communities.
Robert Morrissey and Charla EchoHawk, the director of cultural preservation for the Peoria Tribe, examine the minohsayaki, or painted hides.
Photo courtesy Robert Morrissey
In addition to reconnecting the tribes with their traditions and the artwork of their ancestors, the project also is an opportunity to increase the visibility of current Indigenous nations, Morrissey said.
"For the people of Illinois and my students, there is a pervasive and persistent story that the Native Americans of Illinois are gone. They are not gone," he said. "Here are the modern nations of Miami and Peoria. There was a time they suffered such tremendous loss, and this is part of a revitalization story. People should know about it. This is a good way to tell the story of it."
