biography of a relative

​The Life of Thomas Aptasweh/Abotossaway's Leggings is a biography of the relative called Leggings worn by an Anishinaabe actor from Garden River, Ontario, between 1901 and 1912. The Leggings are currently held in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa. This biography was created for "Indigenous Communities and Museums, Changing Relationships", a course in the MMSt program at the University of Toronto.  

The life of Thomas Aptasweh/Abotossaway’s leggings ​

Thomas Aptasweh/Abotossaway’s Leggings  have been held in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History since 1912. While dissociated from a companion relative Shirt, also in the CMH collection, the Leggings invite inquiry into their use as part of a costume worn by Thomas, an Anishinaabe actor from Garden River, Ontario. The relatives were worn by Thomas in the Hiawatha Pageant. The pageant was popular with white audiences. Versions of it toured parts of Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The Leggings and Shirt relatives represent an assemblage of narratives. They merge Plains and Woodlands styles of dress and methods of making -- practices that speak to adaptive change over many years. Elements, fabrics and specific beads used in the outfit date between 1812 and 1912. At the same time, the outfit is also a theatrical costume.

The relatives were worn by Thomas in the operatic Hiawatha Pageant between 1901 and 1912. This outdoor pageant performance was based on the popular poem Song of Hiawatha (1855) by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem and pageant tell a romanticized version of the life and death of a Plains warrior named Hiawatha. Performed for white settler audiences, this warrior's story is also a distortion of the well known Manabozho "trickster" myth. 

Please contact me for the full biography of this relative.