new research

The Life of Thomas Aptasweh/Abotossaway's Leggings is a research 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 research was for "Indigenous Communities and Museums, Changing Relationships", a course in the MMSt program at the University of Toronto.  Please contact me for the full biography of this relative: [email protected]​

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 an Anishinaabe actor in the Hiawatha Pageant created in 1900. The Leggings and Shirt relative together represent an assemblage of narratives, many of which are difficult. Their layered Plains and Woodlands styles of dress and methods of making, speak to adaptive change over many years between 1812 and 1912. This “theatrical costume” merges the real and unreal in the performance of a distorted Manabozho myth cycle that is further filtered through a white Settler lens. The Leggings reflect a complex story of the Indigenous Peoples of Garden River, Ontario, and the surrounding area who were confronted with cultural genocide and survived.