Firebags are pouches used to carry men’s fire-making implements (flint, steel, and tinder), but clearly they were intended to be fashion accessories and not merely utilitarian bags. This Cree Firebag, fully decorated on both sides, is extraordinarily rich in its colours and use of different textures. The combination of two very different free-form floral designs, geometric pattern, beaded fringe, and lush tassels is brilliant (and perhaps the tassels’ fiery red colour is symbolic). Kate Duncan’s 1989 Northern Athapaskan Art illustrates a Cree firebag from the Haffenreffer Museum collection that is so similar in its overall design and details to this one that it is very tempting to assume they are by the same artist (fig. 6.34). Our example has somewhat more complex floral patterns, however.

This style of Cree firebag is sometimes identified as Chipewyan in museum collections because the trading posts at which many were collected attracted both the Cree and the Chipewyan. The preference for black wool rather than black velvet, the lack of any metal beads, and the similar scale of the different motifs distinguishes Cree bags from Athapaskan ones [1].

1. Kate C. Duncan, Northern Athapaskan Art: A Beadwork Tradition, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), p. 109.

References: For a strikingly similar example see Kate C. Duncan, Northern Athapaskan Art: A Beadwork Tradition, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), fig. 6.34; the book also illustrates Athapaskan firebags (figs. 7.6-7.11). See also Barbara A. Hall and Kate C. Duncan, Out of the North: the Subarctic Collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 1989), p. 133.