“Mokisins”, “cloaks” and “a belt of a peculiar fabrick”: recovering the history of the Thomas Whyte collection of northeastern North American clothing

In 1965 Glasgow Museums in Scotland acquired nine items of eastern North American clothing from a nearby museum that was deaccessioning its ethnographic collection. Information on the collection was only partially transferred with this material, and so it appeared to have become almost completely disassociated from its earlier history. Research currently underway to reattach the collection to surviving documentation suggests that the clothing was acquired in the early nineteenth century, most likely in the Great Lakes region, by a man named Thomas Whyte. This presentation will introduce this little-known collection and the archival processes through which its history is now being reconstructed and recast.