Chinook Clothing
Around 1500 AD, Chinook people, both men and women, wore leather leggings and long leather shirts. Women's shirts were longer than men's, and their sleeves were wider. In warm weather, people often wore less clothing, and in winter they often wrapped furs around them to keep warm.
People also made short skirts and hats out of pounded bark from cedar trees (and also sleeping mats).
You could tell rich people's clothing apart because rich people had time to decorate their clothes with lots of beads, feathers, and shells.
Chinook head-shaping board (1860)
Chinook people also flattened their heads to make themselves look more beautiful or handsome. Both men and women had flattened heads. They did this by tying boards to press down on babies' heads while their skulls were still soft, and this gradually changed the shape of their heads, the way braces gradually change the shape of your teeth. The only people who didn't have their heads flattened were slaves taken from other tribes, so people were happy to have flat heads to show that they were born free. Richer women also got tattoos on their arms and legs.
When European sailors first started to come to Chinook land, people got blue and white trade beads from them. Both men and women wore these blue and white trade beads as bracelets around their wrists and ankles, which sometimes were so tight that they cut off circulation and made their legs and hands swell up.
A Chinook woman
But with the coming of European settlers in the late 1800s, people gradually gave up their leather clothes to wear wool and cotton clothes that they bought from the settlers. And as there got to be fewer and fewer Chinook people, and most Chinook women had to marry Europeans or people from other tribes, they gradually gave up flattening heads too.
To find out more about Chinook clothing, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
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