Wild Turkeys Once Again Feature in Traditional Native Fashions

When Rebecca Haff Lowry got down to create a standard feather cape for New York Metropolis’s first Lenape-curated cultural arts exhibit, she realized: “There’s no guide for a way to do this.” 

The Lenape individuals’s ancestral homelands embody elements of what are as we speak New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and different northeast states. With Wild Turkeys as soon as ample previous to European settlement, Lenape individuals made cape clothes from the chook’s robust, heat feathers, says Lowry, a poet, educator, and a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. However this and different practices have been misplaced as Western colonists decimated Indigenous populations within the area and compelled her ancestors emigrate away from their Northeastern territory. (At present, Lenape nations are established in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada.) 

Lowry’s undertaking to revive the style took place throughout the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Caught at residence, she determined to work on artistic tasks. She wrote a brief story that featured a standard cape. When she shared the piece with Joe Baker, co-founder of the Lenape Center in New York, he challenged her to craft an precise bodily garment, she recollects. Lowry instantly accepted: Working from California, the place she lives and grew up, Lowry consulted a historic picture and recruited her Yurok mother-in-law, who’s a talented regalia maker, to assist.

After a few months of weaving and craft, the ensuing feathered cape—which additionally incorporates a collar of dentalium shells, a fabric prized by many tribes— joined different items within the 2022 present on the Brooklyn Public Library. Since that debut, Lowry’s cape has additionally been exhibited on the Montclair Artwork Museum in New Jersey and might be on view on the Brooklyn Museum this fall. Lowry says she’s proud to contribute to a rising resurgence of Lenape tradition within the northeast:  “I really feel like I’m a small a part of a broader motion of Lenape individuals returning to Lenapehoking—to the homeland,” she says. 

She’s not the one Indigenous artist reviving using Wild Turkey feathers in up to date works. In New York, Baker created turkey-feather capes for “Welcome to Territory,” an set up on the Cooper Hewitt, a Smithsonian museum in Manhattan. Additional afield, within the Southwest—the place Pueblo tribes domesticated Wild Turkeys hundreds of years in the past—Santa Clara Pueblo and Comanche Nation archaeologist Mary Weahkee crafted a conventional feather blanket in 2018. And in Massachusetts, close to the place Pilgrims first landed, Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Julia Marden debuted a turkey feather mantle that she crafted utilizing an historic twining approach—the primary of her individuals recognized to take action in tons of of years. 

When she completed her personal cape, Lowry visited a grove of old-growth oak close to her residence to attempt on her handiwork. “It felt unimaginable,” she says.  Fittingly, she named her work the “Cape of a Matriarch.” She says: “I used to be enthusiastic about the ladies in my lineage who’re chargeable for carrying their tradition with them.” 

This story initially ran within the Fall 2025 difficulty as a part of the package deal “Let’s Talk Turkey.” To obtain our print journal, grow to be a member by making a donation today.