Long necklaces known as bead chains, made by both Indigenous and settler women using miniature horizontal looms, were fashionable in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Sold at tourist sites as well as mainstream retail outlets, Indigenous women modified their existing skills in making wampum strands to create fashionable accessories for the modern woman. This bead chain is a type known as a “picture chain” due to its representational motif – flowers. While flowers had powerful meanings in the Victorian world, for the Anishinaabe women who created this piece, flowers had conceptual associations with metaphors of sight and knowledge.

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