The Basket Tent

From the mid 1800s to the 1960s, Wabanaki entrepreneurs traveled to coastal, lakeside and mountain resorts to sell novelty goods during the summer tourist season. Sales of their artforms provided crucial income for Wabanaki community members to tide them over the winter months. Each year families traveled to destinations that their ancestors traditionally frequented to hunt and gather. Their tents featured brown ash and sweetgrass basketry, birchbark work, carvings, moccasins, and goods especially for children – bows and arrows, tomahawks, and furs and feathers.

At a time when they were increasingly dispossessed of their ancestral lands, Wabanaki people maintained economic sovereignty and a visible presence on the landscape that reminded residents of the communities where they camped that they were still here.

Documentation of these enterprises is scant and black and white real photo postcards dating to the early twentieth century shed light on this tradition. Explore some of the locations in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and Atlantic Canada where Wabanaki people traveled as recorded in historic images in the Hudson Museum’s holdings.