The Blue Beaded Dress in the Works of Susan Power

This article combines archival research at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago with references to a blue beaded Dakota dress that Susan Power makes in both her fictional novel The Grass Dancer and her nonfiction essay “Museum Indians.” In a close reading of Power’s writing, the author traced the blue beaded dress as it moves from family history to the museum and, finally, ends up dancing on the moon. Power’s novel articulates a Dakota object ontology that thwarts traditional understandings of space-time in order to strengthen and reinforce kinship ties. Power’s depictions of the dress defy the typical view of such objects as stagnant, dependent entities, and Majhor argues that Power offers a view of Dakota materialism that positions the dress as a participatory and per-formative object-being. Taking Power’s works together with an analysis Field Museum’s Dakota holdings, the author argues that her writings offer imaginative liberation of object-beings like the dress and, ultimately, call for the material liberation and repatriation of such objects.