Printed in Great Britain The ‘Many Shots ’ Robe

Museum artifacts can speak volumes about their cultures of origin. Too often, however, the chain of events linking an artifact, its maker/owner, the person who collected it and the museum which owns it is too fragmentary to reconstruct an object’s history. This is fortunately not the case with the robe in the Pitt Rivers Museum bearing the painted war deeds of Many Shots. This painting and its history tell us a great deal about the Kainai people. The Kainai, or Bloods, are a division of the Blackfoot, traditionally a nomadic buffalo hunting people of the northwestern plains of North America in present day Montana and Alberta. When there was intense warfare among northern plains tribes, during much of the nineteenth century, men would gain social prestige through their war deeds. Pictographic painted records were an important means of ensuring that the public did not lose sight of a warrior's prowess. Such records were thus executed on highly visible surfaces, such as tipi covers and liners, as well as hide shirts and robes worn by acclaimed warriors. The Blackfoot treaty with the Dominion of Canada and the British Crown in 1877 virtually ended Kainai participation in intertribal warfare. The last buffalo hunt to sustain the Bloods occurred in the winter of 1880-81, after which life changed dramatically. The different bands of the Kainai cam