This is associated with the introduction of a wide variety of
crude colours destructive of the dignity and characteristic
tints of the original quill and bead designs. Unfortunately
this fact is disregarded; beads are more easily applied and
their use saves the skilled labour required in the collection,
softening, flattening, dyeing and sorting of quills. Thus the
arts of wrapping or plaiting or sewing or weaving of quills is
well-nigh lost, at least in this Province, to the detriment of
an artistic form of decorative needlecraft. Originally the
colours employed in this method of decoration were few and har-
monious; mainly red, white, yellow and black, in sone cases

also dark blue, never the multi-coloured crude aniline tints now
too often employed (such as the pink foundation, Plate 20, Figure
3), and never the crystal clear beads, to the use of which many
are tempted to-day.

From a point of view other than the artistic this fact is
regrettable, as a large market has developed in Ontario for a
form of quill work applied as an additional attraction to the
birch baskets much sought after by tourists, with very bene-
ficial pecuniary advantages to the Indian makers.

Beads, however, have come to stay. It may therefore in-
terest some to learn that crude beads were in use even before
the. coming of Europeans. They were made from shells, (chiefly
dentalium, serpula and abalone), from deer hoofs, animal teeth
and seeds, playing their part in the decoration of costumes,
rattles, pendants, and, when strung on strips of buckskin, as
fringes or necklaces. Surviving specimens are so attractive
in their rhythmic alternations of plain and beaded strips that
they might well be reproduced in these days of quaint personal
ornaments. Obviously their use was limited in the case of
shells by the fact that the Sekanis, the Shuswaps and other
tribes of the Interior had to get these by trading methods with
the Gitksans (Tsimsyan) and Carrier people in contact with the
coast.

Another and still later rival of quill work exists in silk
embroidery, a further result of white men's settlement over
wider areas of the continent. Among the Shuswaps, for example,
the substitution of beads for quills started early in the last
century, due to the contact with the Trading Companies, only to
be displaced since about 1860 by silk embroidery when white
settlers increased in number with further expansion of trading
opportunities.

Two methods of securing beads for the various decorative

purposes are still practised. The first, known as "couching"
is substantially the same as that used for quill work. That

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