Crossing worlds: hide coats, relationships, and identity in Rupert’s land and Britain

Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, material culture played key roles in the expansion of trade networks, empires, colonial regimes, and the lives of ordinary people caught up in these processes.Two extraordinary nineteenth-century moose hide coats, which are decorated with painted designs and porcupine quillwork and which combine various aspects of European and broader global fashion and Indigenous technology and cultural perspectives, form the focus of this chapter.