Well, it isn’t perfect, but it’s the absolute best I could make at my current skill level.
The Jingle Dress (Shiibaashka’igan) is a ubiquitous sight at pow wows across North America. The dress, which was created by the Ojibwe, has its roots in the early 1900s, during a time of extreme hardship caused by repressive colonial policies and the onset of the Spanish flu pandemic. There are three different stories regarding its creation, but all versions of the tale emphasize the healing powers of the dress.
In the 1920s, the Ojibwe gave the Shiibaashka’igan to the Lakota, and other groups subsequently adopted the tradition. Despite federal policies banning all forms of indigenous ceremony, the regalia and the dance were unstoppable, spreading far beyond the lands of the Anishinaabe. Over time, the Jingle Dress and dance grew to represent both healing and cultural pride – a spiritual form of wellness, celebration, and resistance against colonial oppression.
Jingle Dresses were initially solid-colored, with dangling cones made from rolled-up snuff can lids. Nowadays, the dresses come in a dizzying array of colors and patterns, blending cultural iconography with personal flair. Dancers often wear feathered plumes in their hair, but I haven’t figured out how to do morphing head accessories yet, so I’ll have to come back to that. I tried to limit the number of cones to keep the polycount down, but this piece still has a higher polycount than my other creations. It warps weirdly in the way that all EA meshes do.
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