Dreamcatcher

ritual object · United States · North America

The dreamcatcher is a small hoop of willow or other wood bound with a web of netting and hung above a cradle, believed in Ojibwe tradition to catch bad dreams in its mesh while good dreams slip through the central hole to the sleeper below. The web form is tied to stories of the spider grandmother, a protective figure of Anishinaabe tradition, and early twentieth-century ethnographic accounts record such charms made for infants. Since the 1960s the dreamcatcher has been adopted across North America as a pan-Indian emblem and mass-produced as a souvenir, a development many elders and scholars c

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