Image and Reality

Appearance is not Everything: To the unsuspecting eye, the buckskin dress that Ruth is most famously known for wearing before and during her excursion to Washington D.C., is not what a Cherokee Indian would have been found wearing in their prior Georgian homeland hundreds of years ago, or even presently in Oklahoma Indian Territory. The dress that Ruth wore for her introduction to President Calvin Coolidge was a called, in an article published after her presentation by the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, a "symbol… of traditional craftsmanship of her race...made of buckskin and covered in ornate beaded designs."(21) The dress, described like the beaded cover of The Red Man in the United States, the book given to President Coolidge in 1923, were not actually crafted by Cherokees at all, but rather Cheyenne and Apache Indians.(22) According to the Cherokee Heritage Center, "elaborately beaded buckskin and feathered costumes were not the style of the Cherokee"(23) Traditional Cherokee women's' dresses were actually fashioned after white settlers' clothing in colonial Georgia. The Cherokee dresses were called Tear Dresses, named after their experience on the Trail of Tears in 1838, and made from cotton and hardly ever beaded. Ruth's choice of attire played into white Americans' conceptions of what an Indian should look like. The response to her image as a traditional Indian was seen in the articles published in conjunction with Ruth's trip to Washington.

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