This girl is in the doorway of her miniature tipi made of about a dozen expertly seamed hides and about a dozen poles.  How many seams can you count?  It is brightly painted with polka dots and has a snake circling around the circumference counterclockwise.  If you look carefully you can see the short, parallel lines of the skewers that hold the top together, above the doorway.  You may also notice that two poles are outside of the tipi and the rest are under the covering.  The two that are outside control ventilation of heat and smoke and allow natural illumination.  A small pile of extra tent stakes lies at her feet.

The girl's buckskin dress is ornamented with the teeth of more than 126 elk for a minimum of 252 teeth.  The two front teeth of the elk are ivory and they were harvested as bling.  The more elk teeth the richer the wearer.  Her leggings and moccasins are covered with large areas of beading.  Her clothing and the normal range for elk indicate that she is most probably from a prosperous Northern Plains family.

Hide-working was the arena where women achieved high prestige and great wealth.  Every mother hoped her daughter would become an expert hide worker and tipi designer.  Many tribes had prestigious tipi-making guilds that women sought membership in.  Those that did not have formal guilds still had less formal organizations.  The better the woman's design skills, the more highly regarded she was in the community.  Expert designers were paid high wages for their work. If a woman could create a tipi by herself, she was considered a most exceptional woman. 

When a woman was ready to make her first home, she announced the news to everyone and then gave a feast to demonstrate that she had acquired enough wealth and maturity to begin the first major project of her adulthood.  Tipis were made of the hide of a male bison; each hide could weigh in at 250 pounds.  It could take more than twenty such hides to make a tipi and help was needed with the weight of the hides. These hides had to be acquired then tanned (a process that took weeks) and stored until all were ready to be cut and sewn which would, of course, mean that she had to butcher at least twenty bison.  In addition, twenty or more 20' - 25' poles were needed and they had to be cut from the forest, moved to the worksite, peeled, de-branched, sized, and smoothed before they were ready.  For people who stayed on the move, this was no small feat for a young woman and required strong social support.

When the girl in the above picture grew up, if she was allowed to live free, she might have had her own tipi home.  She and her spouse would have choosen each other and lived in her tipi.  If she tired of the marriage or disliked his behavior, she simply put his belongings outside the door and he never crossed the threshold again.  The women owned the children here.  Girls became women with their first menstruation, for which there was feasting and celebration.  Men, lacking a moment when they could pinpoint their physical arrival at adulthood, achieved manhood on their first kill of a large adult animal like a bison, stag, bear, or elk, which was a highly celebrated event.  If such a kill was accomplished at a young age, the boy was highly respected.