On a rare? history of jingle dress cones

Terran shared a Twitter post with me where someone was suggesting a Fallout video game original character where the jingles on their jingle dress were made of shell casings, and apparently, this whole history I have of jingle dress cones made from tobacco tins and other improvisations is not as widely known as I thought.

It sent me into thinking about how histories of Indigenous material culture get flattened or aestheticized in fandom spaces, and how easy it is for details with deep context to be replaced by “cool post-apocalyptic” variants that read well to people outside those traditions.

It also sits alongside some of the same frustration I feel when I see American radicals re-enacting the liberal pattern of “fight at a distance to love up close,” whether it’s about arms and materiel for the Ukrainian military instead of plate carriers for prominent American radicals, or compassion framed in ways that reinforce the same exclusions we’re supposed to be dismantling.