Wamus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A wamus is a type of jacket worn in the United States. The term is applied to several different types of upper-body garment.
One of the more consistent uses of wamus is to describe a fringed leather tunic that slips over the head.[1][2] For early American pioneer families in the Southern United States, the buckskin (later, cloth) wamus was widely worn by young and pre-teen boys in the late 18th and very early 19th century.[3] The wamus, if it opened down the front, was either laced shut or held closed with a belt, with dressier versions made from elk skin.[1] If made from cloth, the wamus was dyed blue and trimmed with yellow fringe.[1]
As worn by the Lakota people, the wamus was a ceremonial tunic which was coloured to represent the type of person the wearer was, as well as painted with mnemonic designs.[2] Traditionally, if a warrior had scalped his enemy, he was allowed to trim his wamus with human hair cut from the heads of mourning women in addition to the cut fringe.[2]