Wild Turkeys Once Again Feature in Traditional Native Fashions

When Rebecca Haff Lowry set out to create a traditional feather cape for New York City’s first Lenape-curated cultural arts exhibit, she realized: “There’s no manual for how to do that.” 

The Lenape people’s ancestral homelands include parts of what are today New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and other northeast states. With Wild Turkeys once abundant prior to European settlement, Lenape people made cape garments from the bird’s strong, warm feathers, says Lowry, a poet, educator, and a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. But this and other practices were lost as Western colonists decimated Indigenous populations in the region and forced her ancestors to migrate away from their Northeastern territory. (Today, Lenape nations are established in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada.) 

Lowry’s project to revive the fashion came about during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Stuck at home, she decided to work on creative projects. She wrote a short story that featured a traditional cape. When she shared the piece with Joe Baker, co-founder of the Lenape Center in New York, he challenged her to craft an actual physical garment, she recalls. Lowry immediately accepted: Working from California, where she lives and grew up, Lowry consulted a historic image and recruited her Yurok mother-in-law, who is a skilled regalia maker, to help.

After a couple of months of weaving and craft, the resulting feathered cape—which also incorporates a collar of dentalium shells, a material prized by many tribes— joined other pieces in the 2022 show at the Brooklyn Public Library. Since that debut, Lowry’s cape has also been exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey and will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum this fall. Lowry says she’s proud to contribute to a growing resurgence of Lenape culture in the northeast:  “I feel like I’m a small part of a broader movement of Lenape people returning to Lenapehoking—to the homeland,” she says. 

She’s not the only Indigenous artist reviving the use of Wild Turkey feathers in contemporary works. In New York, Baker created turkey-feather capes for “Welcome to Territory,” an installation at the Cooper Hewitt, a Smithsonian museum in Manhattan. Further afield, in the Southwest—where Pueblo tribes domesticated Wild Turkeys thousands of years ago—Santa Clara Pueblo and Comanche Nation archaeologist Mary Weahkee crafted a traditional feather blanket in 2018. And in Massachusetts, near where Pilgrims first landed, Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Julia Marden debuted a turkey feather mantle that she crafted using an ancient twining technique—the first of her people known to do so in hundreds of years. 

When she finished her own cape, Lowry visited a grove of old-growth oak near her home to try on her handiwork. “It felt incredible,” she says.  Fittingly, she named her work the “Cape of a Matriarch.” She says: “I was thinking about the women in my lineage who are responsible for carrying their culture with them.” 

This story originally ran in the Fall 2025 issue as part of the package “Let’s Talk Turkey.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.