Aboriginal Toys in Canada

This beautiful object is a ball, probably from the Greenland Eskimos. That's really all we know about it. It's one of the images from the "Toys" collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

It caught my eye, and heart, because I've never seen a ball that was as much a work of art as it was a thing of play. I wish I knew more about the games that were played with it. I wish I knew more about how people played with the rest of the toys in this remarkable collection. But I'm more of a collector of folklore than I am of folk things, and this museum is a collection of objects, not stories. And yet, it is a powerfully evocative collection, well-designed, beautifully-illustrated, with an excellent interface, and just enough information to connect us, one civilization to another.