Maggs Bros.

An unrecorded typographical sign for a fortune teller, purportedly of Narragansett Indian heritage.

Though we have been able to find no trace of a fortune teller going by the name Tahoma, the 1920s were a boom period in American spiritualism. In part considered to be a reaction to the losses and horrors of the First World War, the steep rise in popular occultism and mediumship led to a landmark 1926 bill put before Congress seeking to regulate (ergo criminalise) the practice. This campaign found an unlikely ally in Harry Houdini.

By the twentieth century the archetype of the “Indian Mystic” was firmly implanted into the American psyche. This manifested in a slew of real and imposter Native American fortune tellers, travelling medicine shows, and other performative tropes which tapped into a sense of innate and mysterious spirituality accessible through Indigenous practices. Indeed, many white fortune tellers would invoke this sensibility by contacting Indian spirit guides on the astral plane, and relay their words back to their eager audiences.

Though the specific context of this sign remains obscure, there was an individual using the moniker Tahoma who contributed a piece of “Indian Humour” to the July 1935 edition of The Narragansett Dawn, a monthly Rhode Island publication run my tribal members between 1935-1936.