Arkansas / Okalahoma
Southeast / Quapaw People

Pottery (Redware), pigment
ca. mid 20th century
Idiophone – Struck – Indirectly (Rattle)

This is a Quapaw hand coiled and painted redware pottery rattle.  It is made in the shaped of a frog effigy. In Native American culture, frogs symbolize many things, but the most common themes include transformation, fertility, and abundance.  For the Quapaw, the frog symbolizes the life cycle of metamorphosis in which a tadpole grows and changes until it becomes a frog – thus representing rebirth, renewal, and the restoration of life.

Algonquian-speaking people originally referred to the Quapaw people as Akansa, an Illini word for “People of the South Wind”. French explorers and colonists learned this term from Algonquians and adapted it in French as Arcansas. The French named the Arkansas River and the territory of Arkansas for them. Once they migrated down the Mississippi River into Arkansas, they were called the Ogáxpa (Quapaw), which means the “downstream people

Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quapaw