Meaning? Is it obvious?
Notes:
Yet it is true that sometimes a raccoon IS just a raccoon.
At the level of observation, it is probably pretty darned safe to make the identification of one motif on this shell gorget as being a raccoon,
but it is also important to note that the representation on the gorget is almost certainly not a live raccoon, but the skin of a raccoon, as we can see from examination of the contexts in which such raccoon representations occur, both at Spiro and at other sites in the east.
In any case, it is hard to justify wandering too far away from the simple and seemingly obvious identification of an animal into the realm of what either a raccoon or raccoon skin might have MEANT.
It is also particularly foolhardy to assume that a raccoon skin motif had the same meaning as a live raccoon representation might have had.