Totem pole
The carvings may symbolize or commemorate ancestors, cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events.
The poles may also serve as functional architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the remains of deceased ancestors, or as a means to publicly ridicule someone.
Families of traditional carvers come from the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuxalk (Bella Coola), and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), among others.
Totem poles are the largest, but not the only, objects that coastal Pacific Northwest natives use to depict spiritual reverence, family legends, sacred beings and culturally important animals, people, or historical events.
By the late eighteenth century, the use of metal cutting tools enabled more complex carvings and increased production of totem poles.
[9] Eddie Malin has proposed that totem poles progressed from house posts, funerary containers, and memorial markers into symbols of clan and family wealth and prestige.
[10] Malin's theory is supported by the photographic documentation of the Pacific Northwest coast's cultural history and the more sophisticated designs of the Haida poles.
[11][12] By the early nineteenth century, widespread importation of iron and steel tools from Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere led to easier and more rapid production of carved wooden goods, including poles.
[18] In 1938 the United States Forest Service began a program to reconstruct and preserve the old poles, salvaging about 200, roughly one-third of those known to be standing at the end of the 19th century.
Consistent use of a specific character over time, with some slight variations in carving style, helped develop similarities among these shared symbols that allowed people to recognize one from another.
[29][30] Some of the figures on the poles constitute symbolic reminders of quarrels, murders, debts, and other unpleasant occurrences about which the Native Americans prefer to remain silent...
[31]People from cultures that do not carve totem poles often assume that the linear representation of the figures places the most importance on the highest figure, an idea that became pervasive in the dominant culture after it entered into mainstream parlance by the 1930s with the phrase "low man on the totem pole"[32] (and as the title of a bestselling 1941 humor book by H. Allen Smith).
However, Native sources either reject the linear component altogether, or reverse the hierarchy, with the most important representations on the bottom, bearing the weight of all the other figures, or at eye-level with the viewer to heighten their significance.
[40] The Lincoln pole at Saxman commemorates the end of hostilities between two rival Tlingit clans and symbolizes the hope for peace and prosperity following the American occupation of the Alaskan territory.
[41] The story begins in 1868, when the United States government built a customs house and fort on Tongass Island and left the US revenue cutter Lincoln to patrol the area.
Originally carved in the c. 1885, the pole shamed former U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward for his "lack of recognition of Indigenous peoples at an early point in Alaska’s U.S. history," as well as not reciprocating the generosity of his Tlingit hosts following an 1869 potlatch given in his honor.
[50] In 2014, this second pole began to fall apart; a renewed version was carved in 2017 by local Tlingit artist Stephen Jackson, who combined political caricature with Northwest Coast style.
When the Kiks.ádi leaders refused to pay support for the women, Shakes commissioned a pole with carvings of three frogs, which represented the crest of the Kiks.ádi clan.
[58] Following a Sitka Tribe of Alaska-sponsored removal ceremony, the pole was lowered due to safety concerns on October 20, 2010, using funds from the Alaska Dept.
[59] On March 24, 2007, a shame pole was erected in Cordova, Alaska, that includes the inverted and distorted face of former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond.
[66] Although the remains of the original pole at Golden Hill no longer exist, a replica was raised on April 13, 1996, on the front lawn of The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis.
[72] In England at the side of Virginia Water Lake, in the south of Windsor Great Park, there is a 100-foot-tall (30 m) Canadian totem pole that was given to Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate the centenary of British Columbia.
[74][75] After the tree to be used for the totem pole is selected, it is cut down and moved to the carving site, where the bark and outer layer of wood (sapwood) is removed.
There have been protests when those who have not been trained in the traditional carving methods, cultural meanings and protocol, have made "fake totem poles" for what could be considered crass public display and commercial purposes.
These include imitations made for commercial and even comedic use in venues that serve alcohol, and in other settings that are insensitive or outright offensive to the sacred nature of some of the carvings.
[78] In the early 1990s, the Haisla First Nation of the Pacific Northwest began a lengthy struggle to repatriate the Gʼpsgolox totem pole from Sweden's Museum of Ethnography.
[79][80] Their successful efforts were documented in Gil Cardinal's National Film Board of Canada documentary, Totem: The Return of the G'psgolox Pole.
[81] In October 2015, a Tlingit totem pole was returned from Hawaii to Alaska after being taken from a village by Hollywood actor John Barrymore in 1931.
[82] The title of "The World's Tallest Totem Pole" is or has at one time been claimed by several coastal towns of North America's Pacific Northwest.
Carved by Richard Hunt in 1988 in the Kwakwaka'wakw style, and measuring over 6 feet (1.8 m) in diameter, it represents Cedar Man transforming into his human form.
