We have been called the Kwakiutl ever since 1849, when the white people came to stay in our territories. In fact, the Kwakiutl only occupy the village now called Fort Rupert. The rest of us have our own names and our own villages. For example, the Gwawa'enuxw live at Hopetown. Collectively, we call ourselves the Kwakwaka'wakw—that is, all of the people who speak the language Kwakwala.
Archaeological evidence indicates that our people have occupied Vancouver Island, the adjacent mainland, and the islands between for about nine thousand years. Before the Canadian government contracted our traditional boundaries to enclose small reserves, each tribal group owned its territory, through which it moved seasonally. During the winter, each occupied a more permanent site, where the people engaged in intensive ceremonial activities while enjoying the abundant supply of foods from the sea and land that they had gathered earlier in the year.
With the introduction of European technology and food, much of the traditional subsistence cycle was altered. A variety of salmon and shellfish are still gathered and preserved by freezing, canning, or smoking, and the spring runs of eulachon (candlefish) in Knight and Kingcome Inlets are still harvested and rendered into oil.
Although the red cedar is no longer used for housing, clothing, and canoes, its bark is still processed to decorate items of ceremonial gear. Its wood is used to create masks and totem poles. In recent years, renewed interest in the construction of dugout canoes has created an additional demand for red cedar. The building of a sixty-foot canoe requires a carefully selected cedar log, and the search for such a log often reveals the extent of the problems created by the uncontrolled logging practices of large corporations. Suitable logs are difficult to find, and the success of any modern canoe gathering is a tribute to the determination and enthusiasm of those who participate.
The first anthropologist to come to our area, Franz Boas, arrived in 1886; since then countless books and papers have been written about what is called the potlatch, a ceremony practiced along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to northern California. The term comes from Chinook Jargon, a language developed during the early days of the fur trade, and means "to give." Each cultural group has its own word for the ceremony. In Kwakwala, the word is pasa, literally meaning "to flatten"—that is, to flatten one's guests under the weight of the gifts given to them. Potlatches are held to name children, mourn the dead, transfer rights and privileges from one generation to the next, and conduct marriage exchanges.
The first white people to settle in our territory did not interfere with the potlatch. Merchants profited by selling huge quantities of blankets, oak chests, glassware, sacks of flour, and other goods, which were distributed at potlatches. It was not until Christian missions and government agencies became established that opposition to the ceremony began. Although the government of Canada first enacted legislation prohibiting the potlatch in 1884, for several decades the law could not be enforced because it was so badly written. It was simply ignored by those who considered the ceremony a special gift from the Creator. Finally, in 1921, through the zealous efforts of the Indian agent William Halliday, forty-five of our highest-ranking chiefs and their wives were arrested for violating the law by singing, dancing, and giving and receiving gifts, as well as making speeches. Twenty-two people were sentenced to prison terms of two to three months; the rest were given suspended sentences on the condition that their entire villages surrender their ceremonial treasures. These included coppers (our symbols of wealth), masks, rattles, whistles, and kerfed boxes. The collection was shipped to Ottawa, to what was then the Victoria Memorial Museum and has since become the National Museum of Man. Part of what became known as the Potlatch Collection was then transferred to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. George Heye bought thirty-three objects for the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation in New York. This latter portion was then transferred to the National Museum of the American Indian.
During the years of potlatch prohibition, the ceremony simply went underground, with hosts carefully choosing villages that the police would have difficulty reaching in stormy weather. Our old people say that this is when our world became dark. Some of the Kwakwaka'wakw became Christians and their children attended missionary schools, with a resultant loss of language and of skills in harvesting traditional foods. More seriously, the knowledge the children should have been acquiring about their place in the potlatch system was lost.
In 1951, when the Canadian Indian Act was revised, the section prohibiting the potlatch was deleted, not repealed—as our people had continued to hope. Convinced that the surrender of our treasures had been illegal, we began in 1969 to negotiate with the National Museum of Man for the repatriation of its portion of these objects. By 1975, the museum had agreed to return our treasures on the condition that two museums be built to house them. The Kwakiutl Museum at Cape Mudge opened in 1979; the opening of the U'mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay followed, in 1980. The Royal Ontario Museum returned its part of the collection in 1988, and in 1993 the National Museum of the American Indian repatriated some of our treasures.
In earlier days, people were sometimes captured by enemy tribes. The return home of the captives, either through payment of ransom or owing to a retaliatory raid, was called u'mista—that is, a special return. The U'mista Cultural Centre was named for the special return of our treasures from distant museums. Our u'mista also includes our return to the path our ancestors prepared for us. The center has produced a series of twelve Kwakwala-language books for use in schools, and two award-winning documentary films, Potlatch ... A Strict Law Bids Us Dance and Box of Treasures. The collection of oral histories from our old people continues, as do programs for the teaching of language, dance, and song. Since it opened, the U'mista Cultural Centre has become a real focus for the strengthening of our cultural activities in Alert Bay and the surrounding communities.
The increasing number of potlatches held each year is indicative of the revitalization of our culture. Most of these events take place in the traditional big house located in Alert Bay, home of the 'Namgis, one of the seventeen contemporary bands that make up the Kwakwaka'wakw. Built in 1963, the big house accommodates about seven hundred people, and it is here that young singers and dancers proudly display their skills to their families and other guests. Their performances demonstrate the vitality and persistence of Kwakwaka'wakw culture, despite the efforts of white people to "civilize" us.
See also
Potlatch.
Franz Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography ed. Helen Codere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Jonaitis Aldona, ed., Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Peter L. Macnair, Alan L. Hoover, and Kevin Neary, The Legacy: Continuing Traditions of Canadian Northwest Coast Indian Art (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1980).
Gloria Cranmer Webster
'Namgis
U'mista Cultural Centre
Alert Bay, British Columbia
