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CounterPunch
November
13, 2002
The Totem Thieves
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In 1899, railroad tycoon Edward Harriman put together
an expedition of naturalists, scientists, painters and fellow
robberbarons to explore the coast of southeast Alaska. The shrewd
Harriman, head of the Union Pacific, even rented the services
of John Muir, the father of environmentalism and founder of the
Sierra Club, thus striking a bond between corporate villains
and mainstream greens that thrives to this day.
The object of the two-month foray, which
was heralded as the largest survey of its time, was to size-up
Alaska's riches (timber, gold, furs, oil) under the guise of
scientific exploration. Karl Grove Albert, the famed geologist,
picked at rocks. Bernard Fernow, the dean of the American  forestry,
cruised timber, calculating the number of board feet per acre.
Edward Curtis lined up Haida and Tlingits for romantic mugshots
and the painter Louis Agassiz Fuertes, taking Audubon's tradition
to a new level of barbarity, shot thousands of animals in order
to render them in his sketchbook.
Muir mused with the poet John Burroughs
(pal of Walt Whitman) and imparted his transcendental thoughts
about glaciers and grizzlies, while he dined with some of the
high priests of Mammon-men he had previously excoriated as the
defilers of the God's Temple.
Along the way Harriman and his gang engaged
in a good bit of plunder of native villages from Ketchikan to
Wrangell. When they arrived at the Tlingit village of Gaash on
Cape Fox, they encountered one of the most dazzling sites in
North America: dozens of intricately-carved totem poles and the
great grizzly bear house, exquisitely carved and painted.
The great Grizzly House of Gaash ranks
as one of the most accomplished artworks produced in America
during the 19th Century, and rivals most 20th century art as
well. It was certainly far beyond the talents of any of the artists
mustered up by Harriman, although the paintings and (especially)
the maps of Edward Dellenbach, who had also traveled down the
Grand Canyon with John Wesley Powell, are works of great beauty.
At the time Harriman arrived, most of
the Tlingit villagers were away on a fishing expedition. Later
the tycoon would claim that he thought the village was abandoned.
This is almost certainly a lie. Harriman, known as the "Broker's
Boy" by the trust-busters, is one of the most extravagent
liars in American history and an apex capitalist, who not only
created one of the great monopolies but also developed many of
the tricks modern finance and accounting. Ken Lay is a piker
next to the mighty Edward Harriman.
The totem poles at Gaash village were
relatively new, many only a few years old. The lodges were tidy
and clean. There were probably even elders still in the villages.
This was not Mesa Verde or Keet Seel, but a living community,
whose history was carved on cedar: if anyone had taken the time
to read it. The giant welcoming men, arms raised to the sky,
the towering clan poles, where wolves chased frogs and ravens
laughed at beavers and orca, and the austere grave poles that
held the cremated remains of dead chiefs.
In any event, the team wasted little
time documenting the site. Instead, Harriman ordered the totem
poles cut down and removed the carved house posts and painted
panels. The loot was packed up and shipped back to Seattle.
Harriman saw himself as a top tier philanthropist.
He kept much of the plunder for his own enjoyment, of course,
but donated a housepost from Gaash to the Burke Museum of Anthropology
at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The house post depicts a grizzly bear
cradling a human figure in its mouth. This represents the story
of Kaats, who married a grizzly. "Come here you bear, the
highest bear of all bears," says the Tlingit story that
goes with the posts.
The mate of this post went to the museum
at the University of Michigan, but it was later acquired by the
Burke Museum, where they were displayed together until last year
when, after a 70-year long struggle, the Tlingit finally prevailed
on the museum to return them.
Now the Burke is offering an exhibit
on totem poles called Out of the Silence: the Enduring Power
of Totem Poles. The exhibit includes numerous sculptures, panels
and carvings, as well as a series of haunting photos by Adelaide
de Meuil, who shot nearly 20,000 images of decaying totem pole
sites in the 1960s. Naturally, this hardly makes up for the crime
of housing stolen property for a century, but it's a compelling
overview none-the-less that serves as an introduction to the
powerful art of the Northwest tribes and tries to grapple with
the unflattering, if not criminal, role played by collectors
and anthropologists in robbing the tribes of their treasures.
Of course even at this late date, the
Burke has not seen fit to return all of its ill-acquired pieces.
They charge a hefty $9 to see the carvings. None of that money
is going back to the tribes who produced the work. In fact, one
of the masterpieces of the collection is a black 12-foot-long
carved sea-lion that once perched on the ridgetop of a chief's
lodge in the Tlingit village of Tongass, which gave its name
to the magnificant rainforest of Southeast Alaska.
The sea-lion was stolen by a group of
Seattle tycoons sent to southeast Alaska by the city's chamber
of commerce with the express purpose of coming back with native
art that could be displayed as "totems" for the Emerald
City. Along with the sea-lion, the group sawed down Chief Kinninook's
tall, elaborately-carved pole which told the story of the  Chief-of-All-Women.
It was one of the few Tlingit poles dedicated to a woman. Of
course, it's not clear if the men from Seattle had any idea
what the pole represented and it wouldn't have deterred them
anyway. The pole was shipped back to Seattle, where it was erected
as the "Seattle Totem Pole" in Pioneer Square, It stood
ther from 1900 to 1939, when it was burned down by an arsonist.
But the businessmen, who claimed the
village of Tongass had been deserted when they raided it, had
been seen by a Tlingit elder, who complained to federal officials.
A grand jury was convened and indictments for theft were handed
down against the thieves. Before the trial began, the businessmen
invited the federal judge presiding over the case out for a night
of carousing at an elite club in Seattle. The next morning the
judge saw fit to dismiss all the charges. Ultimately, the Chamber
of Commerce agreed to send the tribe $500 as recompense. But
the money was mistakenly sent to the Tsimshian village at Metlakatla.
The people of the Tongass never got a dime.
It could have been different. Instead
of clinging on to these stolen fragments, the Burke Museum could
have returned them to the tribes and hired tribal carvers to
make replicas for the museum. This approach could have preserved
the artworks and allowed the tribes to control their heritage,
while giving work to a new generation of carvers.
Still the Burke's show at least provides
hints at the remarkable range of the art-form and the prowess
of the artists: the carvings are powerful, haunting, funny, menacing
and some as inscrutible as the strangest creations of Miró.
Human faces pop up in the carvings like
gargoyles on cathedrals: on the tail of a beaver, in the blowhole
of a humpback whale, on the wings of a raven and, more ominously,
in the belly of a wolf, its tongue hanging out of a mouth studded
with grinning teeth.
Some of the crests represent mythical
figures from the time when the world was created. It's easy to
imagine a Haida storyteller spinning tales to children in front
of a beach fire, using a pole to bring the legends to life. There's
Sisiutl, the double-headed sea dragon, who transforms himself
into a speeding war-canoe; Fog Woman who brought the salmon to
earth; Huxwhukw, the monster bird, with a long beak, sharp as
a loggerhead shrike, which it uses to crack open the skulls of
men and slurp out their brains; and mightiest of all the Thunderbird,
which swoops down from the sky to snatch killer whales in its
talons and carry them back to its mountain eyrie.
The poles and panels are almost always
carved from a single western red cedar tree, an old-growth specimen
with straight grain, few convolutions and knots and standing
close to a river or cove so that the pole can be towed by canoe
to the erection site. The art of tree selection is almost as
demanding and nuanced as the carving itself. Imagine Michelangelo
prowling the marble quarries of Carrera.
The felling of the tree is a complex
undertaking. The Tlingit and Haida didn't have saws, never mind
chainsaws. The technique for felling the large cedars, some 12-feet
in diameter, was ingenious and certainly dangerous. First the
carver ringed the bark of the tree with an adze, then he would
would chisel out a hole in the trunk, place glowing hot rocks
inside and wait for them to burn out the core of the tree so
that it could be pulled down.
It's tough to build totem poles when
all the old-growth cedar has been logged off by big timber companies
operating on lands that once belonged to the tribes of the Northwest.
That's the predicament facing today's carvers. Joe David is one
of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth's greatest young carvers, a man of astounding
ability. He lives near the village of Tofino, on heavily clearcut
Vancouver Island. He says he finds it almost impossible to find
trees tall enough for poles or thick enough for beamposts. Instead,
he spends much of his time hiking the beaches looking for logs
washed up by the tides. "We're down to sifting through loggers'
litter now," he says.
Generally, the chief, like any picky
patron, decides what goes on the pole. It is afterall a symbol
of his power, klan history, wealth and esteem. But he usually
leaves it up to the artist to design the figures, which are first
drawn on the pole with charcoal, then carved and painted, often
in striking combinations of black, white and red.
The poles are raised to mark important
events in the life of the village or the chief: to inaugurate
a new house, hail a marriage, celebrate a birth, commemorate
a death. Other poles had more down-to-earth purposes. One Tlingit
pole shows an unflattering figure of a Russian, looking remarkably
like a squat version of Drosselmeyer's nutcracker, who had seized
chucks of tribal land without paying for it. It's a mockery pole
and a wanted poster all in one. Another pole from a Nuu-Chah-Nulth
village on Vancouver Island served as a kind of collection notice.
This pole depicts Dzunuk'wa, the wild woman of the woods, a kind
of tribal banshee, with outstretched arms, drowsy eyes, a howling
mouth and pendulous breasts. The chief of the village placed
this mocking monument in front of the lodge of his in-laws, who
had failed to pay off their marriage debt.
The culture of the Northwest tribes revolved
around the potlatch, the big party where debts and feuds were
settled, alliances formed, marriages planned and history relived.
Most of the totem poles were erected before or during potlatches.
In 1884, the Canadian government, seeking to crush native customs
and move the tribes off their lands, banned the potlatch. The
exhibit deals cautiously with this attempted act of cultural
genocide. It's unfortunate, because this more than any other
factor brought to a close the great age of totem pole building.
The repression went far beyond that of
course. The government and their Christian emissaries seized
the tribes' ceremonial gear-dresses, masks, puppets, feast dishes,
and ladles-and carted them off to museums or hacked them apart
in front of aghast tribal members. Children were abducted and
sent off to government schools and fed Christian doctrine, a
deft and proven way to kill off an oral culture.
It wasn't just the Canadian tribes who
suffered. The Haida and Tlingit also saw their religious customs
assaulted and their populations decimated by disease and forced
eviction. A Forest Service survey of the Tongass region in 1900
tallied more than 800 totem poles. Thirty years later few than
200 remained and most of those were "harvested" by
the agency for museums in Washington, New York and Chicago.
The potlatches didn't die out completely.
They went underground in remote coastal villages, mainly in lands
of the Kwakiutl south of the Skeena River. But for the most part
the pole raisings had to be abandoned, as they would be a dead-giveaway
to the persistence of the potlatch. It wasn't until 1951 that
the bans were lifted and the old ways could be practiced openly
again.
In the meantime, the Canadian government
wasted no time in looting the remains of the cultures while they
had a chance. In the early 1920s, government agents cut down
hundreds of poles in Tsimshian villages and re-erected them miles
away along the Canadian-Pacific Railway. The Jasper-to-Prince
Rupert run offered a popular "Totem Pole Excursion."
Thus in one stroke the Canadian government
moved to extinguish Tsimshian culture and give birth to entho-tourism.
Harriman would have been proud.
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November 10,
2002
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