William Shelton, Model Story Pole, Snohomish (Tulalip Indian Reservation), Southern Coast Salish. Ca. 1920s.
By Christy Hansen Guest writer, Ethnology
From the late nineteenth-century through the early decades of the twentieth century, white American culture embraced the notion of the Native American culture as rapidly disappearing. The popular visual iconography of the totem pole, along with the feathered war bonnet and teepee, had come to be interpreted as an exotic and spellbinding relic of a "savage" "vanishing race" by whites, and miniature carved model totem poles became popular souvenirs from curio shops to commemorate a visit to a Native village along the northern Northwest Coast. Urban stores, such as the landmark Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle, Washington (founded in 1899), offered model totem poles for sale, as well, to those who may never even have traveled to villages of the Haida, Tsimshian or Tlingit - northern Northwest Coast Native cultures from which totem poles originated.
The totem pole, which had become a symbol of "a generalized American Indianess," was not a traditional art form of the Southern Coast Salish – the grouping of over fifty autonomous Native American tribes which populate the Puget Sound Basin in Washington State.
Amongst the Coast Salish peoples, traditional religious beliefs did not tolerate extroverted art forms such as the heraldic totem poles of the northern Northwest Coast cultures; thereby, making the circa 1920s Snohomish (a group of the Southern Coast Salish) model totem, or story, pole (pictured at right) so fascinating.
Figure 1: Chilkat Dancing Blanket, Tlingit, late 19th-century. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1-1587.
My first encounter with the alluring and boldly graphic ceremonial dancing blanket, known extensively as the Chilkat blanket, was this past summer. A friend had asked me to assist in suspending one of these northern Pacific Coast Native woven creations from a wall in his gallery, and I was at once taken aback by the complex, fractured design, the striking tightness of the weave and the subtle—yet impactful shifts—in the blanket’s texture, as well as the rhythmic nature of the limited color palette. What awed me the most, though, struck me while gently encouraging the layers of fringe cascading from the base of the design field to lay flat against the wall. It was at this point that my friend enlightened me to the fact that the vertical strands (known as the warps) concealed beneath their fluffy vanilla exterior of mountain goat wool a heart of cedar bark, which provided stability and substance to the blanket. These vertical warp strands function as the supporting ribs for the whole textile, and were breathtakingly delicate to the touch! As I ran across historic photograph after historic photograph within the Burke’s Ethnology Archives depicting noble Tlingit and Haida figures enveloped in these expressionistic and esteemed Chilkat blankets (Figure 2), I knew that I needed to explore the cultural identity embedded in these woven garments.
Figure 2:A photograph taken in the commercial photography studio of Case & Draper based out of Skagway, Alaska in the beginning years of the 20th century documents Chief Anotklosk of the Tlingit Taku wearing his opulent ceremonial Chilkat dancing blanket in the traditional manner. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Case and Draper Collection.)
Unpacking a Phrase: What is a Chilkat blanket? What Native culture was the brainchild of this weaving art?
Figure 1: Tlingit berry-basket, late 1800s. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. George Emmons Collection, No. 1702.
Amidst the many hours devoted to research papers and projects during my graduate schooling, I became very intrigued with historic photographic images of Native American cultures. As these images filled my moments of contemplation and my laptop’s hard drive, a fire was set alight within me to explore the handicrafts produced by the Native hands depicted in these historical photographs. Each day as I walked through the Burke’s Pacific Voices exhibit en route to class, I became more and more enamored with the beautifully crafted and lustrous twined basketry works on display. But these baskets were completely enigmatic for me…how were they made, and how could one differentiate between the baskets of various Northwest Coast cultures?
In the spirit of tomorrow’s Artifact ID Day here at the Burke (this Saturday, January 7th from 1-3:30 pm), I would like to shed light on some of the greatest differentiating characteristics between the spruce baskets of two neighboring cultures from the northern Northwest Coast—the Tlingit (pronounced “TLINK-it”) of what is now southeastern Alaska, and the Haida (pronounced “HIGH-dah”) of the Haida Gwaii (or Queen Charlotte Islands) of British Columbia as well as the southernmost portion of Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island (See a map here).
The Woven Worlds of the Tlingit and Haida
The collecting of Native American baskets across America was earnestly advertised during the last decades of the 19th through the early 20th century in journals and newspapers alike, with one writer of 1891 calling the accumulating craze “the latest fad among artistic people.”*
Shared Sensibilities Despite the introduction of new basketry forms and design motifs with the development of a white tourist-fueled industry, the women of both the Tlingit and the Haida—who bore sole responsibility for the gathering of materials and the weaving of basket works—remained faithful to their native weaving techniques and materials. The Tlingit and the Haida shared in their artful manipulation of split root derived from the spruce tree (referred to as “seet” by the Tlingit) to produce exceptionally vocal woven basketry creations. The body of their baskets—most commonly in the form of open, gradually flaring cylindrical berry-picking baskets--were intricately formed by means of twined weaving techniques: fine strands of peeled and split spruce are manipulated, the lustrous outer part of the root utilized for the strands to be visible on the exterior basket (known as wefts) are woven horizontally in a variety of techniques over passive vertical strands derived from the center of the root (known as the warps, and in most cases concealed in totality by the wefts). The most customary twined weaving stitch was the plain (or two-strand) Z-twining stitch, as illustrated in the brief video clip below, producing a striking uniform textured surface of vertical ridges akin to an ear of corn. The “Z-twining” refers to the direction of each stitch’s slant down to the right.
Movie clip from “Baskets of the Northwest People, Gifts from the Grandmothers,” courtesy of YouTube member SwinomishTribalMedia.
Beauty in the Details: Distinguishing Characteristics of Tlingit and Haida Baskets Overlapping construction techniques and weaving materials can easily mislead one to associate the incorrect culture with a basketry treasure; however, outlined below I detail the greatest idiosyncrasies that can aid in distinguishing between the major basket types of the Tlingit and the Haida.
(1) Visual Materialization of Basket Orientation During Weaving
Favored as the most consistent telltale sign for differentiating a Tlingit basket from a Haida is the point of termination on a basket, which is visually manifested in a vertical band along one point on the basket wall. At this point of termination where the weft strands are connected to each other, a step in the alignment of the vertical ridges occurs. The angle of this step, referred to as a jog, is reflective of orientation of the basket during the weaving process as mandated by cultural customs.
The Tlingit’s jog configuration (Figure 2) shows a “jog down,” where each row is slightly above the previous (row on left side of termination is higher than the row to the right). This “jog down” is the by-product of the Tlingit’s custom of weaving baskets in an upright position (Figure 3).
Figure 2: This close-up view of the termination on a Tlingit basket shows the characteristic “jog down” where each row is slightly above the previous. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 1-916.)
Figure 3: A photograph taken in the commercial photography studio based out of Skagway, Alaska in the beginning years of the 20th century documents the way a Tlingit woman would weave her basket in an upright position. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Case and Draper Collection).
The Haida’s jog configuration (Figure 4), on the other hand, displays a “jog up,” where each row is slightly below the previous (row on left side of termination is lower than the row to the right). This “jog up” is the outgrowth of the Haida’s custom of weaving baskets in an inverted position (Figure 5).
Figure 4: This close-up view of the termination on a Haida basket shows the characteristic “jog up” where each row is slightly below the previous. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 1-1520.)
Figure 5: This photograph taken in the Haida village of Masset in 1897 by photographer Edward P. Allen for The Field Museum of Chicago suspends for perpetuity the customary way by which a Haida woman would weave her basket in a downward position with the basket wall’s warp strands pointing downward. (Courtesy of the Field Museum, Neg. CSA854)
(2) Culturally Favored Design Techniques
The Tlingit and the Haida each possessed a unique set of cultural beliefs that were encoded within the physical form of their basketry works. Each basket maker revealed her individual artistic sense within an established vocabulary of aesthetics and design elements regulated by her people’s vernacular weaving style. While stylistic exceptions do exist as a result of cross fertilization of ideas and techniques due to intermarriage between tribes, as well as a result of tourist demand (hence the importance of examining the termination point on a basket), the following stylistic generalizations can be helpful in establishing a Tlingit basket from a Haida.
The twined basketry works of the Tlingit are typified by the punctuation of boldly colored and finely integrated geometric forms that mingle with great variety across the outer wall of the basket, typically within the confines of horizontal design bands. Customarily on variations of berry baskets these colorful design motifs were woven over three horizontal bands that encircle the form—two wider and matching bands sandwiching a third smaller “tying band” in the middle—that are bookended by margins along the top rim and base of the basket of non-dyed spruce root (See Figure 1). Many of the design motifs symbolically represent in abstracted form natural subjects, but, after 1880, also were literally transcribed from ornamental blankets and fabrics acquired through trade with white settlers. The Technicolor geometric form decoration was applied by a weaving technique known as false embroidery in which pre-prepared colorfully dyed grass strands or maidenhair fern strands (known for its reddish to blackish purple hue and glossy appearance) are wrapped simultaneously with the horizontal weft strand as it is woven over the vertical warp. The false embroidery never passes to the inside and can only be viewed on the exterior wall of the basket. Noteworthy as well is that the colorful strands of false embroidery slant in the opposite direction of the plain z-twining that structurally defines much of a Tlingit basket (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Up close one can view the Tlingit’s characteristic false embroidery technique. Notice that each stitch of the colored strands slants up to the right—the opposite direction of the natural spruce root plain z-twining (visible at the top of this detail photo) that structurally composes much of a typical Tlingit basket (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 2300.)
Specimens of Haida basketry are markedly more understated than that of the Tlingit in design and color choices. The power of Haida twined creations come from the restrained bands circumventing the basket’s wall, and typically from subtle shifts in weaving techniques that appear in a band along the basket’s rim. The narrow horizontal bands around the basket—which typically are black, green or brown in color, but also occasionally red—are created by dying some of the spruce root weft strands prior to weaving and incorporating them directly into the ‘fabric’ of the basket with plain z-twining (Figure 7). The understated elegance of Haida baskets is also typically typified by a thicker horizontal band of skip-stitch (or twill twining) present along the basket’s rim that produces a raised geometric design, as seen in Figure 4.
Figure 7: An exemplary specimen of Haida twined spruce root basketry. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 4590.)
Posted By:Christy Hansen, Ethnology
* Charles E. Holder, “A California Craze; the Latest Fad Among Artistic People: Collections of Indian Baskets,” Placer Herald, July 10, 1891, p7.
To learn more about Tlingit and Haida Spruce Root Baskets, see:
Sharon Busby, Spruce Root Basketry of the Haida and Tlingit (Seattle: Marquand Books, Inc., in association with University of Washington Press, 2003).
George T. Emmons, The Basketry of the Tlingit and The Chilkat Blanket, reprint edition (USA: Friends of the Sheldon Jackson Museum, 1993).
Frances Paul, Spruce Root Basketry of the Alaska Tlingit (United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs—Division of Education, Haskel Press, 1944).
Erna Gunther, Design Units on Tlingit Baskets (Sitka, Alaska: Sheldon Jackson Museum, 1984).
I personally have grown deeply appreciative of, and immensely fascinated by, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis’ photographic- and life- endeavors over the past few years in connection with my thesis work. Tucked away in the Burke’s Ethnology Archives is a little-known treasure trove of material related to Curtis’ 1914 ethnographic melodrama In the Land of the Head-Hunters—the first ethnographic “documentary” motion picture of its kind, depicting a romanticized pre-contact view of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) culture of British Columbia, Canada.
Figure 1 The hand-painted artist’s mock-up housed in the Burke’s Ethnology Archives displays the development of one of the promotional posters created to advertise Edward S. Curtis’ 1914 ethnographic melodrama In the Land of the Head-Hunters. (Image courtesy of The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, ‘In the Land of the War Canoes’ Collection, Ethnology Archives).
Upon my first encounter with the Burke’s archival collection associated with the film, I was instantly struck by a vibrant hand-painted artist’s mock-up, or prototype, for a promotional poster to advertise Curtis’ film (Figure 1). Not only was this mock-up a visual spectacle—a poster child (pun intended) for the Arts and Crafts style with its simplified forms, bold abstraction of color and angular lines, but also an enigma. What was the history behind this poster, and particularly, what was the story of the polychrome carved cedar grizzly bear so boldly illustrated?
The Burke’s prototype, dating from early- to mid-1914, was eventually produced as an official lithography poster by the H. C. Minor Litho Co. advertising the December 7, 1914 premiere of Head-Hunters in New York at the Casino Theatre (Figure 2). The carved grizzly bear depicted holds a dynamic real-life social biography of its own right: metamorphosing from an element of a traditional and culturally-valuable potlatch symbol, to an idealized symbol of “nativeness” as a stage prop, to a constituent in an decontextualized tourist attraction, and finally to a hidden gem within a museum’s storage.
Figure 2 The official 1914 poster exhibiting the film’s iconic carved grizzly bear. While the official poster is markedly more simplistic in its final rendition than the mock-up, the final poster would have still appealed greatly to the middle- and upper-classes of America at the time who would have been spellbound by this vibrant and unbridled expression of the then-believed “vanishing” Native cultures of the Northwest coast. (Image courtesy of Bill Utley Collection)
The grizzly is in fact part of a two-figured Thunderbird house post, one of set, carved initially between 1900 and 1910 by the renowned Kwakwaka’wakw carver Charlie James for Chief Tsa-wee-nok of Gway'i (Kingcome Inlet) as visual public displays of his family crests. According to a ledger record penned by George Hunt, Curtis’ invaluable Tlingit and Kwakwaka’wakw informant and assistant for the motion picture, it appears that the two poles were purchased in the summer of 1913 to be utilized extensively as stage props within the film (markedly the first appearance of totem poles in moving picture history!), each being transformed with physical augmentations to signal distinctive structures within the film (Figures 3 & 4). In 1927, the two house posts were erected within an educationally-intended outdoor totem park, purchased and erected by the Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver (AHSAV) in Stanley Park. While both posts were in subsequent decades replicated, the originals being placed in safekeeping within the Museum of Vancouver (an institution created by AHSAV), the house posts have become one of the most popular tourist attractions in British Columbia (Figure 5).
Figure 3 The thunderbird and grizzly house posts are shown here in a still from Curtis’ film, representing the house of Waket in the tale, the house of the heroine’s father. (Image from Edward Curtis’ 1915 book In the Land of the Head-Hunters).
Figure 4 With the simple accessory of carved figures of Dzoonokwa, the man-eating giantess, over the grizzly bears’ bellies and the elimination of the thunderbirds’ expansive wings, the house posts are transformed into the setting of the ruthless villain, Yaklus’, house. (Image by Edmund S. Schwinke, originally housed in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture)
Figure 5 The Kwakwaka’wakw house posts as seen erected in Stanley Park, sans wings, via a tourist postcard from the late 1920s. Shortly after the poles were raised by the Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver, the organization’s promotional pamphlet for the park stated, “The proposed village, and the totems already erected, will represent the work of the Kwakiutl Indians in particular, and the Coast Indians in general. The totem is an indication of an old and wide culture. It points to the past. The past illuminates the present.”(Image courtesy of eBay member lusitania-postcard. Quote from John C. Goodfellow, The Totem Poles in Stanley Park (Vancouver, B.C.: The Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver, B.C., [unspecified date]), 15.)
Watch a brief clip from Curtis’ film yourself that showcases Kwakwaka’wakw performers involved in a dance festival. Notice the thunderbird and grizzly bear house posts prominently displayed in the background.
Posted By: Christy Hansen, Ethnology division
My deepest gratitude goes to Aaron Glass, Assistant Professor of Native Peoples of the Northwest Coast, Museums and Anthropology, at the Bard Graduate Center, for his informative personal correspondence regarding In the Land of the Head-Hunters and the poster art associated with the film.
Read more about the complicated history of the Curtis film in: Holm, Bill and George I. Quimby. Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes. UW Press 1980. See also: http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/
