Word: potlatch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great occasion in the life of a Northwest Indian, before the turn of the century, was the potlatch. A ceremonial extravaganza that began with gargantuan meals of fish oil and sea food, progressed to bouts of boasting, the potlatch roared to a climax with a prodigious distribution of goods. For a less arrogant, less competitive people, this might have been only a pleasant custom, but for the tribes living an easy life in the mild, rich country between Vancouver and Yakutat Bay, Alaska, the feasts turned into mad giveaway races. Each "gift" was in effect a double dare: to save...
Kwakiutl chief once explained. Warriors, squaws and children worked feverishly to amass a sufficiently impressive array of gifts to "put down" a competitor at the next potlatch. Materials were close at hand: spruce and cedar for the elaborate carved totems and 60-man canoes, horn for spoons and charms, root fibers for baskets, and mountain-goat wool for blankets. Today the brightly colored wood carvings still bear rough adze marks, but they rank high as primitive art, ranging in style from naturalism to symbolic abstraction (see Color Pages). As demonstrated in the permanent collection of Oregon's Portland...
Blistered Guests. An invitation to a potlatch was nothing to take lightly. Both hosts and guests came dressed in their most splendid clothes, the chiefs wearing elaborately carved wooden hats adorned with ermine skins and sea-lion bristles, and carrying their ceremonial staffs. The meals alone involved prodigious waste: one massive, carved, 14-foot-long wooden trencher held 120 gallons of fish stew. The host would often perform a ceremony roughly equivalent to lighting a cigar with a $100 bill: he ladled out the savory fish oil onto the fire. The stoic guests proved themselves unimpressed by sitting motionless even...
...time matching competitions, the powerful chiefs evolved a special blue chip: a sheet of copper valued at hundreds or even thousands of blankets. In one fiercely contested potlatch, the tribal chiefs ganged up to best an upstart brave who had grown rich trading with the whites. It took three coppers with a total value of 39,000 blankets to finally "flatten" the brave...
...white man's demand for the sea otter had all but exterminated the Indian's main trading staple. Gone with the sea otter were prosperity and the passion for the potlatch. The gradual loss of ritual meaning stultified Northwest Indian art, turned its craftsmen into little more than manufacturers of tourist curios...