Word: potlatches
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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...
...farm of 800,000 acres owned by St. Joe Paper Co., and Texas has 3,400,000 acres producing fast-growing Southern pines for U.S. construction and pulp mills. But the biggest operations are in the Pacific Northwest, where the idea first took root. There the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., Potlatch Forests, J. Neils Lumber, Crown Zellerbach, Long-Bell Rayonier, and other large companies have nearly 8,000,000 acres of tall Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock, spruce and pine spreading across four states...