totem
Totem pole, cedar wood
Shows the pole in situ c. 1877 in front of the remains of Bear House (also known as Goose House), Kayang, Massett, Haida Gwaii. British Columbia, Canada.
One way to observe articulture in practice and how Western art notions and colonialism under the banner of "preservation" chop the world apart, is the story of this "totem pole". This story could be about any totem pole, or most anything else, for that matter. The pattern is the same.
It's a fascinating and sad story, all too common around the world, and helpful in part, because of the extensive documentation (and photographs from the British Museum). It could be said to begin with the arrival of Columbus to the "New World" or the long traumatic history of European wars and savagery that shaped that particular pattern of conquest and plunder. The Haida village of Kayung in the part of the planet visitors later called British Columbia is where this part of the story begins.
Installation of totem-pole.
Item number: Am1903,0314.1, British Museum, London, England, 1850 (circa).
"Before being sold to collectors, the pole was located in a village called Kayung on Graham Island in British Columbia's Haida Gwaii archipelago. Kayung had been an important village for the Haida before European contact. After the population was decimated by successive smallpox epidemics in the late 1800s, Henry Wiah, the town chief, encouraged the remaining population to move to nearby Masset. The village was in the process of being abandoned in 1884, when Richard Maynard photographed it, identifying fourteen houses."
This particular beautifully carved cedar log went from being once part of a rich ecological and cultural context to being poached, pickled, and displayed as "art" on another continent. Many of the folks who had once lived in Kayung were killed or sent to boarding schools, prohibited from speaking their own language or maintaining cultural practices. Their once carefully managed forests were clearcut and their rivers and coasts polluted and overfished:
"Tongass National Forest did not protect the Haida and Tlingit inhabitants who saw their land robbed, their cultures assaulted and their populations decimated by disease and forced evictions. According to the US Forest Service, in 1900 there were more than 800 totem poles in the Tongass Forest. By 1930, fewer than 200 remained and these were " harvested" by the Forest Service for faraway American big-city museums. An equally devastating loss is happening today as the mature cedars required for totem pole carving are being exterminated by industrial clearcutting."
Installation in the Great Court of the British Museum, London, England.
At the centre of the British Museum sits the largest covered public square in Europe, the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, a two-acre space enclosed by a spectacular glass roof.
The 6 December 2020 marked 20 years since the redesigned Great Court was opened. In that time, 113 million people have walked through to view the collection.
As an example of the stripping of context that happens through colonial recontextualization, here's an interesting comparison of how Haida carvers and school teachers describe totem poles to non-native children.
"Although Mr. Miller, the Haida carver recognized formal elements within Haida totem pole designs, his understanding and valuing of Haida designs were integrated within a contextual framework. Mr. Miller took great care in describing the various pole types and their functions like the mortuary pole, the commemorative pole, and the ridicule pole. A good deal of time was devoted to telling the Haida myth called "Wasco" whose characters were depicted in the pole he was carving at the time of his interview. The interview with Mr. Miller stands in stark contrast to Ms. Nelson (the school teacher)'s approach to discussing the Northwest Coast Iconography with her students. Ms. Nelson did mention that many of the forms depicted in the visuals used in class were associated with Northwest Coast myths, however, her statement came towards the latter part of the unit of study. Exploration of specific myths, therefore, was presented as an afterthought and occurred during the latter part of the unit. Ms. Nelson did not identify specific myths and their relationship to the design motifs found in many of the totem poles."
The Kayung totem pole, like all things, had a rich context far beyond its aesthetic and formal qualities. It existed within a storytelling tradition and the narratives, images, and crests on it were echoed in architecture, tattoos, decorative patterns on canoes, clothing, songs, and ceremonies. People likely knew where the tree came from as well and that also helped shape people's understanding of the forests, rivers, and animals around them.
This perspective from Robin R. R. Gray, a First Nations carver and anthropologist offers a Powerful look at the appropriation of totem pole imagery:
"In North America, the trend of appropriating Indigenous cultural heritage has been part and parcel to the building of empire. On the Northwest Coast, missionaries, government agents, capitalists, anthropologists, art historians, art collectors, and adventure travelers all played a role in first defining, subjugating, and then appropriating the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of First Nations peoples. While appropriation in the most generic sense occurs whenever human beings encounter each other, appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage in the context of settler colonialism has almost always been about power—the power to produce knowledge about Indigenous cultures, the power to control the means of knowledge production and the power to set the terms of its use-value within society.
Conservation staff preparing the pole for installation.
Indeed, throughout settler colonial history, the image and idea of totem poles—which are the tradition of various First Nations such as the Tsimshian, Haida, Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, Haisla, Nisga’a, and Gitxsan—have been appropriated by non-Indigenous peoples in the market economy, in the fashion industry and in popular discourse. Even though totem poles are defined by the First Nations peoples who create them as communicators of Indigenous knowledge, events, history, place, rights, laws, and identity, non-Indigenous peoples have long superimposed their own ways of knowing, being, and doing onto totem poles, thereby redefining totem poles on non-Indigenous terms. This redefinition has essentially robbed First Nation totem poles of their meaning by taking them, using their image and talking about them, out of their cultural contexts."
Like sneakers made from bison hide, the original context seems to get turned inside out to serve the marketing needs of colonial culture and industry. (In contrast, this.) As someone from a settler-colonial cultural background, I'm aware that I'm participating in yet another use of something I don't have personal intimate knowledge of to tell a story. My hope in doing so is to highlight the destructive pattern of cultural decontextualization and suggest that any attempt to create a more resilient and more life-affirming culture today, would benefit from the practice of looking at human culture and ecosystems holistically rather than piecemeal as the notion of "art" so often tends to do. It seems obvious but in the “arts and cultural sector” few seem to be exploring this. We have a lot to (re)learn about interconnectedness.
This thorough look at the history and meaning of totem poles, in general, includes a helpful reminder of this very fluid understanding of meaning over time:
"Neither is the popular assumption that totem poles represent a form of art that existed in static abundance for centuries. Although carved heraldic monuments (interior house posts or panels, house entrance poles, memorial or mortuary columns) predated the arrival of Europeans to the North Pacific Coast, “the totem pole”—as an icon and idea—actually emerged and continues to change as negotiation and involvement with, as well as reaction to, intruders into indigenous territories. The totem pole is a flexible technology that continues to express shifting identities in the settler context of North America. The most central participants in this transformative process are indigenous people themselves, who have been adapting the totem pole form to meet novel contexts of intercultural encounters. But others have contributed considerably to this history as well, including fur traders, missionaries, government officials, artists, tourists, journalists, settlers, academics, ethnographers, art critics, museum professionals, filmmakers, and photographers. Many of these outsiders found totem poles the most fascinating of Native artworks, subjecting them to varied judgments, interpretations, and celebrations, and in the process imposed on them meanings that their Native creators could never have imagined. Because these reactions have integrated themselves into the concept of the totem pole, we frame this history of the pole’s transformations within the overarching and complementary themes of colonial articulation and imagination—the complex and often contradictory dynamic of both appropriation and appreciation of Native art forms. That is to say, the multiple meanings that adhere to totem poles are comprised of both indigenous realities and non-indigenous misconceptions (be they simple factual errors or wild, romantic imaginings). Thus the history of the totem pole is also a history of settler-colonial relations, for it emerged over two centuries in the context of transactions between the original inhabitants of and the newcomers to the Northwest Coast."
Drawing adapted after TA Joyce (1903), interpreted as telling a story of a lazy son-in-law. Photo: Charles Frederick Newcombe 1897, British Museum
In ”modern” times, we have thought of art as the iconic dot on the blank canvas. Not the canvas, or the frame or the gallery wall, or the architecture of the museum itself, although they all help to reinforce the specialness of that strong graphic element, the dot. They all thrive in the opposite of primordial soup, the white walls of a decontextualized economic and material frame of reference. The irrigated and chemically de-pestified flax fields that produced the canvas and the linseed oil, the mined and processed poisonous cadmium pigments, and refined mineral spirits from hopefully far away under-lands that provided material for the artist make their iconic circular mark aren’t part of the song we sing about the dot. Nor of course, are the farmers, workers and watersheds, the minnows and egrets swimming downstream, nor their threatened great⁷ grandchildren. The name of the wealthy philanthropist that made their fortune long ago in railroads or in the oil business, or through more recent disruptive technologies might get their name on the little plaque on the wall, below that of the artist, having bought the artwork for a song, donated the work years later to great social capital acclaim and tax benefit, to be pickled in a titanium-clad architectural box of treasures. The dot on canvas does not come with a story passed down from generations. It is itself, bold and fresh. Calculated in its rejection of the past. The fish people will not eat it. Rituals and stewardship practices, those few we have left, do not depend on or draw nourishment from the brief narcissistic tale of this dot.
Raising ceremony of Haida Totem Pole in the Great Court.
Wednesday 5th September 2007.
An interesting look at how the museum has tried to address this historical debt.
The practice of reconnection can still include the dot painting mentioned above, and the oil field, and the gun. So we may deepen our understanding of what we've done and continue to do (in the name of progress and endless growth- or just survival), we can begin to sing all of these bits back together. To dance that dot all the way to the totem pole in the Great Court of the British Museum in London and back to whatever remains of the town of Kayung today and the precious forests nearby and again inked onto our skin. And further still, to our own inner landscapes of complicity. My hand-carved animal spirits toothbrush with the dot of homemade invasive fennel toothpaste to scrub my world-eating teeth that strive yet regularly fail, to eat locally only what I know. The wordless song I hum while I rinse and spit into the greywater destined to flow outside and bless the native climate-challenged medicinal plants in the garden. Can any of this sufficiently honor our ancestors? Fuel the resistance? Is this all, even now, too late?
The point I’m trying to make is that it seems we’ve missed holding the spellbinding complexity of the forest and the myriad holy spaces in between. Now, how do we begin to bring something like that awareness back?
Watch this:
And it continues!
