Potlatch

A potlatch was a ceremony among certain Native American tribes, including tribes on the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Such tribes included the Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw). The potlatch took the form of a ceremonial feast traditionally featuring seal meat or salmon. In it, hierarchical relations within and between groups were observed and reinforced through the exchange of gifts, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The host family demonstrated their wealth and prominence through giving away their possessions and thus prompting prominent participants to reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.

The kwakwaka'wakw continue the practice of potlatch. Illustrated here is Wawadit'la in Thunderbird Park, Victoria, British Columbia, (aka Mungo Martin House) a Kwakwaka'wakw "big house" built by Chief Mungo Martin in 1953. Very wealthy, that is, prominent, hosts would have a longhouse specifically for potlatching and for housing guests.

Overview

The name is derived from Chinook Jargon; every practicing Pacific Northwest language group has a variation. The Chinook Jargon word is a homonym having nothing to do with "pot" or "latch". Coast Salish Lushootseed potlatching is x^wsalik^w, from x^wɐš, "throw, broadcast, distribute goods", related to pús(u), "throw through the air, throw at". The casting or throwing of suitable gifts is a part of a potlatch ceremony.

n. [Chinook potlatch, pahtlatch, fr.Nootka pahchilt, pachalt, a gift.]

1. Among the Kwakiutl, Chimmesyan, and other Indians of the northwestern coast of North America, a ceremonial distribution by a man of gifts to his own and neighboring tribesmen, often, formerly, to his own impoverishment. Feasting, dancing, and public ceremonies accompany it.

2. Hence, a feast given to a large number of persons, often accompanied by gifts. [Colloq., Northwestern America]

[Webster 1913 Suppl.]

Also the Sioux tribe had Potlatchs.

Traditional historical

Originally the potlatch was held to commemorate an important event such as the death of a high-status person, expanded to celebrate events in the life cycle of the host family such as the birth of a child. Social rank was hierarchical, ranks were limited, and acquistion of a rank had to be publicly witnessed for validation. Before the arrival of the Europeans, gifts included storable food (oolichan [candle fish] oil or dried food), canoes, and slaves among the very wealthy, but otherwise not income-generating assets such as resource rights. The influx of manufactured trade goods such as blankets and sheet copper into the Pacific Northwest caused inflation in the potlatch in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.Some groups, such as the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw), used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. In some (relatively rare) cases, goods were actually destroyed after being received. The catastrophic mortalities due to introduced diseases laid many inherited ranks vacant or open to remote or dubious claim—providing they could be validated—with a suitable potlatch.

Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 and the United States in the late nineteenth century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive and injurious to the practitioners. Despite the ban, potlatching continued clandestinely for decades. Numerous tribes petitioned the government to remove the law against a custom that they saw as no worse than Christmas, when friends were feasted and gifts were exchanged. As the potlatch became less of an issue in the twentieth century, the ban was dropped from the books, in the United States in 1934 and in Canada in 1951.

The potlatch is a cultural practice much studied by ethnographers. "Potlatch is a festive event within a regional exchange system among tribes of the North pacific Coast of North America, including the Salish and Kwakiutl of Washington and British Columbia."^{[citation needed]} Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it.

The potlatch has fascinated and perhaps been misunderstood by Westerners for many years. Thorstein Veblen's use of the ceremony in his book Theory of the Leisure Class made potlatching a symbol of "conspicuous consumption". Other authors such as Georges Bataille were struck by what they saw as the anarchic, communal nature of the potlatch's operation—it is for this reason that the organization Lettrist International named their review after the potlatch in the 1950s. Kim Stanley Robinson adopted the term in his Mars trilogy. In these, a gift economy existed with the social expectation that all deals exchanges were on equal terms. Potlatching in this situation became essentially the equivalent of ripping someone off in a standard economy, and seen as unfair to the recipient.^{[citation needed]}

"Potlatch" and "potluck"

The English term "potluck" is erroneously said to derive from "potlatch" due to its use in the American term "potluck dinner"; it is actually a portmanteau of "pot"+"luck".

Potluck: Whatever may chance to be in the pot, or may be provided for a meal.
{To take potluck}, to take what food may chance to be provided. [1913 Webster]

n : whatever happens to be available especially when offered to an unexpected guest or when brought by guests and shared by all; "having arrived unannounced we had to take potluck"; "a potluck supper".

See also

• Koha, a related concept among the Māori
• Kula ring, a similar concept in New Guinea
• Moka, another similar concept in Papua New Guinea
• Sepik Coast exchange, yet another similar concept in Papua New Guinea

Sources

• Bates, Dawn and Hess, Thom; Hilbert, Vi; map by Dassow, Laura (1994). "
  Completely reformatted, greatly revised and expanded update of Hess, Thom, Dictionary of Puget Salish (University of Washington Press, 1976).", in Bates, Dawn, ed.: Lushootseed dictionary. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-97323-4 (alk. paper). Retrieved 2006-06-06. 
• Boyd, Robert (1999). The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline Among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle and Vancouver: University of Washington Press and University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 0295978376 (alk. paper), ISBN 0774807555. Retrieved 2006-05-21. 
• Mauss, Marcel ([1925] 1990). "Translation of Essai sur le don.
  Author bio "Mauss, Marcel", Anthropology Biography Web, EMuseum Minnesota State University, Mankato.
  Reference searched 21 August 2006.", The Gift. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393306984. Retrieved not recorded. 

Further reading (general)

• Barnett, Homer G. (1938) "The Nature of the Potlatch." American Anthropologist. vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 349-358.
• Bracken, Christopher (1997) The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Cole, Douglas, and Ira Chaikin (1990) An Iron Hand upon the People: The Law against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 0295970502

Further reading (Tlingit)

• Emmons, George T. and George Thornton]] (1991) The Tlingit Indians. Ed. by Frederica de Laguna. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Kan, Sergei (1989) Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century. Washington: Smithsonian Books. ISBN 1-56098-309-4.
• Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer (eds.) (1990) Haa Tuwanáagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory. (Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, vol. 2.) Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Further reading (Tsimshianic-speakers)

• Adams, John W. (1973) The Gitksan Potlatch: Population Flux, Resource Ownership and Reciprocity. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston of Canada.
• Beynon, William (2000) Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon’s 1945 Field Notebooks. Ed. by Margaret Seguin Anderson and Marjorie Halpin. Vancouver: UBC Press
• "Fur Trader, A" (Peter Skene Ogden) (1933) Traits of American Indian Life and Character. San Francisco: Grabhorn Press. Reprinted, Dover Publications, 1995. (Ch. 4 is the earliest known description of a Nisga'a potlatch.)

Further reading (Kwakwaka'wakw)

• Masco, Joseph (1995) "'It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance': Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, 1849-1922." Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 41-75.

External links

• "Potlatch" from Hoxie, Frederick E., ed. (1996). Encyclopedia of North American Indians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395669219.
• Potlatch An exhibition from the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
• Potlatch Then and Now A website by the BC Heritage Websites Program on potlatch from the U'mista Cultural Society of the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation.
• Money An analysis of Potlatch and modern versions of the same from a pyschohistorical perspective. Not neutral point of view, but does provide references.
• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Oliver S. Van Olinda Photographs A collection of 420 photographs depicting life on Vashon Island, Whidbey Island, Seattle and other communities around Puget Sound, Washington, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This collection provides a glimpse of early pioneer activities, industries and occupations, recreation, street scenes, ferries and boat traffic at the turn of the century. Also included are a few photographs of Native American activities such as documentation of a potlatch on Whidbey Island.

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