Unbelievable. One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Honestly, I’d never considered Totem Poles at length, just always sort of vaguely knew what they were. I assume this is most non-NorthWestern folks’ relationship to these poles. Living up here in the top-left part of the country, you see lots of totem pole kitsch and detritus but also actual totem poles, which are deeply transfixing and haunting in real life, especially on days that are the deep rainy grey that only the Northwest is privy to. My unfamiliarity with the pole and it’s place in indigenous cultures was not an impediment to this book since the book is not really about that. It isn’t a style guide to let you tell a Tlingit from a Haida, despite how interesting those differences are, and it isn’t an anthropological theory about the cosmology the poles suggest. Instead, it uses the totem pole to illuminate the cultural interactions between whites and the various Native groups of northern Cascadia.
This is not to say you don’t learn a lot about the poles per say. I didn’t know that carved interior house poles and poles that attach to the house and the bottom figure on the pole’s mouth is the door were much more common. This makes it especially strange, given how incredible these entrance poles are, that the totem pole, alone, became the cultural shorthand of the Northwest coast and beyond. It is this beyond part, where the poles stand in for “Indian-ness” generally where the book is particularly fascinating. There are dozens of examples the authors find of tepees and peace-pipes and totems juxtaposed to suggest a platonic Indian, noble, and non-existent. In that since, the totem pole, separate from a house, mysterious and solemn against an ancient grey sky, is the ideal symbol of this. The symbolism becomes richer when you consider how mapping traditional, nobel-savage Indian stereotypes on to totem poles is laughably wrong. They’re made out of wood, so they aren’t ancient (though they do live on in the sense that carvers will make new versions of existing poles), they are not idols or objects of pagan worship, they don’t even necessarily venerate, or even like, the subject of the pole. Look at this white-ignorance play out, “Early Alaskan tourists found one type of pole, largely confined to Prince Whales Island, especially delightful-those that depicted whites. While white observers assumed such images honored their subjects, some such poles, in fact, mocked them. These may have developed from existing traditions of erecting shame or rivalry poles to challenge other chiefs.” The book is most fascinating towards the end where it seeks to show a connection between efforts, by governments (particularly Canada, there’s lots of Canada national-image stuff in this book) to persevere the poles and the continued domination of Indigenous groups. “This process, by which the dominate society’s power structure assumes control, communicates a powerful message: Northwest cultures were once great, but they are no more. This, in effect, silences the living native people petitioning for improved conditions and better treatment.” This, to me, is the most provocative part. How dominate society can continue domination not by banning alternative cultural practice but by embracing it in an altered form. Totems were often raised to commentate potlatches, a Northwest culture practice that is deeply complicated but basically revolves around families/clans gaining status by making a big show of giving things away. It’s, obviously much more complicated than that and has religious/spiritual/political/etc. angles that I couldn’t begin to understand but the important part is that they were immensely important to Northwest peoples and they were banned by Canada (and the US) for decades. Now, Western governments pour money into preserving poles and placing them in museums and prompting them in tourist advertisements but in a sort of frozen-in-time aspect. You can see potlatches now, but they are an effort to celebrate culture and keep an almost extinct form alive and to provide spiritual connection. They no longer decide who has power in these regions, since that role has been filled by the Western governments who have refashioned themselves the stewards of the poles as well.
They book isn’t too heavy though. It is full of short, interesting anecdotes, including one where John Muir curses out the whites he’s traveling to Alaska with for stealing a pole. Pole stealing, is unsurprisingly, a big theme. The pole in downtown Seattle, I learned, was stolen. When they installed it, they town let someone read a poem, written from the prospective of the pole itself, about how it was the only civilized pole. In actuality, the pole was erected for a woman named Chief-Of-All-Woman, who died in the 1860’s, on the way to visit her ailing sister. Either way, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the newspaper who paid for the raiding party that plundered the tole, eventually paid the pole’s family much less than they asked for, then, in the 30’s, someone burned it. Seattle was eventually given a replacement from the National Park’s Service as part of their efforts to revitalize the art-form. Lots of great stuff like that. 9 Poles.
