28.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies:

"3. Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the "Potlatch" or in the Indian dance known as the "Tamanawas" is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment ... and any Indian or other person who encourages ... an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, ... is guilty of a like offense ..."

(Section 3 of An Act Further to Amend The Indian Act, 1880)

- photo: Cowichan Valley Museum

27.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Indian Agent William Halliday

"This potlatch custom has tended very materially to retard progress among the Indians. It has set up false ideas amongst them, and has been a great waste of time, a great waste of energy, and a great waste of substance. However, apparently it will take some time before the idea of the potlatch will be entirely eliminated, and when that is done progress will be extremely rapid, as the Indian of to-day, apart from these ideas, is inclined to be progressive."

- Potlatch and totem, and the recollections of an Indian agent : Halliday, William May, 1866-1957

26.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Indian Agent William Halliday

 “I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”

George Bataille

- Photo: A display of goods to be given away at a potlatch at Yalis (Alert Bay), ca. 1900. Photograph by William Halliday. BC Archives H-03976. 

25.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies:

Surrendered regalia, Alert Bay Parish Hall, 1922

"The confiscated masks and other goods were transported out in the open by boat and then were put on exhibition on benches in the Parish Hall of the Anglican Church at Alert Bay. It was particularly difficult for the Kwakwaka'wakw to endure the display of the materials openly in the boat because these items were sacred and were considered to be treasures. Strict tradition required that they be stored away in cedar boxes out of sight when not in use."

- photo: Vivien Lord, Royal BC Museum, PN 12209

I'wakalas, Chief Harry Hanuse (1882- 1927) with his wife May (nee Charlie)

"One of the many chiefs who surrendered their regalia under duress after 1921 Cranmer potlatch with his wife and children, right to left: Alex, Jack, Dan, Fred and the baby is probably Flora. ‘Mim’kwamlis, Village Island, c.1924"

- photo: Stanley Hunt Private Collection


-U'MISTA Cultural Society, 2019

 

24.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Indian Agent William Halliday

"Indian Agent Halliday's official responsibility was for the welfare of the Kwakwaka'wakw. He also functioned as the regional magistrate so, ironically, he was involved in prosecuting the people whose rights he was supposed to be protecting. Over 600 potlatch-related pieces were given up and in his own statement, Halliday said that he had accumulated over 300 cubic feet of potlatch material. Their owners estimated the coppers in 1921 to have had a total value of over $35,000. However, the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs paid only a token amount of $1,485 for the masks and other materials, and no compensation was ever paid for the coppers."

-U'MISTA Cultural Society, 2019

Kwaxala'nukwame', Chief Amos Dawson and his wife, Di'dala, Alice Dawson, Alert Bay. One of the many chiefs who surrendered their regalia under duress after 1921 Cranmer potlatch.

Regalia surrendered under duress in Alert Bay Parish Hall, 1922.

- top photo: Royal Museum BC; middle photo: source unknown; bottom photo: William Halliday, Royal Museum BC, AA 176
 

23.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Tomahawk Restaurant, North Vancouver (#2)

22.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Tomahawk Restaurant, North Vancouver (#1)

21.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: UBC 1947

Cursory browsing indicates that the UBC Totem Yearbooks documented student life from 1915-1966. Graduating degrees of abstraction towards extinction.

20.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Seattle's Potlatch Bug (1912)

The origins of the festival are described as follows: Organizers explained that they had borrowed the term “potlatch” from the “quaint jargon of the Chinook,” meaning a “carnival of sports, music, dancing and feasting, and the distributing of gifts by hosts to all the guests.” [They] developed an extended Indian fantasy to suggest the exotic and mysterious character of the Potlatch. The Tillikums of Elttaes formed a local “secret order”.... The narrative that shaped the Potlatch festival was that the Hyas Tyee, the “chief of the North,” paddled to Seattle to visit “his white brethren of the South.” He was attended by leaders of five Alaskan tribes, each represented by a contrived totem.... The Hyas Tyee shared his knowledge of the “picturesque and romantic Indian North” with Potlatch visitors, and, in return, the city of Seattle offered him access to “the ways of modernity.” (McConaghy, Seattle's Potlatch Bug, 1912.")        

- Candice Hopkins - The Golden Potlatch: Study in Mimesis and Capitalist Desire, Fillip 13, Spring 2011

19.02.19

Potlatch Appropriation Strategies: Seattle’s Potlatch Bug (1912)

"In the Seattle Potlatch myth, the five Alaskan tribal groups -- all, of course, Seattle businessmen in costume -- were responsible for constructing floats to lead the Great Potlatch Parade. So the tribe of Ikht, of the bear totem, built an electrically lit float describing life on the lake, while the Moxttribe depicted life in the air, with the raven as its totem, and the Klone tribe, of the whale totem, built a float describing life on the water. While the Hyas Tyee and his attendants remained in town, Seattle was decorated with 250 plaster totem poles which bore the same exaggerated features as the Potlatch Bug."

- Lorraine McConaghy, 2007

18.02.19

Potlatch : Chinook

patl •êch 1. noun gift 2. verb give patlêch lema verb shake hands patlêch wekt verb give some more

17.02.19

Is it ever acceptable for potlatch to situate as metaphor? Is the field of poetics immune from appropriation tactics? Were the lettrists late model colonizers as they harvested academia for ethnographic material to fold into their spontaneous research and acts of non-territorialization. A view of the cache before unpacking.

16.02.19

Potlatch: Exercise in Psychogeography

Piranesi is psychogeographical in the stairway.

Claude Lorrain is psychogeographical in the juxtaposition of a palace neighborhood and the sea.

The postman Cheval is psychogeographical in architecture.

Arthur Cravan is psychogeographical in hurried drifting.

Jacques Vaché is psychogeographical in dress.

Louis II of Bavaria is psychogeographical in royalty.

Jack the Ripper is probably psychogeographical in love.

Saint-Just is a bit psychogeographical in politics. (Terror is disorienting.)

André Breton is naively psycho-geographical in encounters.

Madeleine Reineri is psycho-geographical in suicide. (See Howlings in Favor of Sade.)

Along with Pierre Mabille in gathering together marvels, Évariste Gaullois in mathematics, Edgar Allan Poe in landscape, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam in agony.

- lettrist international

15.02.19

Potlatch: Directions for Use

We're not interested in a fond place in your memories. But concrete powers are at stake. A few hundred people haphazardly determine the thought of an era. Whether they know it or not, they are at our disposal. By sending Potlatch to effectively positioned people, we can interrupt the circuit when and where we please. Some readers have been chosen arbitrarily. You have a chance to be one of them.

- lettrist internationale, 29.06.54

14.02.19

Some images presented with elegance; the past spread out in ruffled parchment.

-  A Wristwatch Dug up approximately 0.7km from the Epicentre of the Explosion. Nagasaki, 1961- Shomei Tomatsu

13.02.19

The jetty screened in thrust enticed us away from the muffled siren next door. All is forgiven.

12.02.19

Particulating the Inlet was rather straightforward in silhouette. Our journey began with a whiteout, leading to general dispersal along the northshore edge.

-Holland House Library after an air raid, 1940

11.02.19

The concrete fire logs stacked with ease and yet without a proper overhang could not guarantee quick lighting nor a steady crackling burn.

10.02.19

The frothy ice spray tilted us portside in farewell to the distant bluffs, the bladder wracked seashore. Smoke smell rose. It fell as our jackets swelled in breath and heave.

09.02.19

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08.02.19

A road not taken in this instance a sense of mild confusion or self fleeing away from the scurried edge of a new shadow. A genuine rodent dérive, or simply snow blind.

07.02.19

Sliding back we take in the whitecaps, animal footage, memories of horizontal, all before directing our thoughts, then back up the hill to reclining by fireside. It was confirmed by observers later that this was maximum accumulation.

06.02.19

The decision was made to advance from the northern position. With no small degree of caution we put forward a number of provisional interpretations. The truncated gate, it was suggested, evoked the elegance of Pi at a mere 3.14 as it cleated the south-easterlies that whipped us willynilly.

05.02.19

The flock shorn typically send the bench aside leaving yarn rags stuck to the slivered edge. There was no desire here to pounce the layered piling.

04.02.19

Chiaroscuro with ankle deep snowfall while treading to summer feasting grounds. Light tracks make soft work as we settle our gait.

03.02.19

Corn snow, apple crisp, cob kerneled wood stove. White worn, horned owls, hard pan circle tread. A respite from the day to day recasting of the evermore.

02.02.19

How unusual it seemed that a sheep, an aging ram in fact, would lie in solitary ease like a cat in the sun on a front porch rocker. Our approach was taken at face value until he dragged himself to standing and pushed those tired old bones, that raggedy-assed fleece up the bluff to another final rest stop with a view.

01.02.19

“I will not lead anybody in there anymore.”

сталкер