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