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Fri 12 Nov, 2004 06:16 pm
Since time beyond recollection, the Kwak'wala speaking groups have expressed their joy through the potlatch. The word "potlatch" comes from Chinook jargon, a trade pidgin formerly used along the coast. It means "to give" and came to designate a ceremony common to peoples on the Northwest Coast and parts of the Interior. The potlatch ceremony marks important occasions in the lives of the Kwakwa_ka_&wakw: the naming of children, marriage, transferring rights and privileges and mourning the dead. Guests witnessing the event are given gifts. The more gifts distributed, the higher the status achieved by the potlatch giver. It is a time for pride - and a time for showing the masks and dances owned by the family giving the potlatch.
Although there was no immediate opposition to the potlatch at the time of initial contact with the white man, such opposition began to grow with the coming of missionaries and government agents. Frustration over unsuccessful attempts to "civilize" the people of the potlatch led officials, teachers, and missionaries to pressure the federal government into enacting legislation prohibiting the ceremonies. The first version of the law was passed in 1884, but was difficult to enforce because of the vagueness of its wording. Later, the law was revised and following a large potlatch held at Village Island in December 1921, forty-five people were charged under Section 149 of the Indian Act. Of those convicted of offenses including making speeches, dancing, arranging articles to be given away and carrying gifts to recipients, twenty-two people were given suspended sentences. The sentencing was based on the illegal agreement that, if entire tribes gave up their potlatch paraphernalia, individual members of those tribes who had been found guilty would have their sentences suspended. Three people were remanded for appeal and twenty men and women were sent to Oakalla Prison to serve sentences of two months for first offenders and three months for second offenders.
Was it a religious thing, Dys?
I am lost as to why the government would be worried.
It was considered "un-civilized"
Fantastic, Dys. I had never heard of this 1921 travesty of justice.
Dlowan -- the potlatch was (and, among some Kwaikutl communities still is) a cultural, rather than religious, thing. It gave one status to give away huge amounts of one's hard-earned goods. A person's worth wasn't judged by how much he/she had accumulated but, rather, by how much of what one had accumulated one would gladly give away in an elaborate ceremony. However, since spirituality was inextricably mixed with everyday living among most American indigenous peoples, it may have had some religious significance as well.
One of my very first jobs was to read some anthopological journals and write briefs for people at the (now dissappeared) National Company of Popular Subsistance.
Some of the articles were related to this practice, common to North American indians -which include a part of Northern Mexico-.
As a recall, it was also interpreted as some kind of a guilt passage. Giving away gifts as a way of making the other feel guilty -and in the need to reciprocate-. If, by reasons of wealth, there is no reciprocity, the guilt becomes hierarchy.
In Mesoamerica (I don't remember if in some tribes of North America too) there were official sin-eaters. They'd go to the houses of dying people and receive their sins, so the ones about to die could travel with the 400 stars. The sin-eater, in his death-bed, would pass his huge accumulation of sins to his older son... and travel with the 400 stars.
It's of course an anti-American trait, since it's only preliminary to commerce.
Aaaargh - llike we in Oz can talk...
sounds a lot like a Polish wedding, without tthe fistfights.
Non-native Americans do potlatch in reverse. Particularly their politicians.
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