User:OldManRivers/Potlatch



A potlatch is a festival ceremony practiced among the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast in North America. This includes the Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw and Coast Salish people. The potlatch has been practiced for thousands of years by these indigenous peoples, and plays a centrel part of their cultures. It has a history of a rigorous ban by the Canadian government, the study of many anthropologists, and contiues to be practiced.

About
The potlatch is a festival or ceremony practiced among indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. It is important to note the differences and uniqueness among the different cultural groups and nations along the coast. Each nation, tribe, and sometimes clans, have their own way of practicing the potlatch so it presents a very diverse presentation and meaning. Non the less, the main purpose has and still is the redistribution of wealth procured by families. A potlatch includes celebration of births, rites of passages, weddings, funerals, puberty, and honoring of the deceased. Through political, economic and social exchange, it is a vital part of these Indigenous people's culture. Although protocol differs among the Indigenous nations, the potlatch could involve a feast, with music, dance, theatricality and spiritual ceremonies. The most sacred ceremonies are usually observed in the winter.

Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution or destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The Status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away goods or by burning the resources accumulated for the event. Dorothy Johansen describes the dynamic: "In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods.  If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished."

History
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 Kwakwaka'wakw, used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. In 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.

The potlatch was 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." 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.

Potlatch ban
Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1885 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. The church also targeted the potlatch system as what appeared to be "demonic" and "satanic". Despite the ban, potlatching continued clandestinely for decades. Numerous nations 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.

Other places
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&mdash;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.