Headdresses

CHAPTER VIII: POST 1897 COMMERCIAL REPLICAS

Headdresses

Headdress
Unknown maker, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw
Pigment, cedar bark, nails, red cedar, cotton twine, yew, stinging nettle twine, spruce root binding
10 5/8 x 9 1/2 x 24 3/8 in. (27 x 24 x 62 cm)
Collected by Johan Adrian Jacobsen ca. 1882
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, IVA1330

Headdress
Unknown maker, probably Nuu-chah-nulth
Wood, pigment
14 3/8 x 12 x 8 2/3 in. (36.5 x 30.5 x 22 cm)
Collected by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1909
Horniman Museum and Gardens, 9.808

Figure 128 from Boas’s 1897 book.

Hunt’s 1920s notes on Fig. 128:

ʟā´ʟāᵋnāᵋēłᵋyᴇ´xwēᵋwē
wood Picker Dance on forhead mask.
this Belong to the wāx·ᵋwāᵋmes nememot
of the g̣osgemox. this mask is used in
Bāxws Dance. as the kwā´goł uses the
mask with Earmine skin on them. and
never used in winter Dance.

No Boas Image or Hunt Notes for this object

In 1909, the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, acting as curatorial advisor for the Horniman Free Museum in London, visited Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. There Haddon encountered Joseph Standley’s Alaskan ethnological display, which he initially hoped to acquire in its entirety for a planned museum exhibition that adhered to the popular theory of social evolutionism. Instead, Haddon purchased 109 objects from Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory at Standley’s waterfront curiosity shop.1 One of these was accessioned into the Horniman’s collection as a “Haida Raven’s head mask” (seen here on the right), though there is no documentation of how Standley labeled the mask when he sold it to Haddon for $4.2 Despite the museum’s Haida affiliation for this item, Haddon had instead purchased a replica of a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw mask likely produced by Nuu-chah-nulth carvers.

Soon after Standley moved to Seattle in 1899, he began to visit the Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah families that lived in the Duwamish River flats south of Seattle. These local carvers were already known for selling handicrafts in town, and Standley cultivated business relationships with them to provide miniature totem poles and replica objects to sell at his store.3 Through his sale of replicas, Standley in effect promoted a new hybrid style of Northwest Coast souvenir art.4 While it is not known who carved this particular replica mask, the Williams family has worked continuously with Ye Olde Curiosity Shop since the early twentieth century.5 Standley sold at least three nearly identical versions of this mask to different collectors: this one went to Haddon; another ended up in the Reading Public Museum (Fig. 1);6 and one is now in a private collection in Germany.7

Fig. 1. An undated postcard from Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, which features the mask (top, center) that is now in the Reading Public Museum collection. The club numbered “9” is derived from Plate 38 in Boas’s book. Courtesy of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.

These replicated masks are all modeled after Figure 128 in Boas’s 1897 book, which illustrates a headdress that Johan Adrian Jacobsen collected around 1882 for Berlin’s Royal Ethnographical Museum (seen here on the left). The original’s use and meaning remain uncertain due to inconsistencies in its documentation and its absence in contemporary Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw ceremonial repertoire. Jacobsen initially identified this headdress as that of a “Hametzen with faces carved out of wood; shows how often the wearer has bitten or has engaged in corpse-eating.”8 Jacobsen likely associated it with other Hamat̕sa regalia he collected that also features cedar bark and carved skulls. In his figure caption for the mask, Boas labelled it as a head mask representing the Huxwhukw (a supernatural man-eating bird) that was used during the Nanakawalił (a winter dance associated with the Hamat̕sa).9  However, he translated Nanakawalił as the “dance of the wind” and described the latter’s associated choreography, which is characterized by moving one’s body rapidly from right to left with hands held open at shoulder height, thereby confusing the distinct ’Na’nalalał (Weather Dance) with the similar sounding Nanakawalił.10 Although Boas might have been correct in identifying this particular mask as used in the Nanakawalił, his conflation demonstrates the pitfalls of his early typological work, as he included both dance’s regalia under the common section heading “Nanakawalił.”

To add to the confusion about the original mask, Hunt’s 1920’s revisions describe it as a “woodpecker mask” used by clans in the ba’xus (or “secular”) dances performed outside of the Winter Ceremonials. If this is the case, it would have been highly atypical, as the incorporation of cedar bark and carved heads or skulls is generally indication of a mask’s use in the Winter Ceremonials.

By Emily Hayflick

PAGES IN THIS CHAPTER

  1. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things, 12.
  2. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things, 12-14; Horniman Museum accession ledger (Robert Storrie, personal correspondence).
  3. Duncan, “1001 Curious Things: Tales,” 1.
  4. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things, 22.
  5. Coll Thrush, Native Seattle, xvi; Duncan, “1001 Curious Things: Tales,” 35. The family’s relationship with Standley began with Samuel Williams at the turn of the twentieth century and continued through with his grandchildren almost a century later.
  6. Duncan, “1001 Curious Things: Tales,” 4. Duncan mistakenly states that this mask was originally purchased by George Gustav Heye for his private Museum of the American Indian and then de-accessioned to the Reading Public Museum, but archival records at both institutions fail to establish this (Ann McMullen, personal correspondence). Reading’s mask was part of the “Kinsey Collection,” about which little is known, before it was acquired by the museum in 1927 (Ashley Houston, personal correspondence). Like the Horniman Museum, the Reading Public Museum identifies its mask as a Haida Raven, suggesting that Standley described it as such in his shop.
  7. Rousselot et. al, Totempfahl und Potlatch, 45. In the catalog, this example is described as a Makah Mosquito mask.
  8. IVA 1330 Catalog Card, Ethnological Museum of Berlin. 
  9. Boas, The Social Organization, 471-73, 483.
  10. Boas, The Social Organization, 472. In his 1915 book on the Kwakwaka’wakw, Edward Curtis differentiated between the two dances, describing the ’Na’nalalał as the “embodiment of weather” and the Nanakawalił as being “midway” between two other dances related to the Hamat̕sa (the Hamshamtses and the Hayaliḱalał); Curtis, The Kwakiutl, 158. In his 1930s notes, George Hunt—who was surely Curtis’s primary source—described the Nanakawalił in the same terms (Hunt, “Kwakiutl Materials,” 5083, 5281). Judith Berman (personal correspondence) suggests that the syntactic root of the term is “nᴇq-”, which has a broad range of meanings having to do with “halfway,” “center,” or “middle.”
2019-06-21T18:08:01+00:00
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