Transformation Mask

CHAPTER IX: COMMUNITY REPRODUCTIONS

Transformation Mask

Transformation Mask
Corrine Hunt, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Chief David Mungo Knox, Kwakwaka’wakw
Created in 2018–19
Cedar, pigment, string, hardware
22 1/2 x 37 x 31 in. (57.1 x 94 x 78.7 cm)
Hunt Family

Figure 195 from Boas’s 1897 book.

Hunt’s 1920s notes on fig. 195:

Dałdałaᴇmł  māᵋxᴇmł
opening face Keller whale mask. this mask
Belong to the Hāᵋᴇᵋnāʟēᵋnâ nᴇmemot of the
q!oᵋmoᵋyâᵋye. this mask is used in the winter
Dance or ts!ēts!ē´qā. and not used in the
ʟᴇwᴇlaxa or Baxwᴇs Dance. (this mask was
my wife killer whale mask)

This contemporary version of a distinctive transformation mask (Fig. 1), now in the collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and illustrated in Boas’s 1897 book, depicts the body of a four-finned killer whale whose head opens up via a string mechanism to show the face of a sea monster. Transformation masks (dałdałaga, literally “opening up mask”) generally depict two distinct creatures, or the same creature in two distinct aspects, and include at least one mechanical element.1 They are considered długwe’—forms of wealth or “treasure”— and are danced at Kwakwaka’wakw potlatches by those with the hereditary right to historical and cosmological narratives, both within and beyond the memory of their wearers. The physical mask, in turn, is validated by these stories, becoming part of the family lore and inheritance for the next generation.

Fig. 1. Killer whale transformation mask collected by Johan Adrian Jacobsen, ca. 1881. Wood, paint. Courtesy of U’mista Cultural Centre and bpk Bildagentur / Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.

The original whale mask was acquired by Johan Adrian Jacobsen in 1881 for the Berlin museum, along with hundreds of other ceremonial and quotidian Northwest Coast objects.2 Jacobsen claimed the mask belonged to a chief, but recorded no other information about it. It is likely that Boas saw the mask in Berlin while helping to catalog the Jacobsen collection in 1885. In Boas’s later volume, the mask is briefly mentioned in the chapter on the Dłuwalaxa, or Chief’s Dance cycle, alongside an illustration of it both opened and closed.3 Boas links the mask to a “Song of the Killer Whale” (with lyrics: “Praise the great killer whale, the great chief, when he emerges in our house”), and he states that both the mask and song were obtained in marriage from the northern Heiltsuk people. However, there is no further evidence that this distinctive mask was danced to that particular song, suggesting that this may be another instance of Boas’s overdrawn typologies in this early text.4

George Hunt later contradicted at least one aspect of Boas’s published account, stating in his notes from the 1920s that the mask was not used in the Dłuwalaxa but rather in the T̕seka or Winter Ceremonials. More importantly, Hunt revealed that the mask was once a possession of his first wife, Lucy Homiskanis (T’łaliłi’lakw, or “Spouter of the House”), presumably at the time of sale to Jacobsen. In his more extensive notes from the 1930s, Hunt details the origin story of Lucy’s relationship to the mask (what Hunt here calls a hamaxalała or “Killer Whale Dancer’s Mask”).5 As a young woman, Lucy disappeared from the beach in Fort Rupert while digging clams—abducted, people said, by a sea monster—and was missing for a month. She returned during the Winter Ceremonials and was initiated while a dancer in the killer whale mask circled the floor, “spouting around the fire,” to indicate her new prerogative.6 George Hunt, as the recipient of some of Lucy’s hereditary rights and powers among the Kwakwaka’wakw, would have been intimately acquainted with her ceremonial wealth. Having acted as Jacobsen’s guide and translator in 1881, it is possible that he even assisted Jacobsen in the initial acquisition of the object.

Hunt’s notes have allowed his current family to reactivate the long dormant mask and the hereditary privilege it embodies. Having examined the archival materials as well as the historic mask in Berlin, Lucy’s great-grandchildren Corrine Hunt and David Knox carved this new version of the hamaxalałamł (as installed in New York in front of a video projection of the beach at Fort Rupert). The artists paid particular attention to the unusual red and black painted motifs on the four dorsal fins, which are more linear in geometric design than is typical for late-nineteenth-century Kwakwaka’wakw art. For Corrine, the process of research and re-instantiation allowed her to “find out from our family what they think about the past [and how the mask will] fit into our lives today.” After the exhibition has closed, this mask will be danced and validated in the Big House and then made available to Lucy’s descendants for ceremonial use once again. Such transformation masks have the power to link human and non-human beings, to connect kin relations, and to traverse the boundaries between the past, present, and future.7 Boas’s intention that his and Hunt’s book be a receptacle for Kwakwaka’wakw “laws and stories” is realized in the utility of their published and unpublished texts after more than a century.

By Tessa Goldsher and Aaron Glass

PAGES IN THIS CHAPTER

  1. Jonaitis, Chiefly Feasts, 42; Waite, “Kwakiutl Transformation Masks.”
  2. Bolz and Sanner, Native American Art, 160-89; Glass, “Indigenous Ontologies, Digital Futures.”
  3. Boas, The Social Organization, 628.
  4. Boas, The Social Organization, 631, 730. Boas first transcribed the song’s lyrics and recorded its tune (as performed by Tom Hemasi’lakw of Hope Island) on wax cylinder at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, but the cylinder has not survived and Boas did not include musical notation for it in the 1897 book. It is not clear how Boas connected this song to the mask; while no extant research drawing of this mask survives, there is a drawing of a Heiltsuk Killer Whale mask with Boas’s notes on it, suggesting that the published song belongs instead to this other object (Rainer Hatoum, personal communication).
  5. Hunt, “Kwakiutl Materials,” 5613-14. Curiously, Hunt does not mention a Heiltsuk origin for the mask prerogative in his notes, as he does for many other privileges that came from these northern neighbors. Moreover, Hunt confirmed the published song belonged to the Dłuwalaxa dance series (whereas Lucy’s mask was used in the T̕seka). These points lend credibility to the notion that Boas erroneously connected the published Heiltsuk song to Lucy’s mask in the book, likely based on the common killer whale subject matter. Thanks to Judith Berman for helping us parse Hunt’s archival notes.
  6. Hunt, “Kwakiutl Materials,” 5614.
  7. Joseph, “Behind the Masks,” 20.
2019-06-21T18:23:35+00:00
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