When potlatches were banned, they themselves received other names: “feasts,” “memorials,” “doings” (as in “affairs,” but different from our affairs). The ceremonies aren’t just familial; they’re communal and historic. They represent the nation (“The potlatch is our government,” said one potlatcher) and link it to its past. It’s not really like the Hadassah
bazaar. There, it’s all for sale. Stuff here is not meant to be sold. And the focus is on gifts for the guests, who bring no gifts for the hosts, though reciprocal obligations are incurred for future potlatches. This was once the basis of the Haida economy and society. Outsiders have often puzzled about whether it was giving or exchanging, social or economic. But maybe it’s a different kind of exchange or gift, in which each implies the other. You can give, and not worry about loss, since you know you’ll get it back, not because of economic calculation or legal compulsion, but due to a sense of trust on both sides, which releases the innate, human giving-and-sharing impulse.
“Alma spent last night worrying about the men’s presents,” says Dick on Friday morning. “I said, ‘I think I remember something in the crawl space.’ We found five boxes, but none were men’s. So the matriarchs are meeting to decide what to get.” He says it can be almost anything, as long as it’s useful. “It can’t be totally junk.” I wonder if potlatchers were as flexible and philosophical before the colonizers came. Maybe. Why not?
As we drive along the shore of Rooney Bay, Dick explains that every Haida is a Raven or an Eagle. Ravens can’t marry Ravens, and Eagles can’t marry Eagles. I ask whether it happens anyway, and he chortles at the thought. They can marry outsiders, though; his mother was a Raven, and his father was a Welshman from Cardiff.
He pulls over by a clearing with wood sculptures of ravens, eagles, and other animals. The bush spreads before us. Behind is a vast, littered beach; the tide is out. Dick says artists command vast respect among the Haida. The leader of their national council, who negotiates with governments, is Guujaw, a master carver. I ask, why such prestige? “We didn’t have to scrounge for anything,” he says. “Clams, crabs, fish, most vegetation is edible. The forests are thick; we cut them down for houses. So there was time for art.” There’s an abundant quality in the air itself, all mist and rain. Everything grows, and regrows. Due to this absence of scarcity, status wasn’t associated with acquisition, but with giving. Who would demand respect for accumulation when it came so easily?
Our next stop is the home of Dick’s friend Eric Ross. He is about eighty, white, and a widower. Dick says it’s panic time at the hall, and Eric offers the food trolleys in his garage. Eric’s late wife was a native from down the coast. He says his father-in-law was one of the native leaders who supported the ban on potlatches, because they led to destructive competition; some chiefs would impoverish their people “to build their name,” as they still say. I knew natives supported the ban, but I’d read they had been manipulated by missionaries or government. This sounds plausible, too. Any institution can take contradictory shapes over time. In 1883, some chiefs petitioned against potlatches. Then, in 1885, Sir John A. Macdonald, who was his own Indian Affairs minister, introduced a law saying, “Every Indian or person who engages in, or assists in, celebrating the Indian festival known as the ‘potlatch’ is liable to imprisonment.”
The potlatching tribes resisted, but cagily. They asked to hold just a few more potlatches so they could pay what was owing from the last ones. Twenty years later, a government report said the natives were “still so wrapped up in this deplorable custom that they give no heed to any advice for the betterment of their condition.” They circumvented the ban for half a century. In the 1920s, an Indian agent wrote his boss in Ottawa: “The potlatch is killed.” Then, in 1931, “I am sorry to say I have reason to believe it has broken out again.”
This effort to suppress potlatching may seem odd, a bit like outlawing bridal showers, someone said to me. But official policy was to bring Indians “under the sway of civilization, as far as is practicable with any of their race.” Duncan Campbell Scott, one of the “Confederation poets,” who worked at Indian Affairs for fifty-two years, wrote, “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question and no Indian department.” Bureaucrats and politicians viewed the potlatch as a major obstacle to assimilation. Introducing orderly habits was “utterly useless” where the potlatch existed, Sir John A. was quoted as saying. Opposition leader Edward Blake called it “an insane exuberance of generosity.” To the press, it was “the evil potlatch.” The question is, why the potlatch? One can at least speculate.
Capitalism and Christianity were the key components of the civilization being imposed, and the potlatch was an anti-capitalist scandal, “a distribution that renounces every profit,” wrote one scholar. The 1880s, when the ban was enacted, were full of challenges to capitalism. Marxism, anarchism, a “revolutionary” labour movement — all emerged during western expansion, and the resulting clashes with native peoples, including the Riel Rebellion of 1885. Nor were potlatchers woolly-minded, unmenacing dreamers: the Haida were war makers and slave takers. Their potlatches embodied intense, even vicious, competition. They disdained capitalism while embodying the very traits capitalists admired. By the end of World War I, capitalism’s stock had reached low ebb. The Bolsheviks created a communist society in Russia. Uprisings in Europe mimicked it. A Canadian Communist party had been formed. In 1919, the Winnipeg General Strike, full of anti-capitalist rhetoric, broke out in the West. That’s when Duncan Campbell Scott ordered the first serious attempt to enforce the ban.
Back in the truck, I ask Dick if there are still competitive potlatches of the sort Eric mentioned. He says they’re all competitive, including the one we’re going to tomorrow. Everybody wants his to be the greatest. Up in Masset recently, they gave out utensils that people kept. Normally guests bring their own; it used to be that they got a spoon at birth and used it all their lives. “Remember that one in Masset with the cutlery?” people now say.
The boxes in the crawl space are on Dick’s mind, so we return to load them onto his truck. “Moving potlatch gifts — about as hands on as you can get,” he says, watching me lift. He worries Alma will be mad he wasn’t around, but we don’t run into her. Someone says she went to the dollar store in Masset, ninety minutes away, since, as everyone seems to know, there aren’t enough gifts for the men. We swing by the old hall, where Eric’s food trolleys have arrived and the stew is stewing on the porch. Then we go to the cemetery.
