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November: Beyond Your Fifth Grade American History Class
National Native American Heritage Month
Since 1990, November has been National Native American Heritage Month, an explicit time to honor and become more aware of the many diverse people who are original to this land — their accomplishments and rich histories and traditions, their ongoing contributions to the nation’s life, and the challenges they face, both past and present. This year’s occurrence may be especially meaningful due to the appointment of Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, as the first Native American to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior. The department holds the federal government’s main legal obligation, known as the trust responsibility, to support and advance the well-being of Indian tribes and nations, though it has often had troubled relationships with Native communities. This obligation was created by the hundreds of treaties that the U.S. signed with Indians in the late 1700s and 1800s, most involving the transfer of Native lands to the government in exchange for reservation lands and federal guarantees to respect tribal sovereignty.
November is also the month of Thanksgiving, a holiday that many Native Americans embrace as a time to spend with family and friends but otherwise find disorienting, at best. This is because it rests on the myth of amiable co-existence between the English Pilgrims and the Indigenous Wampanoag nation during the first Thanksgiving, a European harvest festival that occurred in 1621 at a place now called Plymouth, Massachusetts. Based on selected fragments of truth, this snapshot overlooks the more complex realities of the Plymouth encounter in particular and the consequences of Europeans’ arrival for Native Americans in general. Indeed, since 1970 many Indigenous people of New England and elsewhere have observed a National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving Day (see links listed below).
Celebrations that also featured lavish feasting but often combined it with song, dance, oration, and gift-giving occurred in Native societies across North America. Perhaps the most famous example is the potlatch, a keystone of societies of the Northwest Coast, which runs up the Pacific shoreline from Washington state into Canada and Alaska. This impressive ladle, made by an artist (perhaps Jim Jacobs) of southern Alaska’s Tlingit people, was likely used during such occasions, which prompted the creation of sophisticated artworks of many kinds.
The ladle is carved with the images of two animals: the head of a bear appears on the underside of the bowl and from atop the handle an eagle hovers, patron-like, over the food that filled the bowl. They may be crests, motifs that, like European heraldry, were exclusive to powerful families who controlled land, resources, and wealth.
Such families hosted potlatches to mark the inheritance of social titles that were passed down through generations. During these events, crests and the stories tied to them narrated the family’s history, anchoring it in remote times and both explaining and validating the family’s worthiness to acquire privileges and rights, such as to fishing or hunting grounds. According to Nora Marks Dauenhauer, the Tlingit poet and scholar, the stories are so crucial that without them, the visual arts are like a movie without a soundtrack.
One aspect of the social validation conferred by potlatches stemmed from the host’s prodigious hospitality, which extended beyond opulent feasts to the giving of other gifts. One photo, taken sometime between 1894 and 1909, shows towering piles of blankets destined for potlatch guests in a village of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), another important Northwest Coast society.
Potlatch-like feasts seem to have been held by some of the earliest people of the Northwest Coast, where the hallmark features of historic societies and arts emerged at least 4,500 years ago. After Europeans arrived in the region in the late 18th century, several factors converged to create new needs to display and legitimize wealth and status, and potlatches became more extravagant and frequent. This development collided with the values and judgements of white settlers, and the governments of both the U.S. and Canada moved to suppress the potlatch. An 1885 Canadian ban was not lifted until 1951.
Some of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch regalia confiscated during this period, after an illegal potlatch in 1921, has been repatriated to the Native-run U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia. Despite this history, the potlatch has been revived — as the 1921 incident suggests, it never completely died — and it continues to be celebrated today in Indigenous communities of the Northwest Coast, an example of strength and resilience against the odds and, together with other such cases in Native communities across the country, a cause for giving thanks.
More Resources
For more about the Wampanoag, the English Pilgrims, and Native perspectives on Thanksgiving, see the engaging video, “The Invention of Thanksgiving,” with curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) of the National Museum of the American Indian (above), as well as the following links.
https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/education/NMAI_Harvest_Study_Guide.pdf https://americanindian.si.edu/online-resources/thanksgiving.
The Department of the Interior’s trust responsibility to Native Americans is summarized at https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/fact-sheet/american-indians-and-alaska-natives-trust-responsibility and https://www.doi.gov/international/what-we-do/tribes.
For the National Day of Mourning organized by the United American Indians of New England see http://www.uaine.org/.
The website of the U’mista Cultural Centre is https://www.umista.ca/.
Discussion of the Northwest Coast potlatch draws in part from Native North American Art by Janet Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2007), an excellent survey of Native arts.
View this ladle and other Native North American artworks in gallery 231 on your next visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art and in the Collection Online!