Potlatch Masks — Image Withheld
Image not shown. This entry's images are withheld by request of the community that owns them. The text describes what is withheld, and why, in full.
Masks danced at the potlatch open and transform as the ancestor arrives. This page shows no image: the masks are community-governed regalia, and their photographs are published here only with the owning community's consent, which has not been sought for specific pieces.
Tagged: Ceremonial Object Restricted/Sacred-Secret Modern Devotional Contested Potlatch Repatriation Indigenous and Traditional Native American Religions
Why It Stands Here
The withheld image is the entry. Potlatch regalia belongs to families and nations, not to the internet; Canada banned the potlatch from 1885 to 1951 and confiscated regalia into museum storerooms, and what the museums hold came, in famous cases, from that confiscation. A page about these masks that began by displaying one without consent would repeat the taking.
At a potlatch — the great feast of witnessing that validates marriages, names, successions, and memorials among the peoples of the Northwest Coast — masked dancers enact the ancestors and spirits whose crests the host family owns. Transformation masks are engineered marvels: strings pull the outer face apart to reveal the being within, so the ancestor arrives inside the dance.
After the 1921 potlatch of Dan Cranmer, Canadian officials confiscated hundreds of pieces of regalia; the collection was dispersed to museums in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York. Repatriation brought much of it home to the U'mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay and the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre at Cape Mudge, where the pieces are held under community authority. This page's restricted state records that history and its consequence: images appear here when the owning community places them here.
References
Related Across the Site
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- The Shintai Mirror Art Entry — Behind the doors of a Shinto shrine sits an object no one looks at — a mirror, sword, or stone that is the seat of the kami. The pictured mirror is of the kind enshrined; the enshrined mirror itself has never been photographed.
- The Torah Ark and Its Ornaments Art Entry — The ark that houses the scroll, and the silver that dresses it — crown, shield, pointer, and finials: ceremonial art at the center of synagogue worship, governed by the principle of beautifying the commandment.
- The Yazd Fire Temple Art Entry — A temple in Yazd whose sacred fire has been kept burning, by the tradition's account, since about 470 CE — carried from shrine to shrine across fifteen centuries and tended daily behind glass.
- Repatriation and Restitution Art Theme — NAGPRA, the Benin bronzes, the Potlatch masks at the Vatican: the return of sacred objects is the point where art history becomes a present-tense obligation.
- Indigenous and Traditional Art Tradition — Sacred objects under community protocol: sacred and secret are distinguished, and repatriation is a live question.