THE BIG SPENDERS

THE great occasion in the life of a Northwest Indian, before the turn of the century, was the potlatch. A ceremonial extravaganza that began with gargantuan meals of fish oil and sea food, progressed to bouts of boasting, the potlatch roared to a climax with a prodigious distribution of goods. For a less arrogant, less competitive people, this might have been only a pleasant custom, but for the tribes living an easy life in the mild, rich country between Vancouver and Yakutat Bay, Alaska, the feasts turned into mad giveaway races. Each "gift" was in effect a double dare: to save face, the guest had to reciprocate, usually within a year, with another gift of double the value.

"We fight our rivals with property," a

Kwakiutl chief once explained. Warriors, squaws and children worked feverishly to amass a sufficiently impressive array of gifts to "put down" a competitor at the next potlatch. Materials were close at hand: spruce and cedar for the elaborate carved totems and 60-man canoes, horn for spoons and charms, root fibers for baskets, and mountain-goat wool for blankets. Today the brightly colored wood carvings still bear rough adze marks, but they rank high as primitive art, ranging in style from naturalism to symbolic abstraction (see Color Pages). As demonstrated in the permanent collection of Oregon's Portland Art Museum, they are monuments to the highest level of wood carving achieved by a vanished culture.

Blistered Guests. An invitation to a potlatch was nothing to take lightly. Both hosts and guests came dressed in their most splendid clothes, the chiefs wearing elaborately carved wooden hats adorned with ermine skins and sea-lion bristles, and carrying their ceremonial staffs. The meals alone involved prodigious waste: one massive, carved, 14-foot-long wooden trencher held 120 gallons of fish stew. The host would often perform a ceremony roughly equivalent to lighting a cigar with a $100 bill: he ladled out the savory fish oil onto the fire. The stoic guests proved themselves unimpressed by sitting motionless even when the flames blistered their legs and set fire to their bearskin robes.

For the big-time matching competitions, the powerful chiefs evolved a special blue chip: a sheet of copper valued at hundreds or even thousands of blankets. In one fiercely contested potlatch, the tribal chiefs ganged up to best an upstart brave who had grown rich trading with the whites. It took three coppers with a total value of 39,000 blankets to finally "flatten" the brave.

Two Heads. The lavish display of pot-latching carried over even into the religious ceremonies. Indian artists were called on to outdo themselves in carving masks, staffs and rattles. Each symbol and convention had its meaning. The double-profiled portrayals of totem gods were apparently adapted from images first painted on both sides of the prow of a war canoe. Totem gods like Killer Whale were sometimes pictured with their entrails revealed to show lesser animals which they had swallowed. Even the massive totem poles were meant as seriously as medieval coats of arms to display family crests and famous ancestors. Such gods as Bear and Wolf might be decorated with fur and shredded cedar-bark wigs. Other masks were provided with movable lower jaws or a concealed inside image.

Gone With the Otter. Because the Northwest Indians worked in perishable wood, horn and fiber, few of their surviving carved objects are more than 150 years old. But ironically, this probably is no great loss. Initial contact with the white man, which spelled cultural disaster elsewhere, had a tonic effect on the avid, acquisitive fisheaters of the Northwest. The steel tools they got in trading started a great, final flowering of the traditions of wood sculpture that had been slowly evolving for centuries. Its most spectacular achievement: the giant totem pole that emerged within a century from the small carved house post.

But by 1900, the white man's demand for the sea otter had all but exterminated the Indian's main trading staple. Gone with the sea otter were prosperity and the passion for the potlatch. The gradual loss of ritual meaning stultified Northwest Indian art, turned its craftsmen into little more than manufacturers of tourist curios.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.