Native American
festivals and holidays are as richly diverse as their culture.
Festivals can reveal a great deal about culture. A most interesting
cultural festival, celebrated by most Pacific Northwest tribes, was
the potlatch.
What
is a Potlatch? A
Potlatch is not just a party. A Potlatch is a magnificent and
planned party. It's a really big deal. Planning for a potlatch might
take an entire year, or even longer! Today, as in olden times, each
person invited to a potlatch receives a present. This present can be
as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a carving. At any
particular potlatch, everyone receives the same present.
Big
Event Potlatches: Indians in ancient Washington
State have always been generous people. In olden times, other tribes
visited the rich coastal Indians in the Puget Sound area hoping to
trade pelts of fur for dried seaweed for sea salt flavoring, dried
fish, dried clams, dried salmon, and dried meat. They were delighted
with their greeting. The Kitsap Peninsula and the Puget Sound area
soon became the meeting place for nearly all of the tribes in the
Pacific Northwest. Each fall, tribes from up and down the coast
would gather in the Puget Sound area to celebrate a potlatch and
prepare to trade.
A Potlatch was (and still is!) a wonderful
festival with weddings and stories (the tall tale type) and feasting
and dancing and trading.
Dignity
Potlatches: In olden times, potlatches were not only
given only for big events. They were given for everything. If an
important person fell off a canoe, a small but elegant and costly
potlatch would be given to offset the humiliation of the fall. You
could not be laughed at. You could not lose dignity. These were
important beliefs in Native American culture. One way to
regain or to establish dignity was to host a potlatch.
Vengeance
Potlatches: There were even vengeance potlatches. If
you wanted to knock a clan down a step or two, you might try to
trick them into giving a potlatch to use up some of their wealth.
People tried very hard not to lose their temper and be tricked into
giving a costly potlatch to save face. So, if a clan had more wealth
than yours, you tried to ignore their insults.
Understanding and using the potlatch system for your own clans'
advancement took great skill.
The competition to show how wealthy you were,
no matter how untrue, nearly destroyed these early people.
Fur Trade
Wealth: What
saved them was the fur trade. The fur trade was introduced by
the white men. Furs were easy for these early native people to get.
They were wonderful hunters. Fur trade wealth poured into the
Pacific Northwest. The white traders also had steel tools. With the
coming of the fur trade and steel tools, many native people were
able to gain the wealth they needed to climb the social ladder of
their culture.
