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.
