KWAKIUTL

Indians of the northwest Pacific coast of North America. The Kwakiutl live in British Columbia, Canada, along the shores of the waterways between Vancouver Island and the mainland opposite. They speak one of three major dialects: Haisla, spoken on the Gardner Canal and Douglas Channel; Heiltsuq, spoken from Gardner Canal to Rivers Inlet; and southern Kwakiutl, spoken from Rivers Inlet to Cape Mudge on the mainland and on the northern end of Vancouver Island. Kwakiutl is a Wakashan language. The Kwakiutl Indians are culturally related to the Nootka. The southern Kwakiutl are the best known. The great importance of the Kwakiutl to anthropology stems from the ethnographic studies of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who published more than 5,000 pages on their culture over a period of almost half a century. Boas' works describe almost every aspect of Kwakiutl culture, as well as analyzing their relationships to other Northwest Coast cultures, with whom they shared general features of technology and economy, art style, myths, and ceremonies. The Kwakiutl subsisted mainly by fishing and had a technology based on woodworking. Their society was stratified by rank, which was determined primarily by the inheritance of names and privileges, such as the right to sing certain songs, use certain crests, and wear certain ceremonial masks. The potlatch, a ceremonial distribution of property and gifts unique to Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, was elaborately developed by the southern Kwakiutl. Potlatches were held to celebrate major life events (e.g., birth, marriage), as penalties for breaches of ceremonial taboo, for face-saving purposes, and in competition for a position or privilege. Potlatches were often combined with the performances of dancing societies, each having a series of ranked dances that dramatized ancestral experiences with supernatural beings. These beings were portrayed as giving gifts of ceremonial prerogatives such as songs, dances, and names, which became hereditary property.