Tongass: The Totem Poles of the Tlingit and Haida

The totem poles you see in museums on the East Coast and in Europe were removed from Tlingit and Haida villages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sometimes purchased, sometimes taken without consent, during a period when federal law was actively suppressing Indigenous cultural practices. Federal officials and missionaries in the eighteen eighties actively suppressed the ceremonies that gave totem poles their cultural context. The poles were cut, shipped, and sold to collectors and institutions while the traditions that made them continued underground.

Within the Tongass National Forest, the communities of Saxman, Totem Bight, Kake, and Kasaan have been the centers of totem pole carving restoration that began in the nineteen thirties under a Civilian Conservation Corps program and has continued since. The CCC employed Tlingit and Haida carvers to restore and replicate poles from communities that had been depopulated by disease and removal. It was an unusual moment: a New Deal government program creating infrastructure for the very cultural practices that federal law had been suppressing for fifty years.

The poles tell specific clan stories. Each figure is a reference to an event in a clan's history, a relationship between human and animal, an account of a specific ancestor's encounter with a supernatural being. They are not decorative. They are documentary. Reading them requires the same training as reading an alphabet, and that training was nearly lost.

Saxman, a village on the outskirts of Ketchikan, has one of the largest collections of standing totem poles in the world and a carving center where the work continues. The Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan holds original nineteenth-century poles recovered from abandoned villages. They have been kept indoors, out of the weather, in conditions that would allow them to survive another generation.