Extreme Giving

On a 2005 trip to Haida Gwaii, a.k.a. the Queen Charlotte Islands, I learned that the potlatch, an ancient, intriguing ritual of wealth redistribution among Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations, had survived. Memories of intro to anthro in student days: a culture where prestige came from giving, not acquiring. The subversive French situationists, who staged happenings in the ’50s, named their journal Potlatch, and gave it away to make a point about their commodified society. American author Lewis Hyde argued that all art embodies the potlatch spirit. As for me, in the face of a braying, globalizing capitalism I clung to the potlatch as an alternate economic model. And here at the top of one of Canada’s most remote archipelagos, amid amazing vegetation and a Haida majority, it lived. I wangled an invitation to one. Or so I thought.

The day before I leave home, I get an email from one of the Haida. “I don’t think it’s a potlatch,” he says, “just a deceased chief’s headstone dedication.” I don’t want to hear it. I’ve bought my ticket, spoken with the chief’s family, booked a guide named Dick Bellis, the late chief’s son-in-law. I’m hot on the trail of the elusive potlatch. But when I arrive there the next day, a Thursday, there’s another email saying that, as he thought, it isn’t a potlatch. Shit.

I call a friend, someone who lives there and who helped me arrange this botch. She is reassuring. She visited Alma Bellis, the chief’s daughter, whose house is crammed with preserves of smoked salmon — for the potlatch after the headstone ceremony, Alma told her. You should write about this, says my friend: how things in Haida culture are sometimes complicated. Hmm. On the flight in, I read a memoir by Florence Edenshaw Davidson, a Haida woman who had a potlatch for her first period. An Indian agent said they could range from “an invitation to dinner, up to a frenzied carouse leaving the hosts absolutely penniless.” Sometimes they called it a memorial, or “memorial potlatch.” It was a thing in flux, not a definition to memorize for the course final. I say potlatch, you say notlatch.

Later, at one of two Chinese restaurants in tiny Queen Charlotte “City,” just up the highway from the Haida reserve of Skidegate, I stare at the harbour, the mountains, the ever-present mist. I haven’t reached my guide, Dick, Alma’s husband. He said to call when I arrived, and I did. Is this “Indian time”? I fret. Gaze again at the sea, the sky, those ravens. The Haida have been here 10,000 years, in harmony with all this; why wouldn’t they have a different time sense? At nine, Dick phones, apologetic. He says everyone has been busy getting the potlatch ready. Whew, he used the word. Or was that because he knows I’m primed, like the Samoans humouring Margaret Mead? “Here comes the anthropologist — let’s tell her some good ones about sex.” I ask if I can come see.

Dick whizzes over in his pickup, and we head back to Skidegate. He says he talked to the chiefs; they say I can hang around, though outsiders usually just attend the event, still two days off. The matriarch is a problem, he adds, but luckily she isn’t matriarch yet. I wonder if he’s using the title in quotes, as I might, but there are matriarchs here. It’s a matrilineal society: women aren’t chiefs but make major decisions. The matriarch he means is Barb Wilson, the daughter of the late chief’s oldest sister; the next chief will be her brother. I’ve always found these kinship networks a headache in books or courses, but they’re clearly clearer in real life.

We enter an old hall with a stage, like the rec hall at summer camp. It’s bursting with stuff, and people preparing the potlatch. “Ever see anything like this?” asks Dick. Yeah, I think, the Hadassah bazaar. Rows of tables groan under gifts, the artful (carvings and crocheted doilies) and the luxurious (blankets and towels) alongside dollar store fodder like deodorant and back-scratchers. There are colour-coded plastic bags for men, women, kids; tall woven baskets for the chiefs. Ever since Charlie Wesley, Alma’s dad and Dick’s father-in-law, died nearly two years ago, his family and friends have been busy. They’ve made, bought, and brought what they could; now they’re assembling the loot bags, as it were. Not quite as I pictured. What did they think when I said I wanted to write about a potlatch as an alternative to capitalism?

In the kitchen are huge pots of soups and stews, 150 pies, sixty cakes. This won’t be catered — it would depersonalize the gifting. This is super-personal; each stew has its crew. They’ll continue cooking tomorrow, then move everything to the new hall where the potlatch will be held. There are buckets of takeout Chinese. Dick says the matriarch ordered in for everyone. The giving is pervasive. She gains prestige from hosting the feast, and gives food to the helpers. No doubt about it, I got myself a potlatch.

We drive to Dick’s house. He says he’s tired and tense and wishes it were over — like anyone having a big “affair,” or simcha among my tribe. Outside there are two carvings, of a raven and a Haida-looking Virgin Mary that eyes you eerily from every angle. Dick is a carver. He took it up late in life, as he did guiding, after a career as a heavy-duty mechanic in logging camps. The house is crowded with gifts, including the preserved salmon and jam, and traditional button blankets Alma has made. There’s hardly room to move. She comes in with an air of exhaustion and crisis, saying, “We need more gifts for the men.” They sigh.

Driving me back, Dick says that in the old days, after the white man came, the Haida were rich. They’d have a potlatch with a Singer sewing machine for everyone, like Oprah giving cars to her audience. I’ve read accounts of one — canoes, pool tables, powerboats, dresses, sweaters, bracelets, blankets, gaslights, violins, guitars, basins, washtubs, teapots, trunks, gramophones, bedsteads, bureaus, flour — that lasted days. It happened after 1885, during the six and a half decades when the practice was criminalized. Several people were jailed; everyone had to surrender etched “coppers” and other regalia that went to places like Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. “You could give away everything but your wife and family,” says Dick. “We made war in summer and potlatched all winter.”

So it’s a verb as well as a noun, with a range of uses. In her memoir, Florence Edenshaw Davidson says one of her sister’s names was “Lots of Things for the Potlatch.” People here acquire names lifelong, which makes more sense than being stuck with the one given before you’re born by someone who didn’t know you yet. Her dad had ten potlatches, and the last name he received was “They Gave Ten Potlatches for Him.”