Are Totem Poles Northwest Tradition or Cultural Invaders?

Are totem poles the new Confederate monuments? Questions of cultural appropriation and authenticity hardly compare to secession and the horrors of slavery. But these towering carvings, long celebrated as emblems of civic pride, regional character, and Native cultural legacy, have lately been denounced in similar revisionist terms as tokens of misrepresentation, exploitation, and, in Tacoma, “colonialism, whiteness, and patriarchy,” even “conquest.” 

And, in one case, uprooted. At Tacoma’s Fireman’s Park, a 1903-vintage pole of murky origin that was a signature landmark, was disavowed, delisted, deaccessioned, dismembered, and sent to likely oblivion after a decade-long campaign by Native and non-Native critics to eliminate it. 

In 2016, two widely cherished poles intended to honor the Native presence at the Pike Place Market came under similar attack from three prominent Native civic and cultural figures. In response, the Seattle Parks Department strategized for years over how to get rid of them, then grudgingly relented when the Market Historical Commission stood firm and won a legal judgment protecting them. Eight months later, after more delay and attempts to bargain with the commission, Parks has begun restoring the poles — a process it expects will take till July, partly because it didn’t arrange a timely structural engineer’s inspection and must now backtrack. I recounted this twisting saga in a recent story for Cascade PBS, formerly Crosscut.

Though they’ve met different fates, the Seattle and Tacoma poles faced similar indictments from officials and activists, not just because they were created by non-Indians — in Tacoma probably and in Seattle partially, though such fine points got lost in the uproar — but because they were, well, totem poles. And ubiquitous though they may be, totem poles are not native to the region surrounding what’s now called the Salish Sea: they were originally carved for particular familial, commemorative, and memorial purposes by the Haida, Tlingit, Tshimshian and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw (Kwakiutl) peoples of the northern British Columbian and Southeast Alaskan coast. Ergo their presence here is inappropriate, intrusive, even “hurtful to local art and culture.” They are a cultural invasive species.

In 2018, Colleen Echohawk, then executive director of the Chief Seattle Center, later a candidate for mayor, and now CEO of the Native lifestyle brand Eighth Generation, told Crosscut’s David Kroman that such “misrepresentation … has consequences.” Echohawk, whose heritage is Pawnee and Upper Ahtna Athabascan, explained that “the lack of cultural representation in the Native community turns into inequity, it turns into poverty, high homelessness rates.” And, however well-intentioned, the poles’ placement here amounted to “compassionate racism.”

Echohawk has since withdrawn her opposition. But following her complaints, then-City Council President Debora Juarez, a member of the Blackfeet Nation who grew up in Tacoma, took up the cause, leading an effort to permanently remove the totem poles. Anticipating that the Historical Commission would not approve such a move, she spoke of end-running the commission by severing the park from the Pike Place Historical District.

Discovering that totem poles aren’t endemic to these environs can be a rite of passage for newcomers (like this writer 45 years ago), which we brandish as proof of our newfound Seattle cred. Look closer, however, and the role of totem poles in local history and culture proves to be richer and more nuanced than the stereotypical narratives propounded by officials in Seattle and Tacoma. “It’s always more complex than politicians portray it to be,” says John Feodorov, a Seattle-based painter of Navajo/Diné heritage.

In 2013, amid the first attempt to withdraw the Fireman’s Park pole’s landmark status and deaccession it from Tacoma’s civic art collection, artist Qwalsius/Shaun Peterson, a member of both the Puyallup Tribe and the panel advising the city’s art commission, recounted how art historians, artists, and tribal elders all “expressed discomfort when talking about raising totem poles in Coast Salish territory.” He recalled how one outspoken elder “expressed the opinion that if Coast Salish people were to raise totems in our village, we would express to the world that we are a conquered people.” 

The conquerors, however, were not the white settlers and federal officials who forced the first residents to cede most of their lands, including the formerly Puyallup land where the pole stood. They were “the very peoples the [Coast Salish] once warred with”: the North Coast tribes, who frequently paddled south to trade, raid, and take slaves.

Alexandra Peck, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, reports mixed feelings about this cedar-embodied intertribal history in her dissertation “Totem Poles, a New Mode of Cultural Heritage?” It examines the roles of about 60 totem poles that the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe (JST) on the Olympic Peninsula has commissioned and erected around its casino and other buildings. The Haida and Tlingit influence “makes sense,” one Jamestown S’Klallam elder told Peck, because, although those tribes didn’t inhabit the region, they “acted like they owned it… and totem poles reflect that history.” Peck writes that “JST elders generally approve of the poles,” which commemorate a range of local events, personages, and themes (including gambling and golf, two elements of this entrepreneurial tribe’s success) through mixed northern and, occasionally, Coast Salish styles. 

Other tribes have criticized the Jamestown S’Klallam for using an imported art form, Peck reports, but they see the poles as bolstering tribal pride and identity. “The totems are cultural symbols telling various stories,” Ron Allen, the Jamestown Tribe’s longtime chairman, explained by email. They’re an “art that captures our identity and history.” 

“Totem poles weren’t traditional for us,” another elder told Peck, “but we’ve been doing them for over 25 years, so they’re a tradition now.”

And not just at Jamestown. Heather Pihl is a former staff coordinator at the Pike Place Market Historical Commission and current president of the watchdog group Friends of the Market, which has fought the removal of the twin poles. She tallied 40 Coast Salish tribes in Washington and southwestern British Columbia that have totem poles, some erected recently and some nearly a century ago, as well as eight city properties with poles — including the “Soul Pole” celebrating Black history at the Douglass-Truth library.

Nevertheless, last December, when the Seattle Parks Department formally proposed permanently removing the Market poles, David Graves, the strategic adviser spearheading the park renovation, explained that this was in part because “local Salish tribes created welcome figures and house poles, and so the subject poles do not represent what the local tribes created.” 

For some local Native artists this presents a false dichotomy. “To discount the 1800s and 1900s is to say our history just ended,” says Makah master carver Greg Colfax. “For many lay people ‘authenticity’ means some kind of static bubble,” argues Feodorov, who endorsed the return of the Market poles. “But it’s never been that way.” Ideas and methods get exchanged, in Native societies as elsewhere. “Navajos used abalone. They were using commercial dyes in the 1800s.” Likewise, local tribes participated in a “pan-Northwest exchange.”

Colfax argues that the locals’ totem poles have legitimacy under the traditions governing who is entitled to make poles. Beginning with the arrival of smallpox in the 1770s, waves of novel diseases devastated Native populations here. At Makah, “we went from 4,000 to 550 people,” Colfax recounts. “So who you going to marry?” Local tribespeople sought spouses up north, and many northerners came south to work in logging, fishing, canning, and hop picking, boosting intermarriage and cultural exchange. “Rituals and rights follow marriage,” Colfax explains — including the right to carve poles.

Commerce also spurred (and exploited) North Coast-style carving, here and up north. As historian David Buerge, author of a biography of Chief Seattle and forthcoming history of the Duwamish people, explains, white traders, in particular Olde Curiosity Shop founder J.E. Standley, did a global business in totem poles and other North Coast-style arts. They commissioned full-sized poles and souvenir-size miniatures from local artists, Native and nonnative alike, and from carvers brought down from the north. Railroads and other tourism boosters promoted totem poles as an exotic attraction. Formline, the characteristic graphic style of northern carving and painting, became what Peck calls “a regional pan-Indian phenomenon.” 

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration’s Works Progress Administration gave another boost, encouraging the development of “totem pole parks” as tourist attractions. But tribal carvers didn’t just make them for the money. In 1938, with WPA support, Swinomish carver Charlie Edwards embodied the tribe’s family lore in a totem pole — and topped it with a bust of President Roosevelt, reportedly to thank FDR for signing the law establishing tribal self-governance.

Twenty-six years earlier, at the Tulalip reservation, a Snohomish tribal leader named William Shelton carved his first totem pole; he went on to carve at least 15 more, including one for the state capitol grounds. His goals, he said, were “to help [the children] learn and perpetuate our customs” and, as he put it in a 1914 memoir, to mend the “broken link between my race and the white people.” In 2014, the Burke Museum brought one of Shelton’s poles back from an Illinois park for restoration; members of the Tulalip Tribes joined in welcoming it.

For more than 30 years, the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers have practiced what they call “totem pole diplomacy,” carving poles expressing various Indigenous concerns and bearing them on cross-country “Journeys,” stopping at other Native communities, along the way. After 9/11/2001, they brought a pole to Shanksville, Pennsylvania to express solidarity with the victims. In 2018, their orca-shaped pole traveled to the Miami Seaquarium to plead for the captive whale Tokitae/Lolita; another pole highlighted abuse in Indian boarding schools. In May 2021, on the eve of the final vote to topple Tacoma’s pole, the Puyallup Tribe’s Canoe Family welcomed a Lummi pole on its way to Washington, DC, to highlight the impacts of fossil-fuel industries on Native lands.

Even for Debora Juarez, totem poles could be vessels of traditional knowledge. After her 2015 election to the Seattle City Council, Juarez, offered some insight about the phrase “I’m at the bottom of the totem pole” in an interview with the Tacoma Art Museum. “One of the things I learned from Uncle Billy [Billy Frank Jr.] is that the bottom of the totem pole for many Coastal people is actually a place of honor.” Exalting the top of the pole instead “is another example of how Western sensibilities have led to a misunderstanding of Native culture. The orientation towards the sky is Christian and Western, but for Native people the place at the bottom of the totem pole touching the earth is the position of most spiritual significance.” 

For years, Coast Salish artists chafed at the ubiquity of formline and totem poles in the art market, which they saw as hindering their access to galleries, museums, and buyers. “When we were trying to introduce our art people would say, ‘What’s that?’” recalls Squaxin Island artist Andrea Wilbur-Sigo. “About 25 years ago, I was telling galleries, ‘Well, just try it and if it doesn’t sell in a few weeks I’ll take it back.’ It sold.” 

Even learning about the more streamlined Coast Salish style, with its solitary “welcoming figures” in place of multi-figured story poles, was difficult, says Wilbur-Sigo. “It wasn’t accessible. There wasn’t much in the books about Salish tradition. The art was either destroyed or put away in museums.” And so local artists started out carving poles and working in formline, and only later reclaimed and reanimated dormant traditions in the celebrated Coast Salish Renaissance, whose pioneers include Wilbur-Sigo’s’s father, Andy Wilbur Peterson. “The Northern styles were there,” explains Wilbur-Sigo, and they served as stepping stones. “That was kind of a tool to get us to where we are today.”

Victor Steinbrueck, the architect-activist who led the fights to save the Market and create the park that was later named after him, likewise chose totem poles by default, explains his daughter Lisa, a trained conservator and former Native-art gallery owner and Alaskan museum director: “The strictly Salish style was hardly starting to be resurgent then.”

That choice could also be seen as an inclusive gesture. Steinbrueck, who was all about inclusion, was determined to provide Seattle’s urban Natives, including the unhoused, a welcoming gathering place with dry shelter and a beautiful view. Many of those residents and others passing through came here from Alaska, following a migration path at least a century-and-a-half old.

Nevertheless, when David Graves, unveiled the city’s proposal to remove the totem poles last December, he framed it as “an opportunity to have the park be more inclusive to all.”