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Totem poles and houses at ʼKsan, near Hazelton, British Columbia.. Totem poles serve as important illustrations of family lineage and the cultural heritage of the Indigenous peoples in the islands and coastal areas of North America's Pacific Northwest, especially British Columbia, Canada, and coastal areas of Washington and southeastern Alaska in the United States.
Kwakwaka'wakw totem pole carvers such as Charlie James, Mungo Martin, Ellen Neel, and Willie Seaweed kept the art alive and also carved masks, furniture, bentwood boxes, and jewelry. Haida carvers include Charles Edenshaw, Bill Reid, and Robert Davidson.
Detail of a Tlingit totem pole, Ketchikan, Alaska. Alaska Native cultures are rich and diverse, and their art forms are representations of their history, skills, tradition, adaptation, and nearly twenty thousand years of continuous life in some of the most remote places on earth.
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Poles are placed outside family houses where they display the family's crests, history, wealth, social rank, inheritance, and privilege. [22] The sequence of characters and symbols sculpted into a totem pole is indicative of past family events, ancestors, myths, and heraldic crests, with the bottom figure usually being the most prominent. [23]
Totem poles, a type of Northwest Coast art. Northwest Coast art is the term commonly applied to a style of art created primarily by artists from Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and other First Nations and Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America, from pre-European-contact times up to the present.
The Pole of Sag̱aw̓een was carved by Oyee to commemorate Chief Sag̱aw̓een from the Eagle tribe (Gitlaxluuks clan). At 81 feet (25 m) tall, this pole is the tallest pole carved on the Nass River. It stood in the village of Gitiks alongside two other Eagle poles: first, the Eagle's Nest Pole, and later in 1885, joined by the Halibut Pole of Laay.
The totem pole could not be read like a book, knowledge of the stories and legends was required beforehand by the observer before they could understand the specific meaning of the assemblage of symbols and characters on the pole. Crests and totemic symbols provided context to the reader, and based upon the appearance and patterns of the ...