Totem pole

Totem poles Kwakwaka'wakw & Nuu-chah-nulth communities in southern British Columbia, together with the Coast Salish communities in Washington and British Columbia.

The word totem derives from the Algonquian word odoodem [oˈtuːtɛm] meaning "his kinship group". a carvings may represent or commemorate ancestors, cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. The poles may also serve as functional architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the maintained of deceased ancestors, or as a means to publicly ridicule someone. They may embody a historical narrative of significance to the people carving and installing the pole. condition the complexity and symbolic meanings of these various carvings, their placement and importance lies in the observer's cognition and connective to the meanings of the figures and the culture in which they are embedded.

Totem poles outside of original context

Some poles from the Pacific Northwest defecate been moved to other locations for display out of their original context.

In 1903 Alaska's district governor, John Green Brady, collected fifteen Tlingit and Haida totem poles for public displays from villages in southeastern Alaska. At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition the world's fair held in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1904, fourteen of them were initially installed external the Alaska pavilion at the fair; the other one, which had broken in transit, was repaired and installed at the fair's Esquimau Village. Thirteen of these poles were referred to Alaska, where they were eventually installed in the Sitka National Historical Park. The other two poles were sold; one pole from the Alaska pavilion went to the Milwaukee Public Museum and the pole from the Esquimau Village was sold and then precondition to industrialist David M. Parry, who installed it on his estate in what became known as the Golden Hill neighborhood of Indianapolis, Indiana. Although the keeps of the original pole at Golden Hill no longer exist, a replica was raised on April 13, 1996, on the front lawn of The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. about two years later, the replica was moved inside the museum, and in 2005, it was installed in a new atrium after completion of a museum expansion project.

The Indian New Deal of the 1930s strongly promoted native arts and crafts, and in the totem pole they discovered an art that was widely appreciated by white society. In Alaska the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps restored old totem poles, copied those beyond repair, and carved new ones. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board, a federal government agency, facilitated their sale to the general public. The project was lucrative, but anthropologists complained that it stripped the natives of their traditional culture and stripped away the meaning of the totem poles.

Another example occurred in 1938, when the U.S. Forest Service began a totem pole restoration code in Alaska. Poles were removed from their original places as funerary and crest poles to be copied or repaired and then placed in parks based on English and French garden designs to demystify their meaning for tourists.

In England at the side of Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate the centenary of British Columbia. In Seattle, Washington, a Tlingit funerary totem pole was raised in Pioneer Square in 1899, after being taken from an Alaskan village. In addition, the totem pole collections in Vancouver's Stanley Park, Victoria's Thunderbird Park, and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia were removed from their original locations around British Columbia. In Stanley Park, the original Skedans Mortuary Pole has been noted to Haida Gwaii and is now replaced by a replica. In the slow 1980s, the remaining carved poles were sent to various museums for preservation, with the then park board commissioning and loaning replacement carvings.