“The most important winter dance among the [Kwakwaka´wakw] was that of the Hamatsa society. The Hamatsa complex originated among the Haisla, the northern [Kwakwaka´wakw] group at Kitlope, which was apparently the center for the dissemination of this dramatic dance complex. In recent times it was borrowed by the Tsimshian and the Haida of Skidegate. The Nootka and Tlingit alone are not recorded as having adopted it.
The popularity of this performance resulted from its complex cast of characters and the dramatic ritual, which took at least four days to complete.” (Hawthorn, A., Kwakiutl Art, 1979, p. 45)
Based upon legends of the bird-monsters who inhabited the sky-world, the Hamatsa masks, of which the present one is an eloquent and noteworthy example representing Gwaxwgwakwalanuksiwe', the man-eating raven, are used in the tseyka, or the red cedar bark ceremony, and are among the most dramatic of Kwakwaka´wakw sculpture.
The present work was acquired by Gaston and Anna-Lou de Havenon between 1968 and 1969 upon the advice of Bill Reid who was at the time traveling with them on Vancouver Island. Reid attributed it to Chief Willie Seaweed, one of the most celebrated and influential Kwakwaka’wakw sculptors of modern times.
Willie Seaweed – his Kwak’wala familiar name is translated as “Smoky-Top”, suggesting a volcano – was chief of the Nak’waxda’xw. “Seaweed is a chief’s name meaning “paddle owner” (the one who received paddling : that is, when everyone paddles up to big potlaches and feast at this place, he is the honored recipient of that paddling).
His ceremonial name was Hehlamas, “making things right”. His nickname, which everybody knew him by, was Kwagitola, ‘smoke on the top’, like a volcano. And a lot of people called him “that old man”. He was an old man – very likeable, well known, a really great actor, comedian, composer, song-leader, carver, painter – a great guy.
He probably started carving when he was young, around twenty, even earlier, in the 1880s, though the earliest piece we can identify for certain was made about 1910. It’s fully developed, so he must have been carving long before that. I think he’d been carving for twenty or thirty years by the time he made a piece we know for sure was his…His style has some relationship to Northern style, but isn’t Northern. It’s a development of a northern Vancouver Island or southern Kwakiutl [Kwakwaka´wakw] style. There were three or four carvers at Blunden Harbour and Smith Inlet who, if they didn’t actually work together, at least influenced one another. Some of their work is a little hard to tell from Willie Seaweed’s, but you can always tell…Everything was very direct with him. If he made a straight line or a parallel-sided thing, that’s exactly what it was. A little curve was deliberate – no wobbling. If the eyebrows were recurving, they came along, wurrrp – like that. Some just swooped up. Yet, with all this precision, all this thought given to design and form, his work wasn’t static in any way. “ (Bill Holm, in Holm, B. and Reid, B., Indian Art of the Northwest Coast. A Dialogue on Craftmanship and Aesthetics, 1975, p. 253)
“Willie Seaweed was born in a cedar plank house on the shores of an inlet that knew only canoe travel…and by the time he died unmanned space craft were landing on the moon. He lived through a century of rapid and disruptive change during which the very foundations of his society were being questioned, his people dislocated, divided and proselytized, their traditional economic pursuits eliminated and their ceremonies suppressed. Seaweed nevertheless lived a full and productive life through all of it, and was honored by his people and by outsiders. His legacy extends beyond the objects he produced, most of which have now been retired to museums and private collections.” (Ames, M., Bill Holm, Willie Seaweed and the Problem of Northwest Coast Indian “Art” : a Review Article, BC Studies, n°64, 1984-85, p. 80)
Several comparable examples to our present mask have been reproduced by Bill Holm in his homage work Smoky-Top : the Art and Times of Willie Seaweed, 1983, figs. 55 to 62. Among the works reproduced by Holm are included also works supposedly undistinguishable from Seaweed’s work, that he nevertheless attributed to the Blunden Harbour school, comprising apprentices or collaborators of Willie Seaweed, such as his son Joe Seaweed or Charlie George Sr.