Writing the Hamat'sa

Long known as the Cannibal Dance, the Hamatsa is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwakawakw of British Columbia. In the late nineteenth century, as anthropologists arrived to document the practice, colonial agents were pursuing its eradication and Kwakwakawakw were adapting it to endure. In the process, the dance with dramatic choreography, magnificent bird masks, and an aura of cannibalism entered a vast library of ethnographic texts. Writing the Hamatsa offers a critical survey of attempts to record, describe, and interpret the dance over four centuries. Going beyond postcolonial critiques of representation that often ignore Indigenous agency in the ethnographic encounter, Writing the Hamatsa focuses on forms of textual mediation and Indigenous response that helped transofrm the ceremony from a set of specific performances into a generalized cultural icon. This meticulous work illuminates how Indigenous people contribute to, contest, and repurpose texts in the process of fashioning modern identities under settler colonialism.