The Potlatch: Wealth Given Away

The feast preparations begin months before the feast itself.

The host chief — who may be marking a marriage, a death, a coming of age, the raising of a totem pole, the transmission of a hereditary name — has been gathering everything he owns and everything his family can contribute. Blankets by the hundreds. Canoes. Baskets of eulachon grease. The most valuable things: the great sheets of hammered copper, the tináa, which are worth hundreds of blankets each and which carry the history of the families that have owned them.

He gathers all of it to give it away.

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The guests come from neighboring villages, from families who are witnesses, from peoples who are rivals. The feast is also a political and legal event: everything that happens in a potlatch happens in front of witnesses, and the witnesses’ acknowledgment is what makes the transactions real. When a chief transmits a hereditary name to his son at a potlatch, the transmission is legally valid because the witnesses saw it and accepted gifts in exchange for their witnessing.

The gifts are the law.

The feast begins. Food comes first — elaborate and abundant, because abundance is what is being demonstrated. Then the giving starts. The host calls out names and designations, and blankets are thrown, canoes are given, baskets of oil are carried to specific families. The copper sheets are produced last — the highest-value gifts, the ones that can only be received by chiefs of corresponding rank.

Some potlatches end with the host destroying coppers, breaking the most valuable items rather than giving them, because the act of destruction demonstrates a power beyond giving — the power of someone so abundant that they can afford to simply break what others would accumulate.

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The government banned the potlatch in 1885 because the missionaries and Indian agents correctly understood that it was the opposite of everything they were trying to install.

They were trying to install: private property, individual accumulation, the nuclear family as economic unit, the Protestant work ethic, the belief that saving and accumulating was virtue and giving away was vice.

The potlatch said: the person of greatest virtue gives the most. Status belongs to the generous. Wealth is a temporary holding between giftings, not a permanent possession. The family is a web of obligation that extends far beyond the nuclear unit. The community exists through acts of giving.

These are genuinely incompatible systems.

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The potlatch was practiced secretly through the decades of the ban. Families hid their regalia and held ceremonies in the winter when agents were less present. The knowledge was maintained. When the ban was lifted in 1951, the potlatches came back fully, and the century of regalia confiscated by the Canadian government (and distributed to museums in Ottawa, Toronto, New York, and London) became the focus of one of the most sustained repatriation efforts in Indigenous history.

The coppers came home.

The names came home.

The potlatch continues.

The host chief today gives away everything he has accumulated, as his grandfather did and his grandfather’s grandfather did, and the witnesses receive the gifts and acknowledge what has been witnessed, and the law is renewed.