Totem Poles
by Jon Burch Photography
Title
Totem Poles
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Capture
Description
One of Stanley Park's most-visited tourist attractions in British Columbia is the totem-pole display at Brockton Point. Begun in the early 1920's with just four totems from Vancouver Island's Alert Bay region, the display grew over the decades to include totems from the Queen Charlotte Islands and Rivers Inlet on British Columbia's central coast. Some of the original totem poles were carved as early as the late 1880's and have been sent to museums for preservation; others were commissioned or loaned to the park between 1986 and 1992.
Totem poles are typically carved from the trunks of western red cedar trees, which decay eventually in the rain forest environment of the Northwest Coast. Few examples of poles carved before 1900 therefore exist. Noteworthy examples include those at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, dating as far back as 1880. While 18th-century accounts of European explorers along the coast indicate that poles existed prior to 1800, they were smaller and fewer in number than in subsequent decades.
The freestanding poles seen by the first European explorers were likely preceded by a long history of monumental carving, particularly of interior house posts. Totem poles progressed from house posts, funerary containers, and memorial markers into symbols of clan and family wealth and prestige. The Haida people of the islands of Haida Gwaii originated carving of the poles, and that the practice spread outward to the Tsimshian and Tlingit, and then down the coast to the tribes of British Columbia and northern Washington.
Image copyright 2014 Jon Burch Photography
Uploaded
September 13th, 2014
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