CEREMONY, COMMERCE AND ART
The tradition of making Tlingit and Haida pipes is rich with history and cultural significance.
The tradition of making Tlingit and Haida pipes is rich with history and cultural significance.
In the North Pacific, from the farthest reach of the Tlingit country at Yakutat Bay southward past the bottom tip of Haida Gwaii, the peoples of the coastland have carved pipes as elaborate as those found anywhere in the world. Although pipes were made in historic times at various locations throughout the Pacific Northwest, the pipes from the Tlingit and Haida in the northernmost region of the North Pacific Coast show highly embellished forms that are nearly unique to that region. They are as rich in artistic embellishment, and as versatile in both form and application, as any arts for which people have been renowned. Yet when compared with the more prominently recognized arts of the coast, little is commonly known about the region’s historic pipes, and how they were made and used. What is known is often clouded by misinformation both old and new.
In the 16th century, European colonists acquired domesticated species of tobacco in the West Indies. Through Russian trade, these new species were diffused across Siberia and to Alaska by the late 1700s. When Russian tobacco and pipes were introduced to the Northwest Coast in the late-18th century, Northern groups were already familiar with milder, naturallyoccurring Nicotiana quadrivalvis—and perhaps also the Nicotiana attenuata that grew further to the south—but they did not practice smoking them. Their consumption of tobacco was accomplished through sucking on pellets fashioned from a mixture of tobacco with a paste of crushed and burnt abalone shells (lime). Smoke had long been established in Northwest Coast myth and ritual tradition as a supernatural medium for communicating with the land of the dead and other cosmological realms, and so the ritual consumption of tobacco through the newly introduced method of smoking would have likely seemed logical. The traditional consumption of tobacco pellets declined, displaced by pipe smoking in potlatches, housebuilding and memorial feasts.
In his definitive and long-unpublished study of
the historic Tlingit, The Tlingit Indians, edited and published by Frederica de Laguna in 1991, George Emmons suggested that historic tobacco consumption by the peoples of the Northern Coast was exclusive to ritual and ceremonial use. The forms of many of the pipes made in the region reflect this context. Like much of Northern iconography, the carvings on many Tlingit and Haida pipes depict the individually owned and validated crests or emblems that made both their mythologies and their social structures visible to all who had been initiated into them.
An inspection of early pipes from the northernmost part of the coast reveals some of the most appealing elements of the Northwest Coast carving of crests and emblems. Symbolic animal and human figures are clustered around, and interwoven into the body of the objects into which they are carved, and figures emerge from the surface and recede into the baroque abstraction of their immediate neighbors. There is monumentality in the simplicity of their forms, and at times an unparalleled formal clarity. The overall design of many of the pipes varies greatly, but their materials are often consistent. Detachable stems were used, and surviving examples are typically made of wood and appear to have been unembellished and utilitarian in form. Few have survived for reference. While some pipes feature inlay of Haliotis shell, usually traded from warmer southern waters, most ceremonial Tlingit and Haida pipes are not embellished with inlay. Although many northern pipes are made of woods regional to the coast, rare examples exist in other materials such as bone and ivory. Many pipes are made from salvaged wood and other materials that became available through trade. Muskets, particularly cheaply-made trade guns, would often foul and required maintenance and repair, and likely as a result many were cannibalized for their materials. Walnut or beech gun stocks were particularly suited to fine carving done on pipe bodies, while sections of gun barrel produced fire-proof bowls. In other instances, scraps of brass from kettles, gun cartridges and other sources were used to clad bowls and bowl tops, employed to prolong the life of pipes that were exposed to the indiscriminate heat of charcoal during the process of lighting.
There has been some speculation about symbolic
meanings, or intent, in the various fixtures of wooden pipes. Particularly, attention has been drawn to the often protruding bowl cladding, a short cylindrical stack that extends above the body of many Northern pipes. According to Bill Holm, the placement of protruding cladding on the pipes of the coast is too varied to be considered a definite reference to the rings of potlatch hats. However, Holm acknowledges that there are some instances where the cutting of evenly spaced horizontal grooves on a cylinder makes the allusion to rings undeniable.
Although historic pipes made by both the Haida and Tlingit for their own use were limited to ceremonial applications and designs, numerous pipes were made for trade and sale in traditional materials, but with non-traditional motifs. In the early-19th century, the trade in sea otter skins was declining and many of the coast peoples were no doubt anxious to find alternatives, in order to maintain a supply of Euroamerican trade articles. Tailor-made goods, pipes among them, were created to meet this need. In these pipes, distinctly Euro-american forms and motifs abound. Sideburn-bearing men and foliate clusters of tobacco leaves appear on many Tlingit and Haida examples, which seem to mimic clay and meerschaum pipes made and smoked by Euro-americans during the period. These pipes are difficult for the contemporary eye to identify as being from the Northwest Coast by their form alone. The pipes betray their origin only in subtle points of adherence to elements of Northwest Coast design, not least of which is their typically exacting symmetry.
In addition to Tlingit and Haida pipes manufactured for trade in the 19th century from traditional materials, pipes were often made in argillite, the earliest known examples employed traditional Hadia designs. The historic carving of argillite pipes was almost exclusively done by the Haida, and the quarrying of Argillite in the 19th century was the right of only one Haida Skidegate Eagle Clan. Their magnificently carved panels of highly polished, jetblack, carbonaceous shale are brittle once finely carved, and ill-suited to smoking. So although argillite will withstand the heat of smoking, argillite pipes were not intended to be smoked, but rather purchased. Such pipes have subsequently been
collected as curios, and in more recent years, as works of expressive art. In these pipes, elements most associated with the arts of the Northern Coast are on display in the finest examples: the rearrangement and manipulation of animals’ anatomy in order to fill the visual field, an interweaving of animal and human figures, and abstraction tempered by the retention of readily identifiable features.
The artistic qualities of argillite pipes have made them avidly collected, and they have been continuously purchased by seamen, missionaries, traders, museum collectors and tourists on the coast throughout the 19th century until the present day. A persistent piece of misinformation regarding the early history of argillite carving is that the craft was substantially influenced, or directly built upon, the tradition of scrimshaw brought to the coast by Euro-american whalers. There is little to no information to support this position. As Carol Sheehan observes in her 1981 book on Haida argillite sculpture, Pipes that Won’t Smoke; Coal That Won’t Burn, it is worth noting that the first scrimshandered whale teeth to reach the harbor museums on the Northwest Coast arrived in the year 1829, 11 years after the first Haida-carved argillite pipe reached a museum in Berlin.
Early in the carving of argillite pipes, Euro-americas motifs were developed and were carved adjacent to more traditional Haida designs. So-called “shippipes” were popular in the mid-19th century; these pipes were sometimes minimallyembellished and representational carvings of steam vessels, but other
times were broken up and baroquely abstracted in a manner reminiscent of traditional Haida forms. Some argillite designs that initially appear traditional do not correspond with traditional motifs upon closer inspection. Many Haida carvers were doubtless, not about to give away objects bearing their individually owned and validated crests and emblems. It interesting to note that this disinclination and subsequent solution has often occurred in contact between disparate cultures. The British Empire in the Eastern North America gave silver military-style gorgets to their Indigenous allies only after nullifying them as indicators of office by the inscription of a nonsensical variation on the royal cipher.
Such decisions on the part of Haida carvers may also have represented artistic playfulness. Knowing full well that their Euro-american customers would be unable to distinguish the authentically meaningful designs from the nonsensical, it would have opened their field of expression to possibilities previously not available.
Objects carved in argillite carried some of the highest prices of curios sold in the Pacific Northwest. Despite this, and while they were the subject of some of the most intense enthusiasm of the 19th century collectors, the bias of many early institutional collectors was against them. In the 1880s the prolific Port Townsend-based collector and Indian agent James G. Swan succeeded in selling much of the argillite he collected to the Smithsonian only after his persistent pleading, while in 1915 a Queen Charlotte island Indian Agent, Thomas Deasy, was forced to sell his collection of 600 argillite carvings—then the largest collection of argillite made on the coast—to a private American collector upon failing to sell it to both the national and B.C. provincial museums. Historic and modern argillite pipes by Northwest Coast carvers have come to be seen as a significant and multifaceted art form, representative of the social acumen and artistic ingenuity of their carvers. The finest carvings are now the prized possessions of both private collectors and public institutions. The topic of modern pipe carvers from the North Pacific Coast could scarcely be touched upon in even a lengthy article of its own. The study of historic pipes carved on the North Pacific Coast is a fascinating and rewarding one. Each time I return to the subject I find my way illuminated by the ingenuity and skill of the artists who produced these powerful and sophisticated objects of ceremony, commerce and artistic expression.