totem pole, Luke Watson

The artist is Luke Watson, active in Canada, died 1948. The work is a totem pole, created in 1937. The work was made with wood, paint, and carving.

This totem pole is a tall, wooden column carved with the faces of people and animals stacked on top of each other. It is carved from the trunk of a single tree and stands about eight and half feet tall. It has been flattened on one side and is displayed on a low platform with the flattened side against the wall. The carved pole protrudes about a foot from the wall and is about a foot wide. The surface of the carved wood is smooth. It is painted the warm neutral of a slightly grayed old ivory with features of the creatures outlined in black, red, and green. The scale of the animals and humans increases from the top of the pole to the bottom. At the top is a small, seal-like animal that sits on the head of a bird with a hooked beak. The top of a human’s head presses up under the bird’s beak, and the human leans back into the bird’s chest, between its wings. The human’s hands wrap around the fin-like protrusions of the creature below, which faces down with the top of its head toward the flattened back side of the pole. The animal’s eyes, nose, and mouth full of large teeth are on the sides of the totem pole. It balances nose-down on the back of a human who stares straight ahead with legs drawn up under it and hands gripping the brow of the animal on which he squats. That animal has fin-like shapes protruding from between its side teeth and a seal-like animal protruding out and down from between its front teeth. On the back of the seal-like animal are the flippers of the creature above. Below the seal-like animal is a creature with 12 violet legs, 6 on either side of a segmented body and head. The multi-legged animal’s head points down to a large creature at the base of the pole. This large creature sits with its back knees drawn up and its forelegs grasping the back of a large bird that emerges from the seated animal’s mouth with its head facing down. The look of the carved creatures combines recognizable natural-looking features with highly stylized ones. Humans and animals share heavy black brows, wide red mouths, and wide-open eyes that are pointed on either side and have large, round, black irises. A pale green appears in large patches around the eyes of animals at the top, middle, and bottom of the pole and in smaller shapes up and down the length of the pole. The only other color on the pole is the muted violet of the 12 slender, jointed legs of one of the creatures.

The Haida of the Pacific Northwest Coast never developed a written language, relying instead on oral history to transmit cultural, historic, and personal knowledge. Their rich artistic traditions, which include carving, weaving, and basketmaking, also use form line symbols, like those seen on this totem pole, to encode messages. In fact, most Haida poles are carved for one of four general purposes: to record the ancestry of a specific family, document the history of a clan, illustrate Haida folklore, or memorialize a single individual. Read from the top down, this folklore pole depicts two traditional stories that provide insight into Haida morality, history, religion, and ecological understanding.

This totem pole comes from the Native American Haida (HI-duh) clan from the Pacific Northwest United States. It tells two stories through the people and animals shown on it. See if you can find each figure or animal as you read the descriptions below. About the art The top portion portrays the Nanasimgyet myth. In this story, a man named Nanasimgyet (fifth from the top of the totem) gives his wife (third from the top) a sea otter (top figure) to clean and skin. As she works at the water’s edge, she is captured and taken below the sea. With the help of an orca whale (sixth from the top of the totem), Nanasimgyet journeys underwater to free his wife and returns home with her. The second legend is the Qagwaii, or “Strong Man,” tale. According to the Haida tradition, a young boy receives a magical halibut (a type of fish) skin that allows him to transform into this type of fish. While traveling in halibut form, the boy encounters many characters, including a giant crab (third from the bottom of the totem). Eventually, the boy has to return the halibut skin because his grandfather only let him borrow it. About the animals Sea otters are one of the only animals that use tools. They mainly use rocks to help them crack open the crabs that they eat. This is the end of our animal “tails”, but there are lots of other works of art in the Museum to observe! Try using some of the tricks you learned in this tour to look at another artwork. You can also use this app when you get home to look back at all the animals you encountered today.