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Totem poles and houses at ʼKsan, near Hazelton, British Columbia.. Totem poles serve as important illustrations of family lineage and the cultural heritage of the Indigenous peoples in the islands and coastal areas of North America's Pacific Northwest, especially British Columbia, Canada, and coastal areas of Washington and southeastern Alaska in the United States.
Totem poles, a type of Northwest Coast art. Northwest Coast art is the term commonly applied to a style of art created primarily by artists from Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and other First Nations and Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America, from pre-European-contact times up to the present.
The sisiutl is a legendary creature found in many cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, notably the Kwakwakaʼwakw. [1] Typically, it is depicted as a double-headed sea serpent. Sometimes, the symbol features an additional central face of a supernatural being.
The totem poles of the Pacific Northwestern Indigenous peoples of North America are carved, monumental poles featuring many different designs (bears, birds, frogs, people, and various supernatural beings and aquatic creatures). They serve multiple purposes in the communities that make them.
The totem poles carved normally tell a story, and Tlingit artists carve subjects like animals into the totem poles. These pictures are aligned in a column down the pole, in order from top to bottom. The poles are put on outside corners of "traditional dwellings", used to structurally support their interiors, or placed on shores.
It is frequently depicted in the art, songs, and oral histories of many Pacific Northwest Coast cultures, [citation needed] but is also found in various forms among some peoples of the American Southwest, [citation needed] US East Coast, [citation needed] Great Lakes, [1] and Great Plains.
While the art forms were and still are as different as the cultures of the Native people who made them – Athabaskan Indians of the vast Interior, Inupiaq of the Northwestern Arctic coasts; Yupik and St. Lawrence Island Yupik of the Bering Sea coast; Aleuts and Alutiiq people from the Aleutian islands; and the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian ...
The reputation of a pole's maker depended on the quality of his work. The Kwakwaka'wakw style of totem uses more protruding elements than other Northwest coast totems, such as stretching limbs, beaks jutting out, and wings thrust away from the body of the pole. [24] Painting followed a scheme of alternating dark and light colors for contrast.