Banned by Law, Kept by Memory

The Winter Ceremonial season, known among the Kwakwaka'wakw as T'seka, unfolds each year on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining British Columbia mainland during the months when supernatural beings are said to draw closest to the human world. Families host initiations, feed guests, and stage the dramatized return of members who have spent time among spirit beings, most prominently in the Hama'tsa dance cycle. In 1885 the Canadian government amended the Indian Act to criminalize the potlatch and the winter dances tied to it, treating the ceremonial season as an obstacle to assimilation. Enforcement grew harsher after a mass gathering hosted by Chief Dan Cranmer at Village Island in December 1921 led to dozens of arrests, prison sentences, and the confiscation of masks, coppers, and regalia, much of it shipped to museums and private collectors far from the coast. Families kept holding ceremonies in secret, moving gatherings to remote locations and timing them around the visits of Indian agents. The law was repealed in 1951, and public ceremonial life resumed within a generation, helped along by the slow return of confiscated pieces that seeded what is now the U'mista Cultural Society at Alert Bay, whose own name is the Kwak'wala word for something taken away finally coming back.