From 1885 to 1951, the government of Canada made it a criminal offense to hold or attend a potlatch, the ceremonial gift-giving feast at the center of Tlingit, Haida and neighboring Northwest Coast religious and legal life. The ban was added to the Indian Act in 1884 at the urging of missionaries and Indian agents who saw the potlatch as an obstacle to converting Indigenous people to Christianity and to individual wage labor, and it targeted exactly the occasions, name-taking, marriage, mourning, the raising of a pole, at which clan history, crest ownership and ceremonial law were publicly transacted. In Haida Gwaii, part of British Columbia and so directly under the ban, potlatches went on in secret and in modified, harder to prosecute forms for the better part of seventy years; enforcement was uneven and the law's own vague wording helped many escape conviction, but confiscated regalia, masks and coppers taken during the small number of prosecutions that did succeed were rarely returned. Tlingit communities in Alaska, under United States rather than Canadian jurisdiction, faced no identical statute but lived under comparable pressure from missionaries and federal boarding schools that treated potlatching and other ceremonial life as backward practices to be educated out of a generation of children.
Canada repealed the ban in 1951. Ku.eex' among the Tlingit and the potlatch among the Haida are living institutions again today, openly held, and the historical study of the law itself, drawing on court records, missionary correspondence and government files, has become part of how both nations now tell the story of what the ban cost and what survived it.