In late December 1904 an unprecedented gathering of Tlingit people took place in Sitka. Hundreds of guests from communities of Yakutat, Klukwan, Hoonah, and Angoon dressed in ceremonial regalia arrived for a four-week potlatch (koo.éex’) hosted by several houses (lineages) of the local Kaagwaantaan clan of the Eagle moiety. Despite the local American government officials’ opposition to potlatches, its hosts received permission to hold it from none other than the Governor of the Territory of Alaska, John G. Brady. However, they had to promise him and other local reformers and influential Euro-Americans that this would be the very last potlatch ever to be held in Sitka. Utilizing written and archival sources as well as the authorʼs own ethnographic data collected between 1979 and 2018, this paper examines the central role played by the memorial potlatch in Tlingit culture of the early 1900s and discusses whether the 1904 ceremony was truly the “last” potlatch. It also briefly looks at the 2004 centennial celebration of the 1904 potlatch.
Sergei Kan is a Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is the author of numerous articles and several books on the culture and history of the Tlingit people, Native American ethnology, ethnohistory, history of anthropology, and anthropology of death and dying, including Symbolic Immortality: Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century, and Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries.
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