2001
In Kwakwaka'wakw society in British Columbia, masks are part of the symbolic heritage of a noble or a chief. The mask presented here is a late 19th century transformation mask sculpted from a piece of cedar wood and taken from the collection in the Musée de l'Homme. It reveals the being's double nature : closed, it represents a crow, open it represents a human face with a hooked nose. These transformation masks, ancestral manifestations of the spirits, are associated with a myth, a dance, a costume. They appear during religious or theatre representations and at potlatches, great meetings for the transmission of privileges. Long suppressed, Amerindian culture and art were rediscovered by the ethnologists E. Curtis and F. Boas, by the surrealists and Claude Lévy-Strauss in exile in New York in the 1940s. Bill Holm, a specialist in Indian art, analyses this mask. A mask sculptor speaks about the shapes and motifs and in particular the egg shape, basis of all creation. Finally, a sculptor and dancer tells the legend of the crow which brought the tlasala dance, a dance of peace associated with the flood.