Writing the Hamat'sa

Long known as the Cannibal Dance, the Hamat̓sa is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw of British Columbia. Drawing on published texts, extensive archival research, and fieldwork, Writing the Hamat̓sa offers a critical survey of attempts to record, interpret, and prohibit the ceremony. Such textual mediation and Indigenous response over four centuries helped transform the Hamat̓sa from a set of specific practices. into a generalized cultural icon. This meticulous work illuminates how Indigenous people contribute to, contest, and repurpose texts in the process of fashioning modern identities under settler colonialism.

“Aaron Glass explores the multifaceted history of the Hamatša dance from an intercultural, intertextual viewpoint, demonstrating how it has circulated in various contexts for more than a century. This extraordinary work is fundamentally an ethnography of anthropology itself.”, “Writing the Hamatša incorporates probably every single text ever published on what is famously known as the Cannibal Dance. This is one of the best contributions to Northwest Coast anthropology, to the history of anthropology, and to Franz Boas’s rendition of ethnographic data available today.”

Aaron Glass is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center, New York City. He is co-author, with Aldona Jonaitis, of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History; editor of Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast; and co-editor, wiht Brad Evans, of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. His documentary films include In Search of the Hamat̓sa: A Tale of Headhunting.