[sapir] social organization OF THE WEST COAST TRIBES 371 



the mother clan. The clan can, indeed, be arranged in the form of a 

 genealogical tree and the crests stratified. The older the crest, the 

 greater number of times is it found in the various clans; on the other 

 hand, a crest found in only one clan may be suspected to be of recent 

 origin, as it probably does not antedate the severance of its clan from 

 the older group originally including it. 



Whatever may have been its origin, the crest seems to have 

 become, to a large extent, a symbol of greatness, and it became the 

 desire of the chiefs to add to their prestige by the acquisition of new 

 crests. They were not only obtained by inheritance, but could be 

 secured as gifts, or even by forcible means in war. The fact that the 

 name of the clan does not as a rule refer to a totem also seems to 

 indicate that the clan may not, to begin with, be organically con- 

 nected with a particular crest. That the clansmen are not conceived 

 of as descended from one of their crest animals, and that there seem to 

 be no taboos in force against the eating or killing of the crest animals, 

 need not matter, for these are by no means constant features of even 

 typical totemic societies. 



There is another feature of the crests of the West Coast Indians 

 which accentuates their difference from typical clan totems. This 

 is the tendency they have to be thought of in very concrete terms, as 

 carvings or paintings. It would in many cases, for instance, be more 

 correct to say that a certain chief uses a ceremonial hat representing 

 the Beaver, or that he has the right to paint the Thunder-bird on the 

 outside of his house, than that he possesses the Beaver or Thunder- 

 bird crest or totem. His justification for the use of these would be a 

 legend, telling of how one of his ancestors gained the privilege by 

 contact with the crest animals — a type of legend which is told to ac- 

 count for the use of nearly all crests. We see more clearly now why 

 earlier in this paper I referred to crests as a particular type of an in- 

 heritable privilege. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the 

 Kwakiutl term for crest seems to denote primarily a carving. 



Crests are shown or utilized in different ways. They may be 

 painted on movable boards used as screens or otherwise, painted on 

 the outside of the house or along the bed platform, carved on the 

 house-posts or beams, or on memorial columns, or on the outside 

 house-posts popularly known as totem poles, tattooed on the body, 

 painted on the face during feasts, represented in dance-hats, masks, 

 staffs, or other ceremonial paraphernalia, woven in ceremonial robes, 

 referred to in clan legends, dramatically represented at potlatches in 

 performances based on such legends, referred to in songs owned by the 

 clan or clan-chiefs, and in individual or house names. Not all house 

 names, however, refer to a crest. The village and clan nam.es are 



