TOTEM POLES OF THE GITKSAN, UPPER SKEENA RIVER, 
BRITISH COLUMBIA 
INTRODUCTION 
Totem poles were once a characteristic form of plastic art among 
the tribes of the North West Coast, in British Columbia and southern 
Alaska. The natives took pride in them and strained every nerve to 
make them worthy symbols of their own social standing and achievements. 
They were also discriminating judges of the qualities of a carver’s work. 
This art now belongs to the past. Ancient customs and racial stamina 
are on the wane everywhere, even in their former strongholds. Totem 
poles are no longer made. Many of them have fallen from old age; they 
have decayed and disappeared. Some have been sold, cut down, and 
removed to museums or public parks. Others have been destroyed by 
the owners themselves in the course of hysterical revivals under a spurious 
banner of Christianity.^ Only a few of these relics of the past remain among 
the Haidas of Qu^en Charlotte islands — -where they were most numerous — 
or the Kwakiutl of the main coast, farther south. Less than thirty poles, 
most of them among the best, are scattered in deserted villages along the 
Nass. Some of the Tlingit poles, on the Alaskan coast, are being pre- 
served under the direction of the Department of Education of the United 
States. 
The only collection that still stands fairly intact is that of the Gitksan 
nation, on upper Skeena river, in northern British Columbia. It consists 
of over one hundred poles, in isolated clusters of from a few to over thirty, 
in the eight tribal villages of the upper Skeena. 
The poles of the Gitksan — more than one hundred and nine of which 
are described in this volume — -are not all of the finest and most valuable, 
but they are among the tallest, ranging, on an average, between 15 feet 
and 60 feet in height. Not a few are old, archaic, very crude, and only 
partly carved. They occur chiefly far inland, on the edge of the area 
of totem pole diffusion. Nowhere, except on the Nass and the Skeena, 
are poles found any distance inland. The Gitksan carvers w^ere on the 
whole less skilful than their Nass River kinsmen, or the Haidas of Queen 
Charlotte islands. Yet their art bids fair to become the best known, 
and, therefore, the most representative and typical, through the sheer 
accident of their survival to the present day. The Department of Indian 
Affairs began, in 1925, the work of their preservation. Others and possibly 
better ones elsewhere have vanished without leaving a trace, and are lost 
to history. 
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE POLES 
The tribal villages of the Gitksan, where we find the totem poles, 
stand on the banks of the upper Skeena or, within a short distance, on three 
of its tributaries. Their picturesque strangeness and e.xotic charm are 
lOne of the finest groups of poles was thus destroyed at Gitlarhdamks on the upper Naas, in the winter of 1917 
or 1918; that of Port Simpson, a few years later. 
