Baxbaxwalanuksiwe

During the winter months the Kwakwaka'wakw people of the of the Pacific Coast of North America conduct a series festivals centered around ceremonial performances. This period is inaugurated and concluded with the Hamatsa. At the start of winter an adolescent male of a high-ranking bloodline is taken away from the community and brought into the surrounding woods. There he stays in seclusion for several months were he is to channel the spirit Baxbaxwalanuksiwe, translated as (Man eater at the north end of the world). The young male initiate’s first appearance back in the community is at a performance that closes these winter festivals. In this performance he is not the boy who had left months before. Emerging from behind a screen drapped in hemlock branches from the forest he dances clockwise around a central fire as the wild Man eater Baxbaxwalanuksiwe. other dancers, representing the supernatural man eating eagles and cranes of heaven flank the initiate. Over the duration of the dance the Man eater is tamed by Men of the tribe who strip the branches from him and place large rings of cedar around him. At the end of the ceremony the initiate is no longer a boy, nor Baxbaxwalanuksiwe, but has an entirely new identity with in Kwakwaka'wakw the community.

Anthropologist Franz Boas upon first studying the Kwakwaka'wakw in the 1880's mistranslated and mis-termed the Hamat'sa as the cannibal dance, and the Kwakwaka'wakw as Kwakiutl which was only the name of the small Kwakwaka'wakw community were he had worked. Boas also posed in photographs as the Hamatsa Initiate, replacing the screen with a hoop, and ceremonial costumes with household blankets.(these are photos he posted of himself) Boas even organized abbreviated performances of the dance for exhibitions in major cities. The Hamat'sa and many other Kwakwaka'wakw customs were banned by the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century in an effort to assimilate the Kwakwaka'wakw. In the 1950's the bans were lifted. The Kwakwaka'wakw after decades without performing the Hamat'sa looked to the photographs of Boas and the few other documents which remained to try and rebuild the tradition.