The Potlatch: Where Giving Away Your Wealth Was the Path to Power

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Among the Kwakwaka'wakw, Haida, and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, status came from emptying your pockets. The potlatch was a winter feast held for births, deaths, adoptions, and weddings, hosted by a kinship house of about 100 members under an aristocrat regarded as the living incarnation of its ancestral founder. To an outsider it looked like a party. In practice it was a legal system: guests who accepted a blanket or a basket of food were being paid to witness and validate the host's titles and the hunting, fishing, and berry territories attached to them.

This episode explains how that system worked, how smallpox and a flood of Hudson's Bay blankets set off potlatch inflation, and why aristocrats began breaking coppers and burning fortunes in what amounted to financial duels. It then follows the Canadian government's 1884 ban under the Indian Act, the decades the ceremony spent underground, the repeal in 1951, and its return as living law.

• A child received a second name at a potlatch a year after birth, and around age 12 hosted a small one of their own to earn a third.
• Coppers, two-foot shields of beaten metal, were each considered equal in value to a human slave. Chilkat blankets of mountain goat wool and cedar bark could take a year to weave.
• Gifts had to be returned in full plus interest. A rival who could not match a host's giving or destruction lost face and political standing.
• The 1884 ban carried two to six months in jail, yet a chief told Franz Boas: let the white man observe his law, we shall observe ours.
• Families hid the practice in small dinners and gatherings disguised as Christmas or Thanksgiving. Today the Haida Nation roots its constitution in potlatch law.