Writing the Hamat'sa

Writing the Hamat̓sa critically surveys more than two centuries worth of published, archival, and oral sources to trace the attempted prohibition, intercultural mediation, and ultimate survival of one of Canada’s most iconic Indigenous ceremonies.

Writing the Hamat̓sa critically surveys more than two centuries worth of published, archival, and oral sources to trace the attempted prohibition, intercultural mediation, and ultimate survival of one of Canada’s most iconic Indigenous ceremonies.

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.

Aaron Glass has produced an important book.

Leah Alfred Olmeo, University of British Columbia:

"Glass’s work is thorough, thoughtful, and unequivocal in its critique of previous textual treatments of the Hamat̓sa"

Bruce Granville Miller, UBC:

…stands as a kind of history of anthropology…

Marie Mauzé, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, Collège de France:

Writing the Hamat̓sa 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.

Michael E. Harkin, professor, cultural anthropology, University of Wyoming:

Aaron Glass explores the multifaceted history of the Hamat̓sa 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.

Philip J. Deloria, professor, history, Harvard University:

A work of brilliant scholarship underpinned by decades of honourable collaborative work, Writing the Hamat̓sa takes readers from fine-grained accounts of intertextual Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw self-fashioning to the history of Boasian anthropology itself. This book traces the Hamat̓sa dance from endangered private ritual to public icon of cultural heritage, reminding us that culture is not something that is, but something that is made – and, in this case, coproduced in ambivalent, but agentic relations of collaboration crafted under the pressures of colonialism.