A Season When the Spirits Are Near

Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial life divides the year into two seasons, an everyday summer season and a sacred winter season in which the ordinary social order gives way to one governed by ancestral and supernatural privileges that belong to specific families. Central to the winter season is the Hama'tsa, sometimes called the Cannibal Dance, in which a young initiate is said to have been carried off by Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, a monstrous cannibal spirit at the north end of the world, and returns to the community in a wild state that the ceremony works to calm. Dancers wearing large hinged bird masks representing Huxwhukw, Crooked Beak of Heaven, and Raven, the spirit's attendants, pursue and threaten the initiate before the community's ranked dancers and orators bring the drama to a close and restore the young person to ordinary life. The masks, songs, names, and dance rights performed in these ceremonies are not shared property but belong to specific lineages and are displayed according to a strict order of rank, so a family's standing in Kwakwaka'wakw society rests in part on the ceremonial privileges it can rightfully bring to the winter season. The tradition is treated locally as a genuine, ordered encounter with spiritual danger rather than as theater, which is part of why outside authorities once tried to suppress it and why its return has been treated as an act of cultural restoration.