Long known as the Cannibal Dance, the Hamat?sa is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwa?ka??wakw of British Columbia. Drawing on published texts, extensive archival research, and fieldwork, Writing the Hamat?sa offers a critical survey of attempts to record, interpret, and prohibit the ceremony. Such textual mediation and Indigenous response over four centuries helped transform the Hamat?sa from a set of specific practices. into a generalized cultural icon. This meticulous work illuminates how Indigenous people contribute to, contest, and repurpose texts in the process of fashioning modern identities under settler colonialism.
Foreword / Chief William Cranmer/T??lakwagila (?Na?mg?is Nation)
Prologue: Points of Arrival and Departure
Introduction: From Writing Culture to the Intercultural History of Ethnography
1 A Complex Cannibal: Colonialism, Mode
