American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The stone hammer illustrated in plate 1 represents a bird with a whale in its mouth. If an Italian artist had carved this piece in a Florentine shop during the sixteenth century, a contemporary scholar could analyze its formal and iconographic significance with relative ease. Both the modern scholar and the Italian sculptor are part of a common Western tradition which facilitates the former's understanding of the latter's creations. However the individual who made this hammer was not part of this Western tradition, since he was a Haida Indian living on the Queen Charlotte Islands during the nineteenth century. Because of this, it is exceedingly difficult for the White scholar to analyze it with any real objectivity. The difficulty lies in the nature of White scholarship: since the interpreter of Indian art cannot shed all of his or her own Western cultural values (and at present, most such interpreters are heirs to the Western tradition), much of what he or she ultimately writes on Native American art actually reflects those values. Thus, the scholar who attempts to discover the underlying esthetic, philosophical, social or religious meanings of Northwest Coast art is actually going to concentrate on those elements in the art that appear to coincide most closely with elements in White society.