When Honor Rests on Giving Wealth Away: The Potlatch and the Gift Economy

What happens to “wealth” when a host’s honor rests on giving it away?

Among many Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, including the Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Tlingit, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast Salish (the potlatch is shared across Northwest Coast nations, with distinct names and practices in each), the potlatch is a ceremonial feast in which a host publicly distributes wealth to guests. Rank, obligation, inheritance, and clan relationships are carefully made visible in the giving. Begin with the people and the ceremony. Then ask what a market price alone can and cannot record.

What follows opens with a carefully cited teaching about the word itself.

A word that means “to give”

The U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, which houses potlatch regalia confiscated in 1922 and later returned to the Kwakwaka’wakw, explains the term in plain language:

The word “potlatch” means “to give” and comes from a trade jargon, Chinook, formerly used along the Pacific coast of Canada. Guests witnessing the event are given gifts. The more gifts given, the higher the status achieved by the potlatch host.

That Chinook jargon etymology is the everyday English story of the word. The French sociologist Marcel Mauss, writing a comparative essay on gift exchange in the mid-1920s, carefully recorded a related but not identical gloss. In Ian Cunnison’s English translation of The Gift (p. 4), Mauss calls potlatch a “Chinook word” and notes: “Potlatch meant originally ‘to nourish’ or ‘to consume’.” Both lines belong in a careful classroom: one is how a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural centre teaches the trade-language name; the other is how a European theorist tracked the word’s earlier senses. They are not interchangeable, and neither replaces Indigenous accounts of what the ceremony does.

Still, a single English gloss cannot carry the whole ceremony. What follows places that teaching beside other carefully cited accounts.

U’mista also carefully records Elder Agnes Axu Alfred’s words on why giving belongs to the ceremony:

“When one’s heart is glad, he gives away gifts. Our Creator gave it to us, to be our way of doing things, to be our way of rejoicing, we who are [Kwakwaka’wakw]. Everyone on earth is given something. The potlatch was given to us to be our way of expressing joy.”

A money-history lesson that stops at “redistribution” misses that sentence. Joy, witness, name, and inheritance sit beside any economic comparison we might later try.

What Boas recorded, and what he could not settle alone

Franz Boas’s fieldwork among the Kwakwaka’wakw, from 1886 into the 1890s, produced a widely used Western ethnographic record of potlatch practice. In The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897), he warned that the custom had been “thoroughly misunderstood by most observers” (p. 341), then carefully offered his own framing: “The underlying principle is that of the interest-bearing investment of property” (p. 341).

On the next page he separates possession from honor more sharply:

Possession of wealth is considered honorable, and it is the endeavor of each Indian to acquire a fortune. But it is not as much the possession of wealth as the ability to give great festivals which makes wealth a desirable object to the Indian.

That is a strong claim about motive. It is also Boas’s claim, dated 1897, filtered through his questions and through his long collaboration with George Hunt, who was raised in the Kwakwaka’wakw community at Fort Rupert and supplied much of the material (“notes made by Mr. George Hunt,” title page). Treat it as a primary ethnographic source with a named author and a purpose, not as a final definition of potlatch for every nation and every generation.

Meanwhile, Boas’s discussion of ceremonial “coppers,” the shield-shaped plaques of hammered copper that carried names and histories, shows how far a simple “gift versus market” contrast can fail. He writes that these coppers “have the same function which bank notes of high denominations have with us” (p. 344). The analogy is his. The copper’s value, he continues, “depends upon the amount of property given away in the festival at which the copper is sold.” An object can be rare metal, crest, name, challenge, and ledger at once. A classroom that asks only “was it money?” will flatten that stack.

Obligation: give, receive, repay

Mauss’s The Gift is the essay many teachers meet when “gift economy” enters a syllabus. In Chapter II, section 4 of Cunnison’s translation, “The Three Obligations: Giving, Receiving, Repaying” (pp. 37–41), Mauss organizes potlatch around three obligations. On giving he is blunt: “This is the essence of potlatch. A chief must give a potlatch for himself, his son, his son-in-law or daughter and for the dead.” On receiving he is just as firm: “One does not have the right to refuse a gift or a potlatch,” though he notes that in certain circumstances a refusal can itself be “an assertion of victory and invincibility.” On repayment he says the obligation to repay is “the essence of potlatch” outside pure destruction, and that “normally the potlatch must be returned with interest like all other gifts.”

Use Mauss for what he is: a comparative theorist arguing that gifts bind persons and groups. Do not use him as a substitute for Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Tlingit, or other coastal nations’ own explanations of ceremony, law, and inheritance. In that light, a good money-history habit is to place the theorist beside the Indigenous-centered account and name the job each source is doing.

Law tried to stop the giving

Canadian law attempted to extinguish the potlatch. After an anti-potlatch proclamation in 1883, Parliament amended the Indian Act on April 19, 1884; the ban took effect on January 1, 1885. Section 3 of the amending Act read:

“Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlach” or in the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and any Indian or other person who encourages … an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, … is guilty of a like offence …”

U’mista notes that for more than sixty years the ceremonial potlatch was outlawed, that potlatches continued in secret, and that Dan Cranmer’s large Christmas 1921 potlatch led to 45 arrests and the forced surrender of regalia in 1922. When the Indian Act was revised in 1951, the anti-potlatch section was dropped. In December 1953, Kwakwaka’wakw carver and chief Mungo Martin opened Wawadiťła, his big house in Victoria’s Thunderbird Park, with what the Royal BC Museum calls the first legal public potlatch after the ban was dropped. (U’mista’s collection history dates that potlatch to 1952.) In all, the ban stood for about sixty-six years, from 1885 to 1951.

When students ask what money has to do with this history, the honest answer is not a slogan. Colonial law tried to break a system in which wealth, rank, witness, and inheritance moved together through public giving. Studying that attempt is part of studying how societies define and police legitimate wealth.

What a money classroom can learn without reducing the ceremony

The Money Wisdom Project asks learners to treat money as a human invention with a long comparative history. The potlatch belongs in that conversation because it forces careful distinctions:

1. Wealth displayed by giving. Boas’s line about festivals over mere possession is one dated ethnographic description of that idea. U’mista’s teaching that a rich and powerful person is someone who gives the most away is another, from a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural centre.
2. Objects with names and histories. Coppers are not anonymous tokens. Their value is publicly storied and contested.
3. Obligation as structure. Mauss’s give / receive / repay triad is a theory of social bond. Test it against specific passages rather than treating “gift economy” as a soft opposite of “market.”
4. Whose voice is in the source. A Boas monograph, a Mauss essay, a Canadian statute, and an U’mista page do not answer the same question. Chart author, date, purpose, and limit before you build a claim.

A purely market description of “giving wealth away” leaves out witness, name, crest, mourning, marriage, and joy. It also leaves out the years when giving itself was treated as a crime. Those omissions are the lesson. What a classroom can usefully ask is deliberately held open: how far any single economic label can carry a ceremony that joins wealth, honor, and witness.

Free resources for teaching the history of money are available at https://moneywisdomproject.org.

Works Cited

Boas, Franz. The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. Based on personal observations and on notes made by Mr. George Hunt. From the Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1895, pp. 311–737. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897. “III. The Potlatch,” pp. 341–358 (quoted: pp. 341, 342–343, 344). https://archive.org/details/socialorganizati00boas.

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West, 1954; reprinted 1966. (Originally “Essai sur le don,” L’Année sociologique, n.s., vol. 1, 1923–24 [publ. 1925].) Introduction, p. 4 (etymology); Ch. II §4, “The Three Obligations: Giving, Receiving, Repaying,” pp. 37–41. Consulted in the Norton Library edition, New York, 1967: https://archive.org/details/the-gift-marcel-mauss.

U’mista Cultural Centre. “Potlatch” and “Potlatch Ban.” Living Tradition: The Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch on the Northwest Coast. https://umistapotlatch.ca/potlatch-eng.php and https://umistapotlatch.ca/potlatch_interdire-potlatch_ban-eng.php. Includes Chinook jargon gloss “to give,” Elder Agnes Axu Alfred on gladness and gifts (the bracketed [Kwakwaka’wakw] is U’mista’s), purposes of the potlatch, coppers, and the history of the ban.

U’mista Cultural Centre. “The History of the Potlatch Collection.” https://www.umista.ca/pages/collection-history.

Canada. An Act further to amend “The Indian Act, 1880.” S.C. 1884, c. 27, s. 3 (assented April 19, 1884). Statutes of Canada 1884, p. 108. https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.9_08051_13_1/272

Moss, Wendy, and Elaine Gardner-O’Toole. Aboriginal People: History of Discriminatory Laws (BP-175E). Library of Parliament, Law and Government Division, November 1987, revised November 1991. Section 3 is quoted at note 58. https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/bp175-e.htm

Royal BC Museum. “Wawadiťła” (Thunderbird Park). https://rbcm.ca/exhibits/tbird-park/html/late/ex07/ex07a.htm.

American Museum of Natural History. Northwest Coast Hall Educator’s Guide. https://www.amnh.org/content/download/420930/6075801/file/northwest-coast-hall-of-educator%27s-guide.pdf.

The Canadian Encyclopedia (Historica Canada). “Northwest Coast Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-people-northwest-coast. See also René R. Gadacz, “Potlatch,” https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/potlatch.