Control Comics - The Amazing Potlatch Ban — Chasing the caribou woman

My Imagine… redesign speaks to the freedom of being able to celebrate the world with dance and spirit.

It is one of the places I personally have struggled to reclaim but with continued work through therapy and land-based healing, I am making progress.

My soul wishes to dance and sing in a way that was made wrong and illegal. Much of this culture has been lost to me and people like me and the grief felt at these losses is real and substantial.

The Dalkelh I use in this cover Yun Wha Nilh Ni – Yun Wha Nohl Ni translates as in this lifetime, enjoy your life on this earth. It also carries the nuance of enjoying and respecting all life on this earth, a spiritual and deep relational quality which injects a responsibility to all that is around us, that came before us, and that is to come.

Title: The Amazing Potlatch Ban

Within Tl’azt’en culture, the potlatch is one of the main systems of governance and it is a complex system within which the clans of our community make community decisions of all types and importance, ranging from village politics through to funeral arrangements.

The potlatch was and is a significant vehicle for the Indigenous cultures that practice it, and its outlawing was another mechanism of control adding to the deterioration of culture and continuing the process of assimilation the empire had laid out.

These ceremonies were considered unlawful until the amendments in 1951. The complexity of the impact of outlawing ceremony makes knowing the true cost largely unmeasurable.