Long known as the Cannibal Dance, the Hamat̓sa is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw of British Columbia. In the late nineteenth century, as anthropologists arrived to document the practice, colonial agents were pursuing its eradication and Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw were adapting it to endure. In the process, the dance – with dramatic choreography, magnificent bird masks, and an aura of cannibalism – entered a vast library of ethnographic texts.

Writing the Hamat̓sa offers a critical survey of attempts to record, describe, and interpret the dance over four centuries. Going beyond postcolonial critiques of representation that often ignore Indigenous agency in the ethnographic encounter, Writing the Hamat̓sa focuses on forms of textual mediation and Indigenous response that helped transofrm the ceremony from a set of specific performances 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.

Aaron Glass holds a dual fellowship at the American Museum of Natural History and the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. He is presently collaborating with the U'mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay to create a digital database documenting the Kwakwaka'wakw collection in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.

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• Honourable Mention - Vinson Sutlive Book Prize

Aaron Glass has produced an important book.

Tony Kail, Anthropology Book Forum

"Glass’s work is thorough, thoughtful, and unequivocal in its critique of previous textual treatments of the Hamat̓sa"

BC Studies

…stands as a kind of history of anthropology…

JACANZS Vol. 3