Featured PNW fantasy or PNW in reality?

Found this today. Shame about it being busted in half. Carved walking stick it sure appears to be. I do believe it’s cedar. To me it’s convincing enough to believe it very well may be tribal made. I’m not confident enough to say it is for sure though. I’d bet the onions but not the entire farm. Komokwa & 2many I’m looking for you on this one. It legit I’d assume the decorative part on the bottom would be to appeal to the tourist that bought it rather than being a traditional design. Kinda funny that the whole thing broke in half before that conspicuous beak broke off.

 

this is a version of a totem from Alaska , that your walking stick carver is trying to recreate..

The B&W chip carving of flora is known on the clubs of the Eastern Penobscot ...

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so....fantasy.

 

oooopsy........

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interesting. So would you think a mishmash or NA styles made by a non native craftsmen? Or possibly a Penobscot stick just made for people that wanted “some Indian stuff” but didn’t care about accurate tribal traditions? If I’m not mistaken the Penobscot would carve random stereotypical looking Indian heads onto sticks. Just because the white people buying them liked how they looked.

 

I’d say it’s not quite as good as the carving on mine, but it’s close. .

 

@J Dagger, too bad it got broken, I really like it and the carving!!!

 

Early pan-Indian.

 

meaning mish mash or mis match of two different cultures.
possible native made too...

 

Thanks. Yeh it stinks, particularly because I collect walking sticks. I was thinking if I cut it off where all the damage ends and mount it to a simple wood base it will still display pretty nicely. I couldn’t leave it there even in its current state. I’m not a stickler for condition in my collection anyways. I’d often rather have an interesting object with damage than an uninteresting object that’s perfect.

 

Thanks. When you say early what are you thinking? 1920’s-30’s?

 

What tribe would you hazard to guess made if it were NA made? Penobscot or other?

 

I don't have a good guess.

More probably an northeastern group like the Penobscot, rather than NWC, just because photographs of NWC art would have been more accessible.

 

Traditional Wabanaki (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi'kmac, and Maliseet) root clubs are made of the stock and root bundle of grey birch trees. Today's carvers use poplar as well. Though pre-18th century root clubs may have been used as weapons, 18th-19th century clubs, embellished with fantastic, other-worldly faces, were used in spiritual ceremonies and are often called spirit clubs. By the late 19th century, the abundance of human faces on root clubs reflected an increased sales to non-Native tourists, moving away from the spiritual. In the 1920s, responding to the white man's idea of the "Indian," Wabanakis carved their clubs with western-style war-bonnets and sold them as war clubs.

( credit , Stan Neptune )

 

My feeling is that the form usage, especially in the eyes, is not what I would expect from native work, and suggests a non-native imitation of the "Chief Johnson Totem" mentioned above. IMHO it would not suggest any particular tribe.
Or to put it another way, the maker, whether native or not, was not familiar with Northwest Coast Native form usage, but had seen the Chief Johnson pole or photos of it.

 

ah yeh, this is what I was referencing above. The later ones mentioned are pretty prevalent. Particularly since I’m in that general area of the country. The war bonnet wearing plains Indian/Sioux type stereotype became what most whites folks thought of when they thought of an Indian. Seems like in the earlier 20th century you could buy just about anything with a depiction of a war bonnet wearing Indian on it. Particularly if you were at a native related tourist attraction. For example I’ve seen endless Mohawk Trail (Massachusetts) souvenirs depicting a generic plains Indian, sometimes on horseback sometimes not. Lots of the later root clubs have one of those faces carved into them.

I was actually going to share this a week or two ago when I was watching it but here is an appropriate place to do so. A documentary on the Wabanaki people and their “modern” life. Lots of basket talk in the beginning.

There is actually a pretty drcent chance that I may have Wabanaki blood on one or both sides of my family tree.

thanks for the excerpt.

 

Makes sense!

 

Our NFB , rocks !!!!!

 

The Wabanaki doc was likely the first production of theirs I have seen. Since it has your endorsement I’ll check back for more!

 

Probably the beak was a branch coming off the main trunk, and so is structurally sound and less likely to break off.

 

The Logdrivers Waltz
The Blackfly
The Cat came back ,,

some of their iconic animations ..