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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;all_fakes, post: 4258047, member: 55&quot;]Like Komo says....and as somewhat of an expert on Ellen Neel - my wife and I have more than a dozen of her totems, and have contributed to a book and museum exhibit featuring her and other carvers - I&#039;ll add this:</p><p>Ellen Neel was the first woman to carve in the NW coast formline style in modern times; and she was qualified to do it because her grandfather Charlie James had chosen her as the person he wanted to pass his skills on to, regardless of her gender.</p><p>She sold totems to support her family, and for many years, in the 1950s and 60s, she had a table in Stanley Park.&nbsp; In order to make her totems a commercial success, one of the things she did was to develop a series of standard designs, featuring a thunderbird on top with various figures below. She also developed the &quot;totemland&quot; pole, featuring a globe beneath the thunderbird&#039;s feet, with a map of Vancouver Island and the Canadian west coast, atop First Man; one example of which Komo has shown us.</p><p>Her primary signature was &quot;EllEN NEEL&quot; with that exact combination of upper and lower-case; but one of the logos she used on the Stanley Park totems was the stamped &quot;Ellen Neel and the totem carvers&quot; as seen on your item.&nbsp; This dates yours to the 1960s, when her children would assist in carving parts of some totems, and all of others.&nbsp; They were all Neel family, though, none were nameless persons outside the Neel family.</p><p>So yes, this may well be a genuine Neel (family) totem originally sold in Stanley Park.</p><p>However, it is the very least of such items, with designs that have been simplified to the extreme, and likely done mostly by the children and not by Neel herself. And though Neel prices have gone through the roof in recent years, this isn&#039;t one that I personally would have in my collection, except perhaps as an example of how low a Neel totem could go. And it would be possible that this is indeed a counterfeit; but some of the Stanley Park Neel totems done by the children were simplified to this extent.</p><p>So yes, could very well be &quot;real,&quot; but might not be; and not very well-done in any case; but then that is true of some of the genuine Stanley Park Neels also.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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