Writing the Hamatsa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance - Softcover

An exploration of the Hamatsa, a ritual dance of the Kwakwaka’wakw people of British Columbia.

Despite settler attempts to eradicate the Hamat’sa, the “cannibal dance” remains an important prerogative of the Kwakwaka’wakw people. While generations of anthropologists sought to document the ceremony’s past, the Kwakwaka’wakw adapted and preserved its dramatic choreography and magnificent bird masks for the future.

Writing the Hamat’sa offers a critical survey of efforts to record and interpret the ritual over the past four centuries. Drawing on close, contextualized reading of published texts, extensive archival research, and fieldwork, Aaron Glass goes beyond postcolonial critiques that often ignore Indigenous agency to show how the Kwakwaka’wakw have responded to an ethnographic legacy that helped transform specific performances into a broad cultural icon. The result is a fascinating study of how Indigenous peoples both contribute to and repurpose texts to shape modern identities under settler colonialism.