Art: Teeth to Trees

In Oregon’s Portland Art Museum last week, gallerygoers were treated to a show that had as much interest for anthropologists as for art-lovers in general. It was the cream of a collection of 5,000 objects (from prehistoric times to the present) that had been carved, painted and woven by the Indians of the Northwest Coast, from Alaska and the Aleutians to northern California.

As anthropologists are fond of pointing out, the Indians knew nothing of art for art’s sake. Their masks, rattles and totem poles were just as functional as their bone fishhooks and spoons carved from caribou horn; the Indians thought that the magic in their carvings was as essential to steady good fishing as sharp hooks. But whether the Indians embroidered leather blankets with the beaks of puffin birds, carved human figures from walrus teeth, or turned whole tree trunks into vertical families of gods and animals, they did their craftsmanlike, unworried best.

Their best was almost always vivid enough to make more civilized and self-conscious artists green with envy.