Ceremonially integral to Northwest Coast Native American tribes for over two centuries as an emblem of lineage, the totem pole has also become a category of colonial and contemporary visual culture, “a highly complex and multifaceted concept in the popular imagination” (7). The intricacies of its history and layers of associated meanings as an idea, icon, stereotype, and condensation of intercultural dynamics are the focus of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History, a collaboration between art historian Aldona Jonaitis, well known for her publications on Northwest Coast art and culture, and anthropologist Aaron Glass, an emerging Northwest Coast scholar. Together they have created a biography of the totem pole that combines respect for its history, functions, and cultural importance to Northwest Coast tribes with a wry and genial consideration of the sometimes amazing, even absurd roles that totem poles have come to play in popular culture.

This book is an ambitious, thoroughly researched, transdisciplinary study that explains the original and continuing cultural functions of these “carved columns” as well as the meanings, both myth and reality, conferred upon them by others and the roles they have come to play more broadly as fine art, craft, popular art, and kitsch. The authors’ goals—to tell the story of how this monument of Native culture has transformed into a multitude of forms and thereby to “contribute to the scholarly art historical and anthropological literature that interprets these and other transmutations” (xxi)—are accomplished with thought, style, humor, and impeccable scholarship. The book encourages the reader to contemplate the mutability of cultures and their objects and discover new ways of looking at the totem pole as a category of contemporary visual culture.

The Totem Pole is unusually structured, generously illustrated, and engagingly written with both the academic and casual reader in mind. A short prologue, “The Wide World of Totem Poles,” introduces their role in advertising, fashion, performance, and cartoons, and demonstrates how thoroughly they have become incorporated into popular culture while piquing the reader’s desire to explore further. The following chapter, “Excursions,” explains the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of Northwest Coast totem poles and clears up broadly held misunderstandings. Likely first developed around Haida Gwaior among the Tsimshian, poles of several types depicted heraldic crests relating to legendary narratives important in clan or family history and to the owner’s social standing. They became important across the Northwest Coast for specific uses, with tribal variations in style. Totem poles are not worshipped, cannot be read, and are not very ancient.

As a transdisciplinary study of a ubiquitous cultural icon, The Totem Pole deals with myth and reality, authenticity, appropriation, and transformation of a form that has come to symbolize Northwest Coast Indians worldwide. The book examines totem poles as objects of cultural practice with changing contexts, meanings, functions, and values. It makes clear that Northwest Coast Native people have been active participants in change within the negotiated nature of the colonial encounter while demonstrating that native endurance and creative adaptation to transculturation can lead to new forms of culture.

The writing is solidly academic but straightforward. The book’s organization is thematic and syncopated. Compact focused articles, brief vignettes, and photographic essays interspersed among longer essays invite the reader to browse with curiosity or intent. The authors’ observations are often nuanced and thought provoking. Theoretical approaches, ideas, and conclusions are most often handled in footnotes. The longish, but not too long, and liberally illustrated scholarly essays are punctuated with twenty-five one-to-two-page, pale-blue-tinted vignettes that allow the reader to easily find and focus on specific notable poles in North America and abroad. Some of these short essays about specific contemporary poles are authored by the pole makers themselves. There are also short, entertaining photo essays on totem poles in cartoons and comics, as business logos, emblems of Indianness on non-Northwest Coast reservations, and as souvenirs and kitsch, from magnets to model kits, puzzles to teapots.

The history of the totem pole can only be told through narratives of complex cultural interchange. Part 1, “Totem Poles in the Colonial Imagination,” introduces them through the eyes and words of explorers, merchants, settlers, tourists, and anthropologists who came to the Northwest Coast. The first sub-section is especially valuable in bringing together in one place scores of descriptions of poles by the earliest non-Native visitors to the coast, beginning with Captain Cook’s 1778 voyage and moving forward in time. Other chapters deal with the ebb and flow of interest in, concern for, and attempts to save and understand the poles within the context of the emergence of the discipline of anthropology. The totem pole became a generalized regional emblem, especially in Alaska during the second half of the nineteenth century, as artists, government agents, and social scientists began to impose new meaning on them. Museum salvage of poles brought them to the public’s attention, and tourists began to revel in “Places of Totemic Delight” (the title of chapter 4) and acquire their very own “Minis, Maxis, and Multiples” (signified in the title to chapter 6).

Part 2, “The Global Circulation of Totem Poles,” explores how, beginning around 1880, museum and academic communities, then viewers, came to expect a totem pole as requisite in an up-to-date presentation of Native cultures in museums and expositions. Poles became promotions of place, especially in Seattle and British Columbia, and some were scavenged up and down the coast. In the twentieth century, major culture brokers—from non-Natives Franz Boaz and Bill Holm to Native artists Mungo Martin and Bill Reid—helped to shift attitudes about totem poles, repositioning them as fine art and generating a “Renaissance” in totem pole carving.

Part 3, “Current Cultures of the Totem Pole,” leads the reader beyond museums and world fairs to the present in order to examine issues associated with totem poles within national and global contexts and as a component of cultural tourism. It concludes with a discussion of the repatriation of old poles and the creation of new ones in association with tribal reassertion of local and regional sovereignty in British Columbia and Alaska.

The Totem Pole also includes multiple appendices that for the first time bring together in one location a sweeping range of diverse and scattered information on Northwest Coast poles, much that is generally inaccessible to all but the most relentless searcher. Corralling this information together into one volume makes an exceptionally valuable contribution to the literature on this best-known type of North American and Northwest Coast image making. The book’s seven appendices include: “A Selected and Annotated List of Books on Totem Poles”; “Primary Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Reports of Monumental Carvings on the Northwest Coast (1778–1900)”; “A Selection of Early Illustrations of Totem Poles and Major Photographic Expeditions (1778–1900)”; “A Selective List of Poles Collected or Commissioned for Destinations Abroad (1880–1970)”; “A Selection of Totem Poles at Regional, National and International Expositions (1876–1994)”; “A Selection of Totem Poles at British Columbian and Canadian Celebrations (1836–1986)”; “A Selection of Poles Raised in or for Native Communities (1957–1988).”

The structure of The Totem Pole brings to mind Zena Pearlstone’s highly recommended Katsina: Commodified and Appropriated Images of Hopi Supernaturals (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2001), a book that also examines the transformation of a Native American cultural ceremonial item into an icon in the public mind. Both books explore the history, reality, and wide appropriation of a figural Native American form that functions ceremonially within its culture, yet, perhaps in part because of its humanlike aspects, has become a focus of broad public fascination.

In this carefully researched and user-friendly volume, Jonaitis and Glass have combined anthropological and art-historical approaches to probe the layered history of Northwest Coast totem poles and their multifaceted imprint on the aesthetic imagination of Natives and non-Natives over nearly two centuries. Tracing changes in the representation, interpretation, and use of poles in the context of shifting balances between cultures, The Totem Pole models a complex and successful examination of the intricacies involved in the layers and complexities of meaning associated with seemingly straightforward objects of culture.