Sharing Ceremonial Treasures : American Indian Dance Theatre Brings Traditions to Cerritos

In 1921, the Canadian government took a look at the sacred ceremonies of the Kwakiutl people of the Northwest coast and promptly freaked. The authorities arrested participants, banned the events and blackmailed the remaining tribal members into surrendering their masks and artifacts by threatening further arrests.

“Twenty-six of our people were sent down to prison in Vancouver, 200 miles away,” Kwakiutl Nation Chief Bill Cranmer said in a phone interview from his home in Alert Bay, British Columbia. “The others gave up anything that was used in the ceremonies. It was all crated up and sent to Ottawa, and there it stayed until the early ‘80s, when some of our people started work to get it sent back.”

Now some of the outlawed ceremonial dances will be performed as part of the “Winter Dances” program by the American Indian Dance Theatre on Thursday and Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. The company, which is made up of dancers from more than a dozen Native American nations, performs sacred and social dances by many different tribes. Cranmer was responsible for bringing the Kwakiutl “Red Cedar Bark Ceremony” to the group.

“We wanted to teach people in the outside world about our history, our language and our culture,” Cranmer said. “These are very special dances to us, and the American Indian Dance Theatre recognizes that.”

Cranmer said the problems at the early part of the century began when “the Indian agents and the church were having difficulties reorganizing the lives of our people to conform with everyone else’s system of living. A lot of these winter ceremonies would move from village to village, and a lot of the people would move with them. So the Indian agents and the churches couldn’t keep our people in one area to be part of a labor force.

“But our people wanted to carry on with the way they used to live.”

And so the people did, keeping those ceremonies and dances alive in the remoter villages and even surreptitiously under the eyes of the Canadian authorities, although the law against them remained on the books until 1951, the 55-year-old chief said.

With the permission of the Kwakiutl Tribal Council, Cranmer and his 16-year-old son Tyler taught the company the “Red Cedar Bark Ceremony,” in which young men--usually the eldest children of chiefs--are initiated as Hamatsa, or wise and knowledgeable leaders.

The ceremony tells how a young initiate goes into the forest to find his spirit. “He is overcome by this spirit and comes back to the village in a wild state,” Cranmer said. “Other members of the society then put him through a taming ceremony. It could take anywhere from a day to two days to put him through this (entire) ceremony.” In the staged performance it will take about 20 minutes.

The Hamatsa form “one of the more powerful societies in our ceremonies,” added Cranmer, who is himself a Hamatsa. “They are usually the first to do anything, the first to be fed and the first to be presented with gifts.”

Gift-giving was always an integral part of potlatches, which were festivals held for important ceremonies such as naming of children, memorializing a chief or initiating young people into adulthood. “We didn’t have a written language, so everything was done in front of guests you would invite to witness these things,” Cranmer explained. “Then you would present these witnesses with gifts for coming to witness.”

The Kwakiutl still feel some bitterness toward the Canadian authorities. “The government never did apologize to us for their action,” Cranmer said. “They’re actually helping us now, but not quite enough. We’ve had to really beat on their doors to help us get our stuff back. We’ve tried to do all the other things we need to do to keep our history alive. But we don’t have the resources to do that.”

In fact, the chief sometimes feels that “we seem to be fighting a losing battle here. A lot of different things happened resulting in our young people not speaking our language. That’s not peculiar to our specific language group. It happened all over the world to aboriginal groups.

“We numbered around 10,000 people when the first sailing ships came in the mid-1880s,” Cranmer said. “It dropped right down to only 1,400 in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s because of different diseases that we had no immunity to. Now, we must be approaching 6,500.”

Still, “there has been a kind of resurgence or revival of the ceremonies,” he said. “A lot of the younger people are learning the songs and learning the history of the dances. They understand the seriousness of the dances and their meaning.

“In the early days, every member of your family would have a dance they would perform. There were so many different dances, these ceremonies used to go on for days. It was said that certain chiefs could dance forever because they had so many treasures that they could show. We had a saying: ‘Their treasure box never empties.’ ”

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* The American Indian Dance Theatre will appear in a “Winter Dances” program, which includes the “Red Cedar Bark Ceremony” from the Kwakiutl people in British Columbia, on Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $24-$32; children 16 and under, $12. Information: (310) 916-8000.