Culture
The Nuu-chah-nulth were one of the few groups on the Pacific Coast who hunted whales. Whaling is essential to Nuu-chah-nulth culture and spirituality. It is reflected in stories, songs, names, family lines, and numerous place names throughout the Nuu-chah-nulth territories. Perhaps the most famous Nuu-chah-nulth artifact is the Yuquot "whaler's shrine", a ritual house-like structure used in the spiritual preparations for whale hunts. Composed of a series of memorial posts depicting spirit figures and the bones of whaling ancestors, it is presently in storage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was the subject of the film The Washing of Tears, directed by Hugh Brody, which recounts the rediscovery of the bones and other artifacts at the museum and the travels of the Mowachaht people, the shrine's original owners, in seeking to repossess them.
Read more about this topic: Nuu-chah-nulth People
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a
transcendental kind.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)