Totem Poles of Note
The title of "The World's Tallest Totem Pole" is or has at one time been claimed by several towns along the coast:
- Alert Bay, British Columbia — 173 ft (53 m), Kwakwaka'wakw
- McKinleyville, California — 160 ft (48.77 m), carved from a single redwood tree by Ernest Pierson and John Nelson
- Kalama, Washington — 140 ft (42.6 m), carved by Chief Lelooska
- Kake, Alaska — 137.5 ft (41.9 m), Tlingit
- Victoria, British Columbia (Beacon Hill Park) — 127.5 ft (38.862 m), Kwakwaka'wakw, carved by Mungo Martin with Henry Hunt and David Martin
- Tacoma, Washington (Fireman's Park) — 105 ft (32 m), carved by Alaskan Indians
- Vancouver, British Columbia (Maritime Museum) — 100 ft (30.5 m), Kwakwaka'wakw, carved by Mungo Martin with Henry Hunt and David Martin
There are disputes over which is genuinely the tallest, depending on constraints such as construction from a single log or the affiliation of the carver. Competition for making the tallest pole is still prevalent, although it is becoming more difficult to procure trees of such heights.
The thickest totem pole ever carved to date is in Duncan, British Columbia, carved by Richard Hunt in 1988, and measures over 6 ft (1.8 m) in diameter. It is carved in the Kwakwaka'wakw style, and represents Cedar Man transforming into his human form.
Standing a total of 173 feet (53 m) tall, the world's tallest totem pole is composed of two pieces of 168 and 5 feet (51 and 1.5 m). This one is in Alert Bay, British Columbia.
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Famous quotes containing the words totem poles, totem, poles and/or note:
“Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter’s planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,—rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)