Story of The Golden Potlatch
Today, Seattle celebrates with a great Seafair festival spread out over most of the Summer. Over one hundred years ago, the Seafair tradition was born in a week long celebration that included many of the features that thousands enjoy today. Daily parades, colorful floats, automobile and boat races, aviation demonstrations, fireworks, Navy ships, fun-loving pranksters / helpers, athletic events, community-wide participation, and general festivity held sway under a Carnival King and Queen and their retinue.
The first Golden Potlatch celebrations spanned the years 1911-1914. Between the World Wars, various Summertime celebrations led up to a Golden Potlatch revival, 1934-1941.
The Alaska Gold Rush of 1897 put Seattle on the map, produced a flood of business and fueled the explosive growth that propelled it from a town of 30,000 inhabitants to one of 250,000 in the space of ten years. A World's Fair in 1909, the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, drew over four million visitors, and the AYPE planners created a smaller, regular festival to celebrate the city's history and provide continuing visibility, civic indentity, and community cohesion.
The earliest translation of the Chinook trade language word "Potlatch" is “a Gift”. In Native American/First Nation Potlatches, gifts were given during special days of feasting, dancing, and celebration. Gift giving helped establish social standing and leadership in the community, and the potlatch name was selected to help represent a festival gift to the larger area. Individuals and groups from hundreds of miles around came to join in. Although Native Americans were restricted in conducting their own Potlatches, at the early Golden Potlatches local Salish, Yakima, and coastal tribes were important participants.
Influences on the Golden Potlatch include Mardi Gras, harvest festivals such as Oktoberfest, Elk’s Carnivals, the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet, and the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition which included many downtown parades. Local flavor was created by themes and celebration of the arrival of Alaskan Gold, Seattle’s ongoing ties to Alaska, Northwest Native American heritage, Seattle’s ethnic groups, and nearby presence of the Navy with a major shipyard across Puget Sound in Bremerton. Each week included various themed parades: businesses, automobiles, children’s stories, local societies. Floats embodied beautiful craftsmanship and artistry of a level that we envy today. Cultural activities included concerts, plays, and garden displays. Athletic contests, flying demonstrations, automobile and boat races helped round out the bill.
In 1911 the man best qualified to be called a naval aviator at the time, Eugene Ely, performed flying demonstrations at the first Golden Potlatch, anticipating another great Seafair tradition. Ely, a test pilot for Glenn Curtiss, flew the biplane Golden Flyer, the first airplane in history to take off from and land on a naval ship.
1912 saw the introduction of the Potlatch “Bug”, an original design based on the formline art of the Northwest Coast tribes. In the spirit of the era, this was reproduced widely and in many ways, and was not considered disrespectful. Rather it represents acknowledgement and aspiration to a great spirit and creativity, and local identification with the earliest inhabitants of the Northwest.
Golden Potlatch was suspended with the advent of World War One. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Fleet Weeks helped keep up the tradition of a Navy-influenced time of parades and celebration. Potlatch and The Bug were revived in the mid-1930s and continued until the advent of World War Two. In 1950, the memories of a great tradition of weeklong celebration were surely fresh as a new summertime festival was inaugurated.
