The Kwakwaka’wakw are geographically and culturally at the point on the central coast where the strictly matrilineal groups of the north (e.g., Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian) give way to more patrilineal and less clan/crest-based patterns of descent in the south (Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Coast Salish), and they have long been known as the grand synthesizers of the region.
Bilateral reckoning of Kwakwaka’wakw descent entails the claiming of crest images and personal prerogatives from both the matriline and patriline, increasing the number of images an individual might legitimately display.
They developed and maintained through the assimilationist period the most elaborate system of restricted ceremonial performance of the famous ‘‘secret’’ or ‘‘dance’’ societies described by Franz Boas (1897) and Philip Drucker (1940) which is predicated on rather flexible and negotiated hereditary rights to (often multiple) ritual dramas and the accompanying regalia (see Roth 2002:144).
The Kwakwaka’wakw have long proved remarkably amenable to participating in their own ethnographic representation, from adapting their visual motifs and performances to intercultural contexts of display, to applying the technologies and institutions of modernity to their own modes of cultural production (Glass 2004, 2006)