OBJECT history The Kwakwaka’wakw Transformation Mask That Inspired the Seahawks Logo The Seattle Seahawks football team has been much in the news lately due to their strong season leading up to their participation in the 2015 Super Bowl. Since their 2014 Super Bowl win, many people have been speculating about the design influence for the team’s distinctive 124 raptor head logo (fig. 1), even suggesting the source was the Egyptian god Horus. However, within the past year, the actual mask that was indicated as the one that inspired the logo in 1975 has been re-identified by Burke Museum Curator Emeritus Bill Holm.1 At the time of the initial logo design when the team was founded in 1975, the central and northern Northwest Coast art traditional to the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Kwakwaka’wakw tribes of Alaska and northern British Columbia were the most readily recognized design styles from the Pacific Northwest Coast. The reasons for this are multifaceted but the main threads go back to the late- nineteenth-century popularity of totem poles, which were seen by tourists on steamship trips traveling to Alaska and British Columbia. One of these poles was appropriated (literally stolen) and was used as a symbol of Seattle starting in 1899 after it was erected in the central square of the city, gaining even more popularity during the Alaska- Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909.2 Bill Holm’s pivotal 1965 book, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form,3 provided us with the vocabulary now used to describe this northern art style, further bringing this design system into public awareness. Because of this public exposure, these northern Northwest Coast art forms from British Columbia and Alaska eclipsed the more subtle and private expressions of art made by the Coast Salish tribes around Seattle and throughout western Washington State. Lacking the large heraldic carvings of their northern neighbors, awareness of this local art tradition only came about when artists FIG. 1 (left): Seattle Seahawks team logo as originally designed, in use 1976–2001. FIG. 2 (right): Eagle/Thunderbird transformation mask. Kwakwaka’wakw, northeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. From Robert Bruce Inverarity, Art of the Northwest Coast Indians, University of California Press, 1950. FIG. 3 (left): UPI article from June 17, 1975, announcing the founding of the Seahawks. Courtesy of United Press International. By Robin K. Wright
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