Object History FIG. 4 (below): Eagle/Thunderbird transformation mask in its closed form. Kwakwaka’wakw, northeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Ex Fred Harvey Co., Max Ernst, Proctor Stafford, William P. Palmer III. Wood, pigment, fiber. L: 61 cm. Courtesy of the Hudson Museum, University of Maine, inv. HM5521. FIG. 5: The Kwakwaka’wakw mask being shown to Bruce Alfred by Burke Museum Registrar Hollye Keister. Photo: Burke Museum, Seattle. 125 from Coast Salish groups such as William Shelton (Snohomish, 1868–1938) and Joseph Hillaire (Lummi, 1894– 1967) started carving Salish-style “story poles” and displaying them publicly throughout the region. This began with a post carved by Shelton that was erected on the Tulalip Indian Reservation in 1912 and continued for decades,4 but the perceived canon for Northwest Coast art was already established in popular culture. When Seattle was forming a professional football team in the mid 1970s, the name Seahawks was selected from a public naming contest, in which 1,741 names were submitted, and around 150 individuals suggested the winning name. Given that the team was the only one based in the Northwest, the Native-style rendering of the raptor head was a specific reference to the region.5 In 1975, General Manager John Thompson stated, “We recognize that not only the name itself, but the helmet design, emblem, and uniform are of great importance in establishing our identity and image in the local area as well as nationally” (fig. 3)6 Designed in-house, Thompson said the NFL firm did refer to some books on Northwest Indian culture. “Our intent was to follow the Northwest Indian culture, but there was no condition placed on them (NFL) in designing.” 7 After the first Seahawks logo was unveiled in 1975, artist Marvin Oliver (Quinault/Isleta), who had studied with Bill Holm, offered a redesigned version that he felt adhered more closely to the northern Northwest Coast “formline” design principles as explained in Holm’s book (fig. 8).8 The NFL did not change its design until 2002, when it streamlined the design by removing the eyelid lines and giving the bird a more aggressive look (fig. 6). During the frenzy before the 2014 Super Bowl, my students were interested in the source of the Seahawks logo and asked me what it was. I recalled learning about this from Bill Holm, who had been my teacher in the 1970s. I asked him if the NFL designers had ever contacted him, and he said no, they never did, but that he knew they had relied on a published illustration of a mask. Reaching to his bookshelf, he pulled Robert Bruce Inverarity’s 1950 book, Art of the Northwest Coast Indians,9 off the shelf and, flipping through the illustrations, he found the illustration of the Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask that was used by the designers for the Seahawks logo (figs. 2, 4). The sweep of the bold painted line around the front of the eye socket and back of the mouth, the open-ended eyelid lines, and the line of the mouth and beak all match nicely with the original Seattle Seahawks logo. Within a week after publishing a Burke Museum blog on this subject early last year, we heard from Gretchen Faulkner, the director of the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine, informing us that this Kwakwaka’wakw mask was in the collection of her museum. According to oral history there, anthropologist Richard Emerick, the founder of the Hudson Museum, knew the mask was a source for the Seahawks logo design, but the museum had no written documentation on the subject. The mask had been on exhibit in past years, but had always been shown in the open position, so its similarity to the Seahawks logo was concealed. Based on its style, we believe the mask was made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by an artist of the Kwakwaka’wakw people (also known as Kwakiutl)
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