The Tlingit and Grizzly Bear House-Partition Screen :: Essays Papers

The Tlingit and grey Bear House-Partition ScreenThe region of the northwestwarderly coast was blessed with an abundance of natural recourses for human existence and make it possible for the empyrean to thrive. As a result of this unusual abundance, the area could sustain large populations and a complex social order for some Indian groups. Because of the level of sustainability, the cultures had more time for artistic and intellectual activities and endeavors and everyplace time, art became very important and vital to the complex social structures of the groups of the northwest coast.One such group, the Tlingit, utilise art to create and portray its rights, privileges, and talents genetical to them and became symbols of tribal importance. As they lived in extended family tribal canoe houses, they used art to decorate and empower their tribe in their social structures and often commissioned elaborate artwork in order to create jealousy within the groups. Because the Tlingi t culture believed that they were all descendants of animals, the subject matter of almost Tlingit art is a extremely stylized mental representation of their ancestor animal. though religious belief was integrated into Tlingit artwork, it remained an iconographic representation of a tribes lineage serving many roles such as power and protection. The Grizzly bear house partition screen is one such typeface of important, symbolic Tlingit art. The partition screens were used both symbolically as easy as served as a dividing screen for the chief separating his living billet from the rest of his tribal house. This example is made in an unusually noble scale of 15 x 8 feet and is carved in abrupt low relief from cedar and was later painted. It artistically and symbolically represents point Shakes extended familys origin, the grizzly bear, with smaller heads of the bear making up other parts of its body such as the eyes, ears, chest, as swell as many other sections of the pie ce. The smaller heads create a highly symmetrical design within the piece as well as further symbolize the important image of the bear. Carved out of the productive area of the bear is the doorway for the chief, additionally creating an important symbolic representation of their chief being birthed from the grizzly bear every time he enters and leaves his sacred quarters. This work exhibits mostly all the characteristics cited by Stockstad as it provided backcloth information into understanding the Tlingit culture and their beliefs.