Nimkish village at Alert Bay

Description

The figure at the bottom of the column in the foreground, with the painting on the front of the house, represents a raven. When a feast or a dance is to be held in this house, the guests enter through the raven’s beak, the lower mandible of which swings up and down on a pivot. When a guest steps beyond the pivot, his weight caused the beak to clap shut, and thus the mythic raven symbolically “swallows” the tribesman one by one. A view from the other end of this street is shown in the illustration facing page 8, Volume X.