Bentwood Halibut Hook

Item number 637 from the The Burke: University of Washington.

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Exhibit Label

Halibut are flat fish that feed close to the bottom at offshore banks, and which can attain a weight of two hundred pounds. They are powerful, and Indian fishermen in their small canoes, often far from land, took care not to catch one that was too big to handle. The hooks were size-selective, too large for small fish and too small for those of unmanageable size. Halibut hooks of the Makah and their neighbors, for whom the fish was a staple of life, were of graceful U-form, bent of wood and armed with a barb of bone, or later, iron. (Holm, Spirit and Ancestor, 1987)