Pipe

Item number 3260/34 from the MOA: University of British Columbia.

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Description

Pipe bowl in the shape of a baby bird with its mouth open wide. The mouth is rimmed with copper. The stem hole is in the bird's breast. Pipe stem is missing.

History Of Use

When Europeans introduced pipes and commercial tobacco to the peoples of the northern coast during the maritime fur trade, in the late 1700s, smoking soon took the place of sucking tobacco as part of ceremonial activities. Prior to such contact, the Haida and Tlingit cultivated a now-extinct, tobacco-like plant which they dried, ground up, mixed with lime from burnt clam or abalone shells, and formed into pellets with spruce gum for chewing or holding in the mouth. With trade tobacco newly available to the Tlingit, “the pipe came into existence, and the smoking feast became an important ceremony after cremation, and at other commemorative ceremonies for the dead”. On this pipe, sheet copper has been carefully wrapped around the edge of the bird’s open mouth and lines the bowl where the tobacco would have been burned. The pipe stem, now missing, would have connected into the bowl through a hole in the bird’s chest.