The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes. It was as though in manufacturing as well as in food production there was no point at which further expenditure of effort in the production of more of the same items was felt to be superfluous.’25 Not only did the Kwakiutl surround themselves with endless piles of possessions, but they also put endless creativity into designing and crafting them, with results so striking and intricately beautiful as to make them the pride of ethnographic museums the world over. (Lévi-Strauss remarked that turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl were like a society where a dozen different Picassos were operative all at the same time.) This, surely, is a kind of affluence.