Totem Poles of the Haida People

Thinking Through Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”

The Haida totem poles are not carvings for display, but emplacements of ancestral presence, standing in the forest or village clearing like Heidegger’s temple: not illustrating myth, but housing the gods, the dead, and the community's relationship with Being. These are not historical markers—they are gatherers of world and earth.

Each totem pole lets a lineage speak. The animals, spirits, and forms carved in vertical sequence do not narrate a story. They set into standing the relation between the human and the nonhuman, between sky and ground, between ancestral time and mortal dwelling. Heidegger would emphasize their uprightness—how they stand into world, presencing a vertical axis of existence.

The earth here is cedar—living, weathering, slowly decaying, resisting eternity. The world is Haida cosmology—relational, spiritual, storied, yet grounded in the local. The strife is not a conflict, but a rhythmic interpenetration. The pole does not dominate nature—it emerges from it. It lets the forest become world.

And when the poles fall, as they are allowed to in some traditions, Heidegger would not call that loss. He would call it the return of the world into the earth, a completion of the cycle of unconcealment and sheltering.