The widespread importation of Euro-American iron and steel tools led to much more rapid and accurate production of carved wooden goods, including poles. The disruptions following Euro-American trade and settlement first led to a florescence and then to a decline in the cultures and totem pole carving. Totem poles in front of houses in Alert Bay, British Columbia in the 1900s.

The regional stylistic differences between poles would then be due not to a change in style over time, but instead to application of existing regional artistic styles to a new medium. He argues that the center of pole construction was the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, from whence it spread outward to the Tsimshian and Tlingit and then down the Pacific Coast to the tribes of British Columbia and northern Washington state.

Early twentieth-century theories, such as those of the anthropologist Marius Barbeau who considered the poles an entirely post-contact phenomenon made possible by the introduction of metal tools, were treated with skepticism at the time and are now discredited.Įddie Malin (1986) has proposed a theory of totem pole development which describes totem poles as progressing from house posts, funerary containers, and memorial markers into symbols of clan and family wealth and prestige. In all likelihood, the freestanding poles seen by the first European explorers were preceded by a long history of monumental carving, particularly interior house posts. However eighteenth century accounts of European explorers along the coast indicate that poles certainly existed at that time, although small and few in number. Being made of wood, they decay easily in the rain forest environment of the Northwest Coast, so no examples of poles carved before 1800 exist. The beginning of totem pole construction started in North America. The unity of the creation and humankind is one of the most compelling messages conveyed through this artist expression. The beauty and story telling power of the totem pole garnered increase respect and demand throughout Northern America and the world in the late twentieth century and continues to grow in the twenty-first century. It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that the practice and tradition of carving poles was renewed. Primarily due to ignorance, Christian missionaries and explorers assumed that totem poles where used for worship, banning them as paganism.

After the movement of European settlers to the region, cultural and religious concepts clashed with those of the indigenous people.

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