Gift Event, after the Kwakiutl, newly rededicated for the 44th Presidentiad, in celebration

Start by giving away different colored glass bowls.

Have everyone give everyone else a glass bowl.

Give away handkerchiefs & soap & things like that.

Give away a sack of clams & a roll of toilet paper.

Give away teddybear candies, apples, suckers & oranges.

Give away pigs & geese & chickens, or pretend to do so.

Pretend to be different things.

Have the women pretend to be crows, have the men pretend to be something else.

Talk chinese or something.

Make a narrow place at the entrance of a house & put a line at the end of it that you have to stoop under to get in.

Hang the line with all sorts of pots & pans to make a big noise.

Give away frying pans while saying things like “Here is this frying pan worth $100 & this one worth $200.”

Give everyone a new name.

Give a name to a grandchild or think of something & go & get everything.

[As originally published in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas & before that in Technicians of the Sacred. Based on native accounts in “The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life: The Potlatch & the Play Potlatch” by Helen Codere (1956). Reprinted today toward a generosity of small things.]