Artist description
A tsesah was never one man's property. Crests of this kind lived in the palace treasury among the beaded thrones and the cloth, brought out for the enthronement of a chief and for the funerals that closed one reign and opened the next. They belonged to the office, not to the man holding it, and the carver knew that while he worked — which is why he made no attempt to charm you.
Look at how much face he left empty: a wide concave plane, a brow shoved forward, and above it a small seated figure cut from the same block so it can never be separated. In this tradition a figure like that says the line continues; the chief dies, the chiefdom does not. Indigo, the dye of the cloth hung behind a seated ruler, and red ochre in layers you can still count at the rim, each layer a re-dressing before another ceremony. Twentieth century, tsesah in tradition. No palace, no reign is recorded with it, and I will not invent one.
