How this Indigenous mask from B.C. inspired the Seattle Seahawks logo

thomas more than a decennary agone, as the Seattle Seahawks were on the brink of their number one of two consecutive Super Bowl appearances, Robin K. Wright’s art history students at the University of Washington became curious about the NFL team’s logo.

“My students had some sort of bizarre theories, they thought it was the Egyptian god Horus or equally funny things,” said Wright, now a professor emerita at the university’s school of art, art history and design.

The inspiration for the team's logo, she says, which consists of a profile of a raptor, is a transformation mask from the Kwakwakaʼwakw of northern Vancouver Island.

Wright says her longtime colleague Bill Holm, who was curator emeritus of Northwest Coast art at University of Washington's Burke Museum, once told her the logo is strikingly similar to a mask featured in the 1950 book Art of the Northwest Coast Indians by Robert Bruce Inverarity.

Wright noted that while Seattle is on Coast Salish territory, the mask is from the Kwakwakaʼwakw territory, a distinction likely lost on the designers.

“If they had done a little more research and had wanted some kind of Indigenous design from the Seattle area, they would have maybe gone for a Coast Salish design, but at the time the northern Northwest Coast style of art was much more prominent in the public's eye,” Wright said.

The Seahawks logo, which has been redesigned and streamlined over the years since it was unveiled in 1975, is familiar to football fans around the globe.

Days before the Seahawks won their first and only Super Bowl in 2014, Wright published a blog post about the apparent connection between the team's logo and the Kwakwaka’wakw mask. At the time, she didn’t know of its whereabouts and thought it could be with a private collector. Decades ago, she said, many cultural items ended up in the hands of well-known surrealist artists who were “enamoured” with Indigenous masks.

She later received a message from officials with the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine saying the mask was in their collection.

Transformation masks depict two forms, one when the mask is closed and another when it's open. In this case, the closed mask depicts a raptor and opens to reveal a human face, Wright said.

But the similarities to the Seahawks logo weren't obvious because of how the mask was displayed.

“People hadn't noticed because it was on display open and you really see the connection when you see the profile of the mask as it's closed,” said Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, director of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art, in Seattle.

The Hudson Museum later arranged to have the mask sent to the Burke Museum in Seattle to display.

Bruce Alfred, an artist from ‘Namgis First Nation, one of 18 nations that are part of the Kwakwaka'wakw territories, travelled to Washington state to examine the mask along with museum officials who wore gloves.

“They certainly treated it like it was the Holy Grail,” Alfred said.

Alfred, 75, said it was clear that the mask was from the Kwakwaka’wakw.

“If you're from here and you're an artist, you know it was from here,” he said. “You just know the distinctive style.”

Alfred said he didn’t know when the mask was created, but estimated it dated back to perhaps the 1860s or ‘70s.

The Seahawks logo faced criticism shortly after it was first unveiled. According to a 1975 Associated Press article, the chairman of the King County Arts Commission wrote a letter to team owners that said the logo "fails to depict with adequate sensitivity the art principles of Northwest coast Indian peoples."

According to The Associated Press, Seahawks general manager John Thompson sent a letter in response and included a photograph of a mask from Art of the Northwest Coast Indians, saying "that mask, with certain modifications, was used by NFL Properties as the basis for the Seahawks emblem."

Alfred said that to his knowledge there were no consultations with the Kwakwaka’wakw at the time the logo was designed.

“They just saw it. They liked it. They produced it, their own version,” he said.

Alfred went on to say that “it's a big honour for them to want to use something like that.”

Bunn-Marcuse said the way the original Seahawks logo was created wouldn’t happen today.

“There's lots of local history and if [teams] want to be inspired by that, they need to work with First Nations artists."

In the 1970s people weren't thinking along those lines, she added.

Wright notes that over the years Indigenous artists have created their own versions of the Seahawks logo.

K'ómoks and Kwakwaka’wakw artist Andy Everson saw the mask at the Burke Museum, while taking part in a 2014 event at the museum that included former Seahawks players.

“The fact that an object from our culture most definitely formed the basis of the original logo made me almost feel proud,” Everson wrote in a social media post. “It also brought up a lot of questions, too. Questions around appropriation and territorial recognition.”

Everson, who described himself as a Seahawks fan, created his own take on the logo, “one created by a Kwakwaka’wakw-Salish artist and inspired by a Kwakwaka’wakw mask on southern Salish lands.”

Qualsius (Shaun Peterson), a Coast Salish artist based in Washington state, created a version of the logo that incorporated Coast Salish design.

In 2021, the Seahawks partnered with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe to create T-shirts inspired by the Seahawks logo using Coast Salish design elements.

Wright says her research found that the mask once was part of a collection of German surrealist artist Max Ernst, who likely acquired it in the 1940s from either a German art dealer or the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

A 2024 documentary, So Surreal: Behind the Masks, focused on how European surrealists were obsessed with masks from the northwest coast of North America, many of which had been stolen, seized by the government or sold by people who didn't have the right to sell them.

According to the website for the U’mista Cultural Centre, which aims to ensure the survival of the cultural heritage of the Kwakwaka’wakw, for more than a century some of the “most treasured masks and ceremonial objects had been in the hands of museums in Canada, England and the United States, taken away at a time of great sorrow when a law deemed the potlatch was illegal.”

Bunn-Marcuse says it’s critical to remember that transformation masks serve an important cultural function. She hopes that if there is a positive that comes out of the mask’s association with the NFL, it’s that the history of Northwest Coast art, in all its complexity, can be introduced to a new audience.

“When we had the Seahawks mask on display I got invited onto an NFL podcast,” Bunn-Marcuse said. “I certainly, as an art historian, never imagined that would happen in my lifetime.”

Jon Azpiri is a reporter and copy editor based in Vancouver, B.C. Email him with story tips at jon.azpiri@cbc.ca.

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