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

More than a decade ago, as the Seattle Seahawks were on the verge of their first 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.