Little was known about the long history of the mask until Gloria Cranmer Webster, a Kwakwaka'wakw (First Nation community) anthropologist and daughter of Chief Dan Cranmer, identified the mask from a photograph. Several years later Harry Beasley, a British collector, acquired one of these masks – the Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch transformation mask – and later, in 1944, his wife, Irene Beasley, donated it to the British Museum. The Canadian government then sold many of these masks on to North American museums. They were offered shorter prison sentences if they surrendered their masks and regalia to the authorities. When the ceremony was discovered by the authorities, 26 people were arrested and put in prison. On Christmas Day in 1921, Chief Dan Cranmer held a potlatch in the village of 'Mimkwamlis, Village Island, British Columbia.
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