Cultural AH Challenge: Totem Poles

How could totem poles become relatively wildly popular throughout the US and Canada in the later half of the twentieth century for multiple kinds of pop culture/ political art and other uses? The idea is that nearly all of society takes to the concept. Not in a solely religious way specific to the tribes of the northwest, but in a broader way as a kind of popular public artwork that originated from indigenous cultures but became a very visible addition to public spaces.
 
How could totem poles become relatively wildly popular throughout the US and Canada in the later half of the twentieth century for multiple kinds of pop culture/ political art and other uses? The idea is that nearly all of society takes to the concept. Not in a solely religious way specific to the tribes of the northwest, but in a broader way as a kind of popular public artwork that originated from indigenous cultures but became a very visible addition to public spaces.

I feel like this should be actually fairly simple. Totem poles seem like exactly the sort of things that hippies would love; have one group of hippies make one, people admire it, they bring it to Woodstock (or some other large music festival), and bam! totem poles everywhere hippies are found. Over the next couple of decades, it'll get diluted and genericized and adopted into the mainstream, like many hippy things.

The main problem is that totem poles are big and hard to move and time-consuming to make...but that just makes them great for territorialism. Schools and Scouts troops will make them and display them proudly. Frats will make shitty ones every year, bring them to Homecoming, and then burn them afterwards in a big, dangerous, drunken party. Gangs will assemble them from scrap wood and then elaborately carve and paint them, and people will die trying to steal, destroy, and defend them.
 
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