While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Haida (Xa'ida, 'people'). The native and popular name for the Indians of the
Queen Charlotte Islands., British Columbia, and the south end of Prince of Wales island., Alaska,
comprising the Skittagetan family. By the natives themselves the term
may be applied generally to any human being or specifically to one speaking the
Haida language. Some authors have improperly restricted the application of the
tend to the Queen Charlotte islanders, calling the Alaskan Haida, Kaigani. Several English variants of this word owe their origin to the fact that a
suffix usually accompanies it in the native language, making it Hā'dē in
one dialect and Haidaga'i in the other.
On the ground of physical characteristics the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian
peoples should be grouped together. Language and social
organization indicate still closer affinities between the Haida
and Tlingit.
According to their own traditions the oldest Haida
towns stood on the east shore, at Naikum and on the broken coast
of Moresby island. Later a portion of the people moved to the
west coast, and between
150 and 200 years ago a still .larger section, the Kaigani, drove the Tlingit
from part of Prince of Wales island and settled there. Although it is not
impossible that the Queen Charlotte islands were visited by Spaniards during the 17th
century, the first certain account of their discovery is that by Ensign Juan
Perez, in the corvette Santiago, in 1774. He named the north point of the
island, Cabo de Santa Margarita. Bodega and Maurelle visited them the year after. In
1786 La Perouse coasted the shores of the islands, and the following year Capt.
Dixon spent more than a month around them, and the islands are named from his
vessel, the Queen Charlotte. After that time scores of vessels from England and
New England resorted to the coast, principally to trade for furs, in which
business the earlier voyagers reaped golden harvest. The most important
expeditions, as those of which there is some record, were by Capt. Douglas,
Capt. Jos. Ingraham of Boston, Capt. Etienne Marchand in the French ship Solide,
and Capt. Geo. Vancouver (Dawson, Queen Charlotte Ids., 1880).
The advent of whites was, as usual, disastrous to the natives. They were soon
stripped of their valuable furs, and, through smallpox and general immorality,
they have been reduced in the last 60 years to one-tenth of then former
strength. A station of the Hudson Bay Company was long established at Messet, but is now longer remunerative. At Skidegate there are works for
the extraction of dogfish oil, which furnish employment to the people during
much of the year; but in summer all the Indians from this place and
Masset go
to the mainland to work in salmon canneries. The Masset people also make many
canoes of immense cedars to sell to other a coast tribes. The Kaigani still
occupy 3 towns, but the population of 2 of them, Kasaan and Klinkwan, is inconsiderable.
Neighboring salmon canneries
give them work all summer.
Mission stations are maintained by the Methodists at Skidegate, by the Church of
England at Masset, and by the Presbyterian at Howkan, Alaska. Nearly all of the
people are nominally Christians.
The Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian seem to
show greater adaptability to civilization and to display less religious
conservatism than many of the tribes farther south. They are generally regarded
as superior to them by the white settlers, and they certainly
showed themselves such in war and in the arts. Of all peoples of
the north west coast the Haida were
the best carvers, painters, and canoe and house builders, and they still earn
considerable money by selling carved objects of wood and slate to traders and
tourists. Standing in the tribe depended more on the possession of property than
on ability in war, so that considerable interchange of goods took place and the
people became sharp traders. The morals of the people were, however, very loose.
Canoes were to the people of this coast what the horse
became to the Plains Indians. They were hollowed out of single
logs of cedar, and were sometimes very large. Houses were built
of huge cedar beams and planks which were worked out with adzes
and wedges made anciently of stone, and put together at great feasts
called by the whites by the jargon word "potlatch". Each house
ordinarily had a single carved pole in the middle of the gable
enc: presented to the beach. Often the end posts in front were also carved
and the whole house front painted. The dead were placed in mortuary houses, in
boxes on carved poles, or sometimes in caves. Shamans were placed after death in
small houses built on prominent points along shore. Among the beliefs of the
Haida reincarnation held a prominent place.
An estimate of the Haida population made, according to Dawson, by John Work,
between 1836 and 1841, gives a total of 8,328, embracing 1,735 Kaigani and
6,593 Queen Charlotte islanders. Dawson estimated the number of people on the
Queen Charlotte islads. In 1880 as between 1,700 and 2,000. An estimate made for
the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs in 1888 (Ann. Rep., 317) gives 2,500,
but the figures were evidently exaggerated, for when a census of Masset,
Skidegate, and Gold Harbor was taken the year after (Ann. Rep., 272) it gave
only 637. This, however, left out of consideration the people of New Kloo. In
1894 (Ann. Rep., 280), when these were first added to the list, the entire Haida
population was found to be 639. The figures for the year following were 593, but
from that time showed an increase and stood at 734 in 1902. In 1904, however,
they had suffered a sharp decline to 587. Petroff in 1880-81 reported 788
Kaigani, but this figure may be somewhat too high, since Dall about the same
time estimated their number at 300. According to the census of 1890 there were
391, and they are now (1905) estimated at 300. The entire Haida population would
thus seem to be about 900.
The Alaskan Haida are called Kaigani. By the Queen Charlotte islanders they are
designated Kets-hade (Q!ēts xa'dē), which probably means
'people of the strait.'
The people of Masset inlet and the nort end of Queen Charlotte islands generally are
called by their southern kinsmen Gao-haidagai (Gao xā'-idAga-i),
'inlet
people,' and those living around the southern point of the group are called Gunghet-haidagai (GA'
ñxet-xā'-idAga-i), from the name of one of the most
southerly capes in their territory. All of these latter finally settled in the
town afterward known to whites as Ninstints, and hence came to be called
Ninstints people.
