As a break from all the terrible events in the news I've been doing some more investigations into British Columbia history.
I ran across a book called
Fire in the Raven's Nest: The Haida of British Columbia by Norman Newton (new press, 1973). Woke readings of history are nothing new. Their antecedents go at least as far back as Tacitus. Recent expositions of this point of view got their start with the likes of Carl Ortwin Sauer, always talking about the depredations of Columbus while skipping over any description of Indians except those of Bartolomé de las Casas or the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself whose flattering accounts of them were calculated to insure us that they were suitable candidates for conversion to Christianity. By the 1970s this attitude (minus Christianity, which was already passé) was in full swing both in popular books and film.
Newton purports to write from a Native perspective, even if he wasn't one himself. He did interview a lot of Canada's indigenous peoples living on the North Coast. Because I'm so well familiar with the area his descriptions of life there fifty and sixty and more years ago speak to me. I was there. I found it interesting, for example, that Chief Weah (William Matthews) told him that the first white people to visit the Queen Charlotte Islands (that's what they were called until just a few years ago) arrived in the mid 1600s. Improbably early, but interesting that he should make this remark.
"First time they met a the white man," he said, "it was a ship coming in. They never imagined that fine-looking people like that were in existence. In the olden days they used to live on this island and they used to see the mountains on the mainland, but they had no canoes to go over; and they wondered if those lands over there were inhabited. They didn't know nothing. They had stone axes, you see. They'd chop down, maybe, a three-foot-and-a-half cedar tree, and chop of the top so many lengths, and then square off the top somehow, and burn the inside out. No tools - tone axe. So they were up against it. They could make little dinghies to go around the shoreline and go up the river. That's all they could do in travelling. They couldn't go across to the mainland. They could see the mountains; for hundreds and hundreds of years they wondered if it's inhabited or what kind of land is out there. ..."
The chief was of the opinion that it was only a short time before the white people came that the first circumnavigation of the islands occurred. These seas are always rough, no doubt about that.
Today's Haidas and other activists for Canada's indigenous peoples will always tell you that that they are, in fact, the original inhabitants of Haida Gwaii (the new name for the islands). But later in the book we find this gleaned from many Haida legends:
The Haida who first came to the islands probably found themselves in conflict with the aboriginal inhabitants, whoever these may have been. In fact, an anomalous group is mentioned in the clan histories - the Pitch-Town people. The stories about them are confusing, some seeming to imply that they are ancient inhabitants of the islands, others that they were related to the Ravens. The curious thing is that the stories about them have many of the aspects of racist humour. They are described as having been uncouth in manners, unusually tall and strong and very superstitious, which may simply mean that they held a different set of beliefs about the supernatural world from that common among their fellows.
[...]
In time the Ravens spread over the whole island. They have always been considered the older of the two clans, and though the Eagle clan was apparently more powerful and aggressive at the time of white contact, the latter, or at least most of them, had to live down a certain assumption that they were newcomers, and hence rather raw, crude and spiritually poverty-stricken. Most of the super-natural beings associated with the Queen Charlottes, for example, are of the Raven clan, and in one story Dzilaqons, the ancestress of the Eagles, is distinctly snubbed by the Raven ancestress, Foam-Woman.
The oldest group of Eagles on the island, a small group, is said to have "appeared" or "come over" at the same time as the oldest of the Raven groups, and to have first made its home on the east coast. But another and later group, comprising most of the Eagles of northern Graham Island, seems to have spread from the direction of Rose Spit, which lay at the island end of the most frequently used canoe route from the mainland.
The name Gitins is found in connection with this group, and Swanton, whose opinions in this matter bear considerable weight, thought the name was once applied to all the Eagles of the north part of Graham Island. Boas has suggested that the name has a Tsimshian root; and it is significant that one of the possible places of origin for the mythical ancestress of the Eagle clan, Dzilaqons, is said to have been the Nass River to the north of Prince Rupert. In fact, the Stastas group within the Gitins, tow which the famous Haida carver, Charles Edenshaw (Tahayten), belonged, can trace its ancestry back to Tlingit country. The name Edenshaw, Tahayten said, was Tlingit, and meant "nothing left of it", a reference to the place where a glacier comes to the sea and is melted by the sea water. The story of how the Eagles came down the Stikine is also found among the Tlingit: the Eagle ancestors known as Yenyedi ("Hemlock people") passed under a Stikine glacier on their way to the coast. This information suggests a migration of Eagles directly to the north shore of the Queen Charlottes.
The fact that these traditions of the Eagles show less evidence of age - that blurring of outlines by time - than the Raven legends, implies that this last branch of the Haida Eagles crossed Hecate Strait some time in the past two or three hundred years. In fact, Tsiminshian history, which can be dated more precisely, speaks of a great invasion of Tlingit Eagles at the end of the seventeenth century, and continuing conflict with the Tlingit is recorded after that in both Haida and Tsimshian traditions. It was not until the island Haida began to exert an influence on the mainland that they entered Tsimshian historyr. During the eighteenth century, and particularly towards its end, the Haida began to enter the lives of the mainland peoples, both as raiders and, through marriage into the chiefly dynasties, as members of mainland elites.
The Haida not only crossed Hecate Strait and left ruling families among the Tsimshian, they also spread north, crossing Dixon Entrance to establish themselves on the southern end of Prince of Wales Island. There is some argument as to when this migration occurred, but most of the writers who have voiced opinions on the matter would place it at some time between 1740 and 1790. It would coincide with a period, according to Tsimshian tradition, during which the Tlingit, who had previously established control as far south as the Skeena estuary, were gradually being driven back to what is now Alaska: the slow fading of their power seems to have begun, roughly, about 1730 and continued, again roughly, until 1790. That the Tlingit were present on Prince of Wales Island is indicated by the fact that the Haida immigrants retained the Tlingit names of such places as Hlinkwan and Howkan; that they were not very strong is indicated by the fact that they allowed a weak group of Haid (the Haida immigrants are described as poor and rather desperate) to take possession of their territory.
The story of this migration seems to imply that big canoes were scarce on this part of the island at least, since the emigrants tried to cross Dixon Entrance without them, and had to turn back because of the rough water. They then, according to the story, "found many friends and secured a big canoe", in which they were able to cross "the great water". Now Dawson thought the crossing occurred about 1720; Swanton, in discussing his opinion, thought it must have happened more recently than that, though he advanced the opinion with some hesitation. If big seaworthy canoes, though they were obviously known at this time, were not easily obtained, this would tend to confirm Chief Weah's statement that the Haida did not build such canoes until some time after the 1640s. On the other hand, we know that they had such canoes by the 1770's since the Perez expedition describes them.
Brings back memories. I lived for several years right on the beach on Revilladigedo Island. This is in Tlingit territory. But directly opposite though quite a few miles out to sea is Prince of Wales Island which is / was half Haida and half Tlingit. In between but far enough south not to impede the view is Metlakatla Island. It's named after the original Tsimshian village near Prince Rupert. Back in the 1880s a group of them left to establish a Christian community there. I think I may have told this story before: It was supposed to be 'dry', only in sense of no liquor allowed; this part of Alaska is one of the wettest places on earth; when I was there most years we had over 200 inches annually. Metlakatla was never totally dry in other respects either. Every week a group of Indians would get in their boat and come over our way, beaching it very close by. There was a liquor store right across the road, perfectly situated for their convenience and the residents of the South Tongass rural area just outside of Ketchikan.