took with me the completed introductory chapters and rough version of her narrative. As I typed the narrative portions in July I was astounded at the growing list of questions I was amassing. The project had supposedly been completed the preceding summer, but I found I had neglected some basic life-cycle topics: how long mothers typically nursed their children, the significance of menopause for Haida women, the learning of sexual behavior, and others. In addition, I had enumerated questions dealing specifically with Nani’s life history, such as whether the first children of Isabella and Charles Edenshaw had been born in a traditional house and where Isabella and Charles had lived after they were first married. Fortunately, I secured answers to most of my stock of questions during a week’s return to Masset in August of 1978.
With the manuscript complete except for the Discussion and the Afterword, I returned in the summer of 1979 for another week. This time my main purposes were to check the large genealogy I had constructed and to read Nani’s narrative to her. In addition, I sought her reflections on friendship, growing old, the changes she had witnessed, and the people she has admired. In July of 1980 I returned again, this time to work specifically with Nani on Haida kinship, but our tape recordings included some life-history data that have been incorporated into this narrative. My last visit with Nani before the book went to press, in July 1981, resulted in a few corrections and minor additions to the narrative.
ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
A considerable amount of ethnohistorical research both preceded and followed my fieldwork. In earlier trips to the Provincial Archives of British Columbia in Victoria I had surveyed most of the material relating to the nineteenth-century Haida, but had not explored extant twentieth-century materials. During July and August of 1977 and 1978 I researched these materials. Especially significant were two newspapers from the Queen Charlottes, the Queen Charlotte Islander and the Masset Leader, which were published during the second decade of the twentieth century. In addition to presenting local news, the Islander also ran a series of lengthy articles on the Haida during 1911, 1912, and 1913, written by Charles Harrison, a former missionary. Perusal of materials relating to Thomas Deasy, Indian agent at Masset from 1910 to 1924, revealed documents written by a Haida. Alfred Adams, Florence Davidson’s uncle, carried on a regular correspondence with Deasy from 1924, when the latter left the Queen Charlottes, until the time of Deasy’s death in 1936. Deasy’s reports to the Minister of Indian Affairs, published in the annual reports from 1911 to 1920, present a detailed and generally sympathetic portrait of the Masset community.
From research conducted at the Church Missionary Society archives in 1972, I had compiled all the pertinent correspondence written by Masset missionaries from 1876 to 1913; some of this material has contributed to the present volume. The early marriage and baptismal records for St. John’s Anglican Church at Masset, housed in the diocese headquarters in Prince Rupert, provided marriage dates for several of Florence Davidson’s relatives and ancestors, documented Isabella Edenshaw’s births prior to Florence, and pinpointed the baptismal dates for Florence and her sisters.
Ethnohistorical and ethnographic data have been drawn together to form the traditional and historic picture of Haida women in chapter 2. Additional data from more recent historical documents and from my own field journals are interspersed with Florence’s narrative, both to lend a broader perspective to her account and to present a contemporary non-native view of the Haida.
1. Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography, which appeared just as this book was going to press, provides an introduction “to the full historical and conceptual development of the life-history method in anthropology … and discusses the relevance of this method to a wider audience” (Langness and Frank 1981:5).
2. Two of the biographies included there are of women: Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute) by Catherine Fowler and Flora Zuni (Zuni) by Triloki Nath Panday.
3. Boas (1943) later eschewed the life history as a legitimate approach to the study of culture.
4. Charlie Nowell, for example, discusses his premarital and extramarital affairs (which he estimates at more than two hundred) quite openly and in some detail (Ford 1941). To what extent this revelation is a product of Clellan Ford’s well-known anthropological interest in human sexual behavior is not known.
CHAPTER 2
The Haida Woman
The women also to a great extent share the good qualities of the men…. They are exceedingly strong and can cut firewood, sail and paddle canoes, and work equally as hard as the men. They are all handsome and possess agreeable features when classed with the other coast Indians. [Harrison, April 29, 1912]
A SKETCH OF THE TRADITIONAL PEOPLE
They called themselves Haada, “people,” and their world was divided into two islands, Haida Island (the Queen Charlottes) and the larger seaward country (the mainland). Both places were supported by a supernatural being, “Sacred One Standing and Moving,” who in turn rested upon a copper box (Swanton 1909:12). The Haida population of some nine thousand was distributed among winter settlements located along the more protected shores and inlets of the Queen Charlotte Islands and, by the mid-eighteenth century, in southeastern Alaska. The large cedar-plank houses comprising these villages were built close together, nestled against the treeline and facing the beach in one or two long even rows. Above the storm-tide mark along the beachfront were erected the forest of totem poles so frequently remarked upon by nineteenth-century visitors to these remote shores. Advertising the greatness of their owners or owners’ kin, some rested against the houses, some stood freely before the houses, and still others, shorter than the preceding types, contained the remains of the dead.
A maritime fishing, gathering, and hunting people, the Haida dispersed from March to November to resource areas where they fished, hunted sea and land mammals, gathered seaweed and other wild plants, and collected shellfish. The winter months, spent in the villages, were punctuated by the giving of potlatches and feasts, a prerogative of the wealthy.
Traditional Haida society was stratified into three categories: the y’a?؟zEyt (nobles), the ?is?aniya (commoners), and the hədənga (slaves). This stratification was underpinned and reinforced by the ceremonial distribution of wealth and food in potlatching and feasting, respectively. The y’a?؟Eyt were the “chiefs,” the holders of high-ranking hereditary titles, the house owners, the wealthy, the ambitious, the clever, and the lucky. They were kind, generous, polite, and well-spoken; they fulfilled kinship obligations and had “respect for themselves.” They gave potlatches and feasts to make good their names and to assure that their children would be y’a?؟Eyt, for the route to high status was through the potlatching efforts of one’s parents. Ideally, this upper stratum of society exemplified all the desired and valued Haida qualities.
The ?is?aniya, on the other hand, were traditionally regarded as “kind of poor”; they did not show proper etiquette, did not exemplify “respect for self,” talked “any old way,” and were lazy. They were outnumbered by the y’a?؟Eyt. The həldənga were slaves or the descendants of slaves, captives taken in warfare or persons purchased as slaves from other tribes. They were without status, regarded as chattels, used as labor, and valued by their y’a?؟Eyt owners for the prestige their possession conveyed.
The Haida class division crosscut the descent organization of society. Descent was traced matrilineally, and named matrilineages, each headed by a chief, were the important resource-holding corporations. Lineages owned, among other properties, fishing streams, stretches of shoreline,
