LITMIR.BIZ

      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, stands of cedar trees, a corpus of hereditary names or titles, and “crests.” The last, largely zoomorphic symbols, comprised the subject matter of most Haida art. Carved and painted on totem poles, feast dishes, chief’s seats, frontlet headdresses, screens, housefronts, and canoe prows and paddles, among other items, crests symbolized the lineage affiliations of their owners.

      The more than forty Haida lineages were grouped into two matrimoieties—Eagle and Raven—which, like the lineages, were exogamous, but unlike them, were not corporate. In addition to their marriage function, the moieties were ritually significant; one feasted and potlatched members of the opposite moiety and called upon them to perform mortuary functions. The larger significance of the Haida moiety division is exemplified in their classification of mythical beings and deities into this same dual schema.

       Sources and Lacunae

      There are several well-known ethnographic accounts of Haida culture, beginning with geologist George M. Dawson’s 1878 study appended to the report of his geological survey of the Queen Charlotte Islands (Dawson 1880). Some thirty years later, John R. Swanton, a member of the Jesup Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, conducted what still stands as the most thorough investigation of traditional Haida culture. His extensive Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida (1909) was augmented a few years later by the ethnography that Edward S. Curtis prepared in 1916 as part of his twenty-volume study of North American Indians. Brief field research conducted in the summer of 1932 by G. P. Murdock resulted in important additions to our understanding of Haida social and ceremonial organization (Murdock 1934a, 1936). Additionally, Murdock provided a summary of Haida culture in Our Primitive Contemporaries (1934b). Ethnographic as well as ethnohistorical data on Haida culture are also found in the numerous accounts of eighteenth-century trading voyages to the Queen Charlotte Islands (e.g., Bartlett 1925; Dixon 1789; Ingraham 1971; Marchand 1801), in the published and unpublished writings of missionaries (e.g., Collison 1915; Harrison 1912–13; Harrison 1925), government agents (e.g., Deasy 1911–20), and museum collectors (e.g., Swan 1883).

      Although the Haida have been well recorded in the ethnographic literature, there are certain lacunae in this material. Perhaps most importantly, ethnographic as well as historic sources on the Haida chronicle a male world seen through the eyes of male writers, a bias present in most earlier ethnographic literature from all areas of the world. The lives of women are described primarily as they impinge upon or complement the lives of men. Menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth, for example, had wide ramifying effects upon the Haida community and consequently these aspects of the female life cycle have been of sufficient interest to be reported in some ethnographic detail. But what of girlhood, the learning of female roles, the availability of power and authority to Haida women, achievement in female terms; what of the experiences of aging, menopause, and widowhood? We know little or nothing of these cultural domains from the literature.

      In short, the culture of Haida women has not been described. Yet, in order for a life-history narrative to have meaning, one must understand the traditions from which it derives. In this chapter I draw together scattered data from ethnographic and historic sources and from Florence Davidson’s remarks upon Haida women in “the olden days” to form a picture of the cultural position of traditional Haida women. In particular I have dwelt upon the life cycle, the division of labor, ceremonialism, and the value system. By the time Florence Davidson was born, the Haida had been exposed to Euro-American culture for over one hundred years and were considerably acculturated in many respects. More changes followed during the long years of Florence’s marriage. These changes are also briefly reviewed in this chapter, in terms of their effect upon the lives of Haida women.

      THE LIFE CYCLE

      Traditionally, the Haida preferred female to male children (Murdock 1934b: 248). Female children signified future expansion of the matrilineage, and their marriages brought males into the household to assist their fathers-in-law in “making canoes, fishing and hunting” (Harrison, November 25, 1912). On the other hand, it was important that a woman also have male

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