Haida history
Tony Eberts
Great Outdoors
The late Curley Chittenden, the logging boss/environmentalist who helped save our Skagit River from a hydro-power project, was one of the most colourful and accomplished men I have ever known. But the Chittenden family history in B.C. really began with the work of Curley's grandfather, Newton Chittenden, more than a century ago.
In the early 1880s, Newton was commissioned by the B.C. government to explore and write a report on the state of the Queen Charlotte Islands, then a misty, north-coast archipelago known to the province's white population only as a region teeming with fish and timber and still largely inhabited by a proud and handsome people known as the Haida.
The Chittenden report was published in 1884, a brief but stirring account of hundreds of miles of travels by canoe, often at great risk in stormy seas, of exploring on foot, of traveling, trading and living with the native people, studying the resources of salmon, trout, trees and wildlife. And while the islands are still renowned for fine sports fishing (rivers like the Tlell and Yakoun and sea fishing around Langara Island spring to mind), the report's accounts of fish abundance in late Victorian times might make a modern angler's teeth ache.
The Charlottes, or Haida Gwaii as the original inhabitants call them, were even more beautiful and bountiful then, before the inroads of logging and commercial fishing. It was as close to an earthly paradise as this part of the world has ever come. The Haida always had an abundance of fish, using nothing more than simple salmon traps at river estuaries and ingenious bone hooks to catch halibut, lingcod and more. The vast forests provided huge trees for their ocean-going canoes, their homes and the intricate expressions of their culture. For excitement, they would raid other nations for slaves and women.
In short, the Haida (especially the men, of course) had lives that modern folk can only dream about. Fishing, hunting, fighting, fulsome dining, handsome women, carving, painting, story telling--and all without taxes, police, lawyers, traffic jams, rap, Britney Spears and TV commercials. Today, men spend huge sums of money trying to recapture a little of that life style at fancy resorts and hideaways, and seldom succeed.
And then what happened? The progressive, aggressive Europeans arrived and spoiled it all.
Even back in 1882, paradise had been poisoned. Newton Chittenden writes about “beautifully situated" villages such as Culmshea, Ninstints and Skedance..."with splendid beaches and abundant supplies of food. Besides the halibut bank marked on the chart, there is one near all of the villages mentioned, and inexhaustible quantities of clams and mussels along the neighboring shores..." But the villages held so few people; only 50 to 70 in most cases.
Judging by the large burial places, tomb-houses filled with the dead, Chittenden estimates that the islands once held ten times the 1880s population. “Smallpox and the corruption of their women have been the principal causes of their destruction," he writes. “The Haida women, being good looking...have for twenty years been the special prey of the coarse libertines of a large floating population (of Europeans)..."
Paradise fouled by disease and corruption spread by intruders who no doubt saw themselves as a basically Christian, superior race introducing “savages" to the wonders of steel, gunpowder, big fishing nets, assorted viruses, booze, and new levels of lust and thievery.
Is it any wonder that today's Haida leaders look askance at the White Man's plans to involve Haida Gwaii in greedy oil-drilling plans?
(Curley Chittenden had his grandfather's report re-issued in 1984 and distributed by Gordon Soules Book Publishers Ltd. I had the honour of writing the introduction to the slim, 92-page volume.)