| A VOYAGE INTO CANADIAN HISTORY:
THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS
Story and photography
by Eric Anderson & Nancy Allen
|
| And that is the thrill for most passengers: venturing into the unknown, into
the mystical territory of one of the least understood Native American cultures
of all time and into the land of the Haida.   
  
The Haida nation lived here for ten thousand years. Their origins are lost in
time though their art somewhat resembles the Maori’s of New Zealand and
their language, strangely, has something in common with Comanche. In the late
1700s, the Haida, 20,000 strong, lived in more than 100 coastal villages. They
were resourceful people who mastered the challenge of surviving a sometimes angry
sea.
  
  
They couldn’t, however, survive the smallpox that came with European discovery.
The few hundred survivors dragged their way in the late 1800s to a missionary
village, leaving their “dead abandoned on the beaches, their canoes rotting
in the rain forest and their signature totem poles decaying in the marshes. They
were,” says historian Moira Johnston, “a forgotten culture and a
people starved for their own history.”
  
  
|
