haidahs

Updated: May 1, 2025

The Chilcats, Haidahs, and Tsimsheans are all Thlinkits, and are by far the best of the brown people of the Northland. They are honest, simple, and kind, and more intelligent than the Indians living farther north, in the colder regions. The Thlinkit coast is washed by the warm current from the Japan Sea, and it is not much colder than Chicago or Boston, though the winter is a little longer.

Mary F. Nixon-Roulet - Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin

Few and faint as are these tendencies towards caricaturing and conventionalizing as compared with what may be noted in the artistic productions of the Haidahs, Chinooks, and other tribes of the Northwest, they are yet sufficient to show that in these particulars no hard and fast line can be drawn between the art of the Indian and of the Mound-Builder.

Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee) Henshaw - Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley: Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 117-166

In this connection it is interesting to note that even among tribes of the Northwest, the Haidahs, for instance, whose carvings or paintings of birds and animals are almost invariably treated in a manner so highly conventional or are so distorted and caricatured as to be nearly or quite unrecognizable, it is still some natural object, as a well known bird or animal, that underlies and gives primary shape to the design.

Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee) Henshaw - Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley: Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 117-166