Today, most of the Haida population in Canada lives on Haida Gwaii, particularly Graham Island, but in prehistoric times they were much more evenly distributed throughout the archipelago. According to the early fur traders, there were concentrations of population in the south at Skungwai (or Ninstints) village and in the north at Cloak Bay, where there was cluster of villages, including Kiusta, Dadens and Yaku. On Masset Inlet there were the major villages of Masset, Yan and Kayung, and on Skidegate Inlet there was the village of Skidegate. The locations chosen for these settlements protected them from the winter storms that lash the Pacific coast and Hecate Strait.

Although the Haida spent most of the year in their sizable towns, during the fishing season they dispersed to every stream or river that had a fish run. Salmon were the primary food species, although they run only on alternate years on Haida Gwaii. All Haida had access to the rich halibut fishing grounds, and villages on the west coast relied heavily on black cod. Shellfish was readily available, except on the west coast. Eulachon, a variety of herring rich in oil, was not available on Haida Gwaii, so the Haida travelled to the huge runs on the Nass River on the mainland, where they traded for other foods and rare materials that were not available in their homeland.

Kiusta

The name Kiusta means "where the trail comes out," in reference to a trail from Lepas Bay to the village. The first European to see the village was Captain George Dixon in July 1787. Kiusta was first portrayed in 1799, in a drawing in the journal of the ship Eliza, a fairly accurate panorama of the town from the water. The largest house belonged to the town chief Itltini, of a branch of the Stastas Eagles whose head chief was Cunnyha (now Gunia) and who is depicted in a sketch by Sigismond Bacstrom. Cunnyha's house was on Lucy Island near Kiusta, but in about 1800 he moved his people to the Prince of Wales Island area of Alaska to join the group known as the Kaigani Haida.

Kiusta, along with the adjacent village of Yaku, was identified by John Work as Lu-lan-na. The remains of twelve houses at Kiusta indicate the population was then just over three hundred people.

The name Edenshaw is first mentioned by fur traders of the 1790s. As with all Haida chiefly names, it was passed down the matrilineal line to a chief's eldest sister's son. At least one Chief Edenshaw preceded the one who dominated most of the nineteenth century, Albert Edward Edenshaw. He was born in 1812 and grew up in his father's village of Rose Spit, but moved to Kiusta after 1834 when he was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to loot the Vancouver, a stranded Hudson's Bay Company ship. The captain and crew blew up the vessel, nearly killing Edenshaw, but he later salvaged many rifles from the sandbar and replaced their badly burned stocks with ones he carved himself. These he traded to other Haida and converted his new wealth into slaves, of which he eventually owned a dozen.

Albert Edward Edenshaw built his house in Kiusta around 1840 after the details of the carvings on the corner posts, rafter ends and frontal pole were revealed to him in a dream. He named it Story House, and it stood on the site of his predecessor's dwelling, called Property House. When Story House was finished, Albert Edward gave a great potlatch and invited guests from Masset, Skidegate, Kaisun and Cha'atl, as well as from Kaigani villages.

The noted artist Charles Edenshaw, who was Albert Edward's nephew and heir, made a model of Story House for John R. Swanton, and it is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Swanton notes that Albert Edward intended to leave Story House to his son rather than his nephew, but abandoned the idea and, in fact, the village itself, moving to Kung village in 1850, just before the capture of the ship Susan Sturgis by Chief Wiah of Masset.

Just west of Kiusta are three mortuary posts that once supported a communal mortuary box, now completely overgrown with mosses and ferns. In 1932, Robert Bruce Inverarity saw these mortuary poles and recorded his observations of them:

The centre pole of the three carved poles was half round, and hollow, while the other two were solid. The two outer poles and the plain pole behind are notched in the top to receive a burial box at a height of about fifteen feet. The box was gone. On both sides of this mortuary group were the remains of burial platforms. Both were broken and well pilfered like the cave we had visited, by fisher folk. From the box sides I found there must have been from twenty to thirty boxes on each side of the two platforms.

Remains of the timbers that formed the burial platforms were still evident in the 1990s. The central pole of this mortuary appears to once have been an interior pole of a chief's house, for the back of it is hollowed out, as Inverarity notes above, and it also has a small oval doorway only a foot (30 cm) high in the base. The opening is clearly symbolic rather than functional, but it is similar to other known examples of interior central poles from the backs of houses; they appear to be thought of as small frontal poles for the chief's compartment.

Kung

Kung (or Dream Town) was a thriving community of fifteen houses and 280 inhabitants in 1840, according to John Work. On the east side of the village, the remains of a row of houses that appear to be at least several hundred years old suggest an even larger population long ago. The village chief in 1840 was Gulas of the Up-Inlet Town People of the Eagle moiety. A closely related Eagle family shared the eastern half of the town with them, while the Stastas Eagles and a single household of Rose Spit Ravens lived in the western half.

In 1850, Albert Edward Edenshaw, realizing that Kiusta had lost its economic and strategic importance, abandoned his Story House there. He resettled at Kung and built an elaborate dwelling named House That Can Hold a Great Crowd of People. Its architecture has many features of the Kaigani Haida style, such as tall square corner posts, which reveal Chief Edenshaw's strong ties with Haida towns in Alaska. The house next to it was Steel House, so called because it was fortified with the addition of extra horizontal planks to the walls so that no one could shoot the inhabitants through the cracks. Edenshaw also erected a pole in the early 1860s in Kung in honour of Governor James Douglas's fairness to native people; the pole portrays Douglas dressed in his frock coat and tall hat. At about the same time, villages in Alaska were raising poles in Abraham Lincoln's honour for freeing the slaves.

About 1875, Albert Edward Edenshaw moved again, this time to Yatze (or Knife Village) at the head of Naden Harbour, in the hope of encouraging more Alaskan trade.

By the time Newton Chittenden, a provincial government surveyor, stopped at Kung in 1884, it had been abandoned as a permanent village. Yatze had been abandoned the year before, when Albert Edward Edenshaw moved to Masset, but the site continued to be used as a halibut fishing camp until at least the First World War, and smaller temporary houses were built near the beach.

Very few objects were collected at Kung, since it was off the usual visitors' track. Most of the valuable items were taken along by their owners when they moved to Masset. George A. Dorsey, an anthropologist, helped himself to the contents of many Haida graves at Kung, and these objects are now in the Field Museum in Chicago.

Yan

Yan means Beeline Town (literally, "to proceed in a straight line"). It was a large village of seventeen houses established in the late eighteenth century when a split occurred between two Masset families, one of which, the Masset Inlet Rear-Town People, moved across the inlet to Yan. Other Raven and Eagle families joined them there, but were segregated into Eagles in the north end of town and Ravens in the south.

The town chief of Yan, name Stiltla, was an accomplice of Chief Wiah of Masset in the capture of the ship Susan Sturgis in 1852. After its seizure, the ship was brought to Yan, then looted and burned a short distance offshore from Stiltla's House Looking at Its Beak. Stiltla built another large house at Masset, on which he displayed a carved eagle from the sternboard of the ship.

Shortly after photographer Edward Dossetter visited Yan in 1881 when the town was booming, Henry Wiah, the town chief of Masset, invited the population to return, and Yan was abandoned.

Kayung

Kayung was an important village from at least the late eighteenth century, and it appears prominently on maps of that period. By the early 1880s, it had been abandoned in the consolidation of north coast villages to Masset that was encouraged by town chief Henry Wiah.

One fine pole stood in front of Chief Na'qadjut's House That Wears a Tall Dance Hat, so named in reference to the figure at the top of the pole, a chief wearing a hat with eight rings. The chief's tongue is joined to the tongue of a bearlike animal that he is holding. The depiction of joined tongues is rare on a totem pole, though it was a common feature on argillite carvings in the middle of the last century when this pole was probably created. The middle figure is a Whale with human arms holding its fins. The lowest figure is a Bear with a small Raven in its mouth. This pole was removed from Kayung at the turn of the century by Charles F. Newcombe for E. E. Ayers, a Chicago philanthropist who gave it to the Field Museum. After passing through the hands several owners, the pole was purchased by the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which painstakingly restored it and erected it in front of the Haida house in the Grand Hall.

A second exquisite pole tells the story of the lazy son-in-law. The son-in-law is depicted at the level of the gable board on the pole, on the back of a Sea Wolf that is eating a Killer Whale. His mother-in-law, who thinks she has a shaman's power to bring in whales (which in actuality her son-in-law has caught), is lodged above him between two Whales. The house chief holding his club sits at the top.

When Richard Maynard arrived in 1884 to take the first photographs of Kayung, fourteen houses of the old style were still standing. The first five houses at the south end of the village belonged to the Eagles while the remainder all belonged to the Ravens.

The other villages*:

Museum of Civilization, Ottawa, Canada
* for all these subjects you can find much more information on the Museum of Civilization, Ottawa, Canada site (see Sources)