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Haida
Villages* - Houses
Permanent
Haida villages consisted of one or more rows of houses
strung along a beach. Double-row villages were quite
common, but villages with up to five rows of houses
existed only in myth time. Generally the house owned
by the town chief was larger than the rest and stood
near the middle of the village.
According
to ancient myth, the house was one of the main contributions
that the Raven made to Haida life after he stole the
idea from the Beaver. The house was the centre of
Haida social, political and economic life. Certain
aspects and themes related to the house call for some
elaboration in order to better understand the setting
within which all Haida art was created and used. The
subject of houses and their decoration is dealt with
extensively in my book Haida Monumental Art.
Haida
houses were constructed of western red cedar with
a framework of stout corner posts that supported massive
beams. The frame was clad with wide planks. The tools
required for building houses included sledgehammers,
adzes, hand mauls and wedges for splitting wood. Most
housebuilding tools were not decorated, but a few
examples in the collection of the Canadian Museum
of Civilization are quite remarkable.
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An
elaborately carved basalt hand maul that was used
for driving wooden wedges into red cedar logs
to split off planks. James Deans identifies the
lower face as that of a Bear, with the naturalistic
head of a hunter above. The hunter's conical hat
forms the traditional top of a nipple-top maul,
suggesting this may have been an old maul that
was later enhanced with a carved design. The accession
record claims it was once in the collection of
Sir Matthew Begbie, chief justice of British Columbia.
Acquired with the A. Aaronson
collection in 1899, but probably originally collected
by James Deans in the early 1890s on Haida Gwaii.
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A
sledgehammer used to drive wedges into cedar trees
to split off planks. This fine specimen has the
head of the Thunderbird holding a small Whale.
Collected
on Haida Gwaii in 1879 by Israel W. Powell.
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Small
houses averaged 6 by 9 m (20 by 30 feet) and were
occupied by thirty to forty closely related family
members, while large houses were up to 15 by 18
m (50 by 60 feet) with twice as many residents,
including immediate family and slaves. The ideal
house had a large pit in the central area, often
lined with a vertical box structure of massive planks.
The hearth occupied the centre, directly under a
smokehole, which had a plank flap that could be
moved with ropes to control the draft for the fire.
Usually the house of the town chief had the largest
or deepest housepit. The roofs of houses belonging
to people of rank were covered with overlapping
planks, anchored in placed with large rocks. The
houses of poorer people and canoe sheds had roofs
of cedar bark that had to be replaced frequently.
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The
interior of Chief Wiah's Monster House at Masset,
showing the two deep house pits. There are sleeping
compartments on the upper level (right). A doorway
(left) that is covered with pictures from the
London Illustrated News leads to Wiah's sleeping
compartment, which is built outside the house
itself. Most of the furniture is from the captured
ship Susan Sturgis.
Photograph
by Richard Maynard, 1884.
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The
people of the northern and southern regions of Haida
Gwaii have different approaches to house construction.
In the north, including the villages of the Prince
of Wales archipelago, Haida houses resemble the
large gable-roofed plank structures found throughout
other north coast villages. This house has an internal
frame consisting of four or more massive vertical
posts spanned by equally massive round beams up
to 15 m (50 feet) or more in length, covered with
a cladding of wide planks.
In
the south, houses have an external frame, with plank
cladding that fits precisely between the parallel timbers
of the house frame. This more elaborate style of house,
with mortice and tenon joints and low-tolerance carpentry,
probably did not develop until steel tools became available
in the late eighteenth century. The greatest incidence
of the exterior frame house occurs at the village of
Ninstints at the southern tip of Haida
Gwaii.
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| Northern
style (Kiusta) |
Southern
style (Skedans) |
A
third type of house occurs predominantly among the Kaigani
Haida of the Prince of Wales archipelago in Alaska.
It is a blend of the two basic styles, in having both
an interior frame based on four massive posts as well
as a system for the walls and gables supported by four
smaller exterior corner posts. Large houses, like that
of Chief Skowl at Kasaan village, have a heavy horizontal
timber between the front corner posts (repeated at the
back wall) that effectively divides the cladding on
the front and back gables above and below this beam
into shorter boards.
More
reading*:
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Housefront
Paintings*
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Carved
Interior Poles and Posts*
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Interior
Screens, Housepits, and Smokeholes*
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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)
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