Oct 16, 2015

When you signed up to support this project one of you told me that the Haida were slavers. I knew that North and South American tribes frequently enslaved each other, but I wasn't sure abut the Haida. Here's what I learned.

This will be a sidebar in the book:

                                                               HAIDA SLAVERY 

 There are dozens of conflicting accounts and descriptions of slavery on Haida Gwaii, about the ways slaves were taken, traded, bought, sold and treated. Here, based on multiple common accounts, is what seems certain: The Haida had slaves. Truth is many north and south American tribes enslaved each other, and Africans, and in at least one well documented case, The Haida’s, they enslaved white people. 

 At one point up to thirty percent of he Haida population may have been slaves. Most Haida slaves were the defeated warriors of other First Nations that had the temerity to attack Haida Gwaii. With their prisoners of war the Haida had three choices. 

1. Kill them? Too harsh. 

2. Send them home? Really …. to be rearmed and sent back for another assault? Dumb idea. 

3. Enslave them humanely, for a probationary period, try to rehabilitate them. Then either release them or invite them to stay on. 

 Option three appears to have won. So prisoners of war were definitely one source of slaves for the Haida. But there are also accounts of Haida going on lightening raids to kidnap or capture slaves from neighboring tribes. And what seems certain is that the Haida may have been the first, and possibly the only non-white civilization in history to enslave white people. The whites were mostly British soldiers who either committed crimes while on leave, or worse made eyes at a Haida woman. That could get your ship burned to waterline with all your fellow sailors taken prisoner. Among the Haida’s white slaves were also gold miners, thieves and whiskey traders. 

 Haida slaves were a commodity, traded frequently for other commodities and occasionally used to pay debts and buy wives. Slaves were allowed to marry, even to a Haida woman if she’d have him. But the children of slaves were enslaved. Slaves did menial work and paddled war canoes. 

 Where the legend gets dicey is in conflicting accounts of how the Haida treated their slaves. Rumors range from generous to brutal, from kindly to vicious. There’s an oral history of a white slave remarking that he’d been well treated and never had a better meal than he’d had while enslaved by the Haida. But there are also possibly apocryphal tales of Haida sacrificing slaves as an offering to visiting dignitaries, and refusing the bury them on the islands when they died, instead simply throwing their corpses into the sea. 

 What most historians seem to agree with is that the Haida kept their slaves for a limited period, ranging in accounts from seven to ten years, at which point they were with either released or invited to stay in Haida Gwaii as second class citizens. Some even married into the tribe, although until quite recently the Haida seemed to remember who was and who was not descended from slavery. And for some reason former slaves and their descendants all seemed to have settled in one community.