dressspace blog Un nuovo sito targato WordPress
Related Articles
The Haida is a tribe of American Indians, living in the British Columbia (Canada) coast.The Haida members were great whales andsea otters hunters.
They form with the neighboring Tlingit and Tsimshiana subgroup of the coastal culture,characterized by matriarchy and a language belonging to the na-den family. Skilled carvers, producingblack slate tools and totems, both familiar small andlarge totems. They use decorated canoes forfishing and travelling and their livelihood dependslargely on the sea. The canoes are for them, whatthe horses were for the Indians living in the plains. Theirboats, sometimes very big, are dug ina huge cedar trunk and decorated with sculptures. The Haida members are better known as builders ofbig decorated wooden houses.They were divided into clans andhad secret societies.
The first European man to meet them was Juan Perez, arriving in 1774 with the Santiago corvette, followed by the famous French explorer La Perouse.The contact with the modern civilization led to a drasticreduction of the Haida population, which from a maximum peak of more than 8000 people (surveyed in 1841) decreased to just over a thousand, due tosmallpox epidemics and venereal diseases.
