Tlingit and Haida Religion

Tlingit and Haida religious life is organized around a moiety system: every person belongs by matrilineal descent to one of two reciprocal halves, most commonly named Raven and Eagle among both nations, though local names vary by clan and dialect. Each moiety is made up of clans, and each clan holds its own crests, songs, names and origin stories as property, displayed on totem poles, house fronts, blankets and regalia and invoked at potlatches that mark births, deaths, name-taking and the raising of a pole. A person from one moiety traditionally marries into the other, and the two sides perform essential ceremonial roles for each other, so that a Raven cannot properly bury a Raven or raise a Raven's pole without Eagle labor and witness, and the reverse.

Raven himself appears across both traditions as the central culture hero, a trickster whose appetite and cunning repeatedly reshape the world despite, or because of, his own selfishness. The best known cycle tells how Raven, weary of a world kept in total darkness by an old chief who hoarded the sun, moon and stars in nested boxes, transformed himself into a hemlock needle, was swallowed by the chief's daughter, and was reborn as her son. As the cherished grandchild he cried and wheedled his way through box after box until he reached the innermost one, holding daylight itself, then became Raven again and flew off with it, releasing light into the world. Haida and Tlingit versions differ in detail but agree on the shape of the story, and both nations recorded it for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the start of the twentieth century in the tellers' own words.

From 1885 to 1951, the government of Canada made it a criminal offense to hold or attend a potlatch, the ceremonial gift-giving feast at the center of Tlingit, Haida and neighboring Northwest Coast religious and legal life. The ban was added to the Indian Act in 1884 at the urging of missionaries and Indian agents who saw the potlatch as an obstacle to converting Indigenous people to Christianity and to individual wage labor, and it targeted exactly the occasions, name-taking, marriage, mourning, the raising of a pole, at which clan history, crest ownership and ceremonial law were publicly transacted. In Haida Gwaii, part of British Columbia and so directly under the ban, potlatches went on in secret and in modified, harder to prosecute forms for the better part of seventy years; enforcement was uneven and the law's own vague wording helped many escape conviction, but confiscated regalia, masks and coppers taken during the small number of prosecutions that did succeed were rarely returned. Tlingit communities in Alaska, under United States rather than Canadian jurisdiction, faced no identical statute but lived under comparable pressure from missionaries and federal boarding schools that treated potlatching and other ceremonial life as backward practices to be educated out of a generation of children.

Canada repealed the ban in 1951. Ku.eex' among the Tlingit and the potlatch among the Haida are living institutions again today, openly held, and the historical study of the law itself, drawing on court records, missionary correspondence and government files, has become part of how both nations now tell the story of what the ban cost and what survived it.