Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

Sometime toward the end of the 18^th Century, the people of Haida Gwaii developed a second type of house construction which more effectively married the post and beam structure to the exterior walls and roof. This six-beam house integrates all of the structural members and distributes the loads by employing more elaborate joinery, including mortis and tenon joints and interlocking features. The sheathing is further integrated into the post and beam frame by joinery. The extensive use of joinery in this type of house, with structural supports integrated into the exterior walls, adds structural strength as well as providing for column-free interior space. Because the six-beam house was built most commonly in the southerly Haida Gwaii settlements, the Anthony Island region has been identified as its birthplace. Perhaps this anomalous architectural contribution was stimulated by trading with European seamen, when new wealth enhanced artistic inventiveness among the Haida and they had obtained both metal tools and exposure to European and maritime joinery.

The unique six-beam house found only on Haida Gwaii intrigued the early photographer George Dawson when he visited there in the late 1800s. In these buildings, he observed, the roofs were not supported on central posts as in the more widespread two-beam construction system. They rested on the angled gable plates, the slotted corner posts, and six stout beams flattened on the lower side, which protruded beyond the plate beams on either side of the gable. Dawson’s photographs show how the vertical wall planks fit neatly into slots in both these gable plates and the base plates that ran along the ground. Sometimes the wall planks were bent by steaming and forced to overlap to produce a weather-tight wall. The six-beam system opened up the interior of the house, making its use more flexible, because interior free-standing house posts were no longer necessary. 

The traditional Haida longhouse was also distinguished by its unpainted facade. Instead, the occupying family’s crests and myths were portrayed on prominent doorway poles, on screens, and on fire pit retaining planks inside, or on the free-standing poles that rose before the buildings like proud genealogies. Dating the phases of Haida monumental art has prompted considerable speculation. Northwest Coast art forms were firmly established before the influx of traders, metal tools, and European paints in the early 1800s, but the fur trade certainly increased their quantity and probably their quality. Carved interior screens and house entry poles were sketched by early European artists in the 1790s, but there is only one brief reference in 1794 to a free-standing totem pole. Only a century later, however, these ceremonial and mortuary poles were dominating Haida village-scapes. 

Inside the house, the house pit or da, had a primarily ceremonial function and is perhaps an archaic feature retained from the period when the Haida, like other North Coast groups, lived in pit houses.  Although common among the Haida and Tlingit the house pit occurs only occasionally among the Tsimshian, and was absebt from houses on the Central and Southern Coast.  Houses of the highest ranking Haida had deeply excavated house pits which descended in stages.  Usually there was only one house with this feature in a village, that of the village chief.

Haida houses were named and a house might bear more than one name. Names derived from a number of sources: the crest of the house owner, the largess of the house owner or the abundance of his economic resources, events related to the actual construction of the house, or physical features of the house. House names were considered personal property and were often transferred to a new house in a new village when the homeowner moved, or a replacement of the original house was built at the succession of a new chief.