Haida Two-Dimensional, Sculptural & Woven Art.
The original inhabitants of the Northwest Coast developed and practiced elaborate art traditions that exhibited a degree of continuity both in concept and style.  In the nineteenth century, distincitive traditions developed within the conceptual and formal relationships common to the Native artwork of the northwest coast(Holm, 1990:602).  These distinctive traditions can be grouped into three major conceptual and stylistic branches.

The northern branch includes the arts of the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Haisla, Haihais, and the Bella Bella; the central branch consists of the Kwakiutl and Nootkan arts; and the southern branch is exemplified by the arts of the Coast Salish, the Chinookans, and the Oregon coast Natives (Holm, 1990:602).  Where these branches meet, as in the Bella Bella region, the arts tend to include both of the adjacent traditions.

Tools and Materials.
Woodworking tools in use before contact consisted of bone, shell, stone and beaver incisor teeth, with a few iron and steel blades (King 1981:pl. 85, nos. 123, 124).  The iron and steel may have been obtained from trade across the continent, or salvaged from drift wreckage from Asia (MacDonald 1984a:74-76; G.I. Quimby, 1985).  The maritime fur trade provided additional metal tools throughout the coast that helped foster artistic activity.

The Natives utilized adzes, chisels, drills, knives, mauls and wedges for their woodworking tools.  The crooked knife, similar to the curved bladed man's knife of northern North America (Mason, 1899) became the standard fine carving tool of the Pacific northwest Natives (Holm, 1990:604).

The artwork was either knife finished, resulting in a textured surface, or sanded smooth with dogfish skin or dried stalks of the horsetail (Equisetum) (Holm, 1990:604).  Paint was applied with brushes made of the guard hair from porcupines, or with smoothly pointed sticks for the fine lines(Holm, 1990:604).

Materials such as antler, bone, ivory, steatite and argillite stone were also carved with the woodworking tools that were modified as needed. Early in the nineteenth century natives started metal engraving on copper, silver and gold, producing native carved formline designs.  Many objects were decorated with designs,  utilitarian objects, cultural, and the artwork that was produced for sale to the Europeans.

Two-Dimensional Art.
The formline system depicts creatures by showing their body parts and details with various broad "formlines" that are joined to give an uninterupted grid over the design area (Holm, 1990:606).  Shapes such as ovids and U forms are utilized in various sizes and proportions to complete the body parts.  The formlines join one another with a limited number of juncture types that allows for a smooth transition form one formline to another without an increase in design weight (Holm, 1990:607).  The formline system initially was a painted art, although artists eventually applied the rules to their silver jewelry, argillite and other low relief carvings.

The Haida artists worked within the guide lines required of the formline system, although there are many different stylistic variations noted (Holm, 1990:609).  These variations may represent individual artists' work or simply changes in fashion over time.

From 1820 onward, the Haida artists carved and sold objects such as bowls, chests, figures, model totem poles and platters made from argillite (MacNair and Hoover, 1984).  These argillite objects combined two-dimensional design with sculpture, with the formline details characteristic of the artist's style (Holm, 1990:609).

From the 1860's onward, Haida artists began to make jewelry, primarily bracelets, from pounded silver coins.  The early designs were European-inspired, but eventually crest designs were incorporated (Holm, 1990:609).  The best silver jewelry followed the formline system closely, with elegant designs attributed to individual artists such as Charles Edenshaw.

Haida Sculpture.
The earliest explorers of the Northwest coast noted the monumental, carved Haida poles in their journals (Duff, 1964a:84-94).  As the Haida artists obtained metal tools, the production of poles and artwork flourished.  Some of the carved poles were over 15 meters high and one and a half meters wide (Holm, 1990:615).  The poles served to assert the rank and social affiliation of the house owner and his wife, or to memorialize a deceased noble person (Holm, 1990:615).  The carved figures represent the crests or creatures in the mythical adventures of the family's ancestors.

Haida poles were carved in relief with each formline figure just fitting into the cylindrical confines of the tree trunk, and with the beaks or snouts flattened into the confines of the pole's surface (Holm, 1990:615).  The carved details of wings and fins and the applied paint followed the formline rules (Holm, 1990:615).  The carved figures onten interlocked, with creatures either bitting one another, grasping a fin, or squatting between the large ears of another creature (Holm, 1990:615).

Other Haida sculpture was strongly influenced by formlines, such as bowls, headdress frontlets, rattles, spoon handles and weapons (Holm, 1990:615). 

There was a large variation in the individual styles of Haida art that make it difficult to establish rules for recognizing it as such (Holm, 1990:616).  The Haida are well known for their naturalistic representation of human faces.  The visiting Euro-American sailors facination with the Haida women and their labrets in the lower lip established a market for such portraiture masks (Holm,1990:616).  The realistic masks that were made for sale often had detailed hair stles and movable eyes and lips (Holm, 1981:179-181).

Haida Woven Art.
Haida basketry artist made beautiful spruce root hats with patterns in skip-stich twining on the brim and three-strand twining on the crown that resulted in textural change (Holm, 1990:624).  The hats were painted with crest designs by male artists.  The basket weavers also produced cylindrical storage and gathering baskets made almost entirely of twined spruce root.

The Haida wove yellow cedar bark blankets and capes similiar to the ones made by the Kwakiutl and Nootkan weavers (Holm, 1990:628).  The Spanish explorers on the north end of the Queen Charlottes in 1794 noted Haida wearing blankets woven with elegant geometric designs.  It is possible that these blankets were made by the Haida (Holm, 1990, 628).

Selected Repository Collections of Haida Art*:

American Museum of Natural History, New York. Alaska State Museum and Historical Library, Juneau.
British Museum, Museum of Mankind, London. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
Thomas Burke Memorial, Washington State Museum, Seattle.
University of British Columbia, Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver.
Canadian Museum of Civilization, National Museum of Canada, Ottawa.
Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Denver Art Museum, Denver.
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.
Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal.
Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge.
British Columbia Archives and Records Service, Victoria.
Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria.
Smithsonian Institution, Department of Anthropology and National Anthropological Archives, Washington D.C.
University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
University of Washington, Suzzallo Library, Special Collections, Seattle.

*Information collected byJoanna C. Scherer and various authors of Volume 7, Handbook of North American Indians , Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 1990.