Cedar and Trade: The Haida and Tlingit Empires of the Northwest Coast

On a fog-bound slope in Haida Gwaii, a canoe builder lays his palm on a red cedar that has stood for four hundred years, strikes it with a stone adze and listens. A clean, hollow note means sound heartwood and a canoe inside, waiting to be let out. Before the tree comes down, burned through at a notch packed with wet clay and scraped with shell, he will speak to it, explain what is wanted and thank it for what it is about to give.

The patience came from abundance. Salmon runs darkened the rivers, eulachon grease passed as food and currency, and on that wealth the Haida and the Tlingit built societies of sharp rank, divided into Raven and Eagle and traced through the mother's line. Their big cedar canoes carried trade, war parties and captives the length of the coast.

In 1774 Haida paddlers came out to trade with a Spanish ship, and what followed tested every part of that world: the sea otter rush and the smallpox years, the Russian and then the American claim to Tlingit country, and the Canadian law of 1884 that banned the potlatch. Later came new constitutions and long land claims, and the book ends with potlatches held in the open again and the question of who will decide the future of the cedar.