Yaadás clan historian says he only recently traced how his clan got the beaver crest

Benjamin Young, a Yaadás clan historian, said he only recently looked into a question that had puzzled him for years: how a Haida clan comes to hold the beaver as a crest. He offered two possible accounts and treated one of them as less credible.

"It wasn't until very recently that I figured out, or found out why and how we came upon the beaver as a crest," Young said in a talk for Sealaska Heritage Institute. The beaver, he said, "is actually one of the most favoured crests, or I should say most common crests, among Haida Eagles," appearing among 12 clans in the Haida Nation.

Young gave two accounts and did not choose between them. The first, recorded by ethnologist John R. Swanton, attributes the crest to a woman of another Eagle clan living at North Island who was captured by the Tsimshian and taken as a slave to Port Simpson. A tattoo of a skate on her breast drew the attention of the son of the chief who had captured her, and he married her. Some of her descendants returned to their Haida relatives, Young said, bringing back the beaver and the hummingbird.

The second account comes from Marius Barbeau, who held that the Haida acquired the beaver as a crest through the fur trade. The beaver was the emblem of the North West Company, whose Beaver Hall headquarters in Montreal dates to about 1800. The Hudson's Bay Company kept the emblem after the two companies merged. Young said the sources he has consulted treat Barbeau's material with a grain of salt, and that he includes it anyway because more history is better than less.

Young traced Yaadás lineage through his mother, Joylyn Young, and her mother, Klawgwa Tawa, Gladys Morrison. He described the clan as the Alaskan branch of a larger Haida Gwaii clan whose name refers to salmon eggs after the young have begun to form, and said the clan name itself carries a claim about standing. "So, 'Yadás' would be translated as 'the honorable people,'" he said.

Young traced his own push to recover this history to a 2018 gyaasla, or giveaway potlatch, organized by Robert Davidson, who set out to commission a large banner design for each living Haida clan to carry at gatherings. Davidson first gave banners to the clans at a gyaasla in Masset on Haida Gwaii in 2016, Young said. Once he saw that the Alaskan group was not well represented there, he made plans for the larger gathering held in 2018. Young said that effort helped drive identity development among Haida in Kasaan and in hubs including Ketchikan, Juneau and Anchorage, prompting people to ask who their mother's mother's mother was as a starting point for their own histories.

The migration account came to Young through his great-aunt's recorded telling of a history his great-grandfather gave in an interview. An earlier clan made the run north in early summer and prospered near Cordova Bay. The Yaadás left in early fall, met hard weather, were blown east and landed at Cape Chacon on Prince of Wales Island. They moved repeatedly, building in cold rain. A raven flew over the camp in the mornings calling "Tots, tots, tots." Men followed it and found a creek thick with dog salmon. They named the creek for what the raven said. They settled at what became Old Kasaan.

The National Park Service says the Haida left Old Kasaan between 1902 and 1904 for the site now known as Kasaan, and that the Yaadaas Crest Pole standing there today is a recarving of a pole from the older village. The original remains in the park's collection. The Haida Nation describes Old Kasaan as a village of up to 500 people in 18 lodges, with as many as 60 poles.

The account is Young's synthesis of the clan histories he named and published ethnography. No other knowledge holder responded to it here, and he said it is not finished.

"It connects us with the land, it connects us with the people, it connects my clan with a lot of shared history," he said. He closed by asking anyone who knows more to correct him.