Archive Note
Among the Haida, ki-da was a system of marking clan crests, the bear, beaver, wolf, eagle, killer whale, salmon, and others belonging to the Eagle and Raven moieties, rendered in the same curvilinear formline design used across Northwest Coast art and carved on poles. The marks served as a visible, permanent record of clan membership, family lineage, and territorial rights, and they were applied within the potlatch, the ceremonial cycle of feasting and gift-giving through which a house's names and rights were witnessed and confirmed. The anthropologist James Swan documented the practice in the late nineteenth century, observing that every mark carried meaning and that the designs on women's hands and arms indicated their family and crest. Canada's ban on the potlatch from 1885 to 1951 suppressed the tattooing without ever outlawing it directly, a case of suppression by indirection; the tradition contracted sharply but did not vanish, and a contemporary revival is underway. Lars Krutak's research on the crest tattoos of the Tlingit and Haida is the principal modern synthesis.