SURVEY OF SOUTHEASTERN ALASKAN 

 INDIAN RESEARCH 



Viola E. Garfield 



Department of Anthropology 

 University of Washington 



Approximately eight thousand Indians now live on the 

 coastal mainland and islands of Alaska from Copper River east 

 to the Canadian border. In the early eighteenth century when 

 Europeans sailed into north Pacific waters the native popula- 

 tion was probably much larger. Figures are difficult to com- 

 pare because of different bases of classification and areas in- 

 cluded. The Russians applied the term Kolosh specifically to 

 the Tlingit, but also included all Indians from Prince William 

 Sound to the coast of Washington, as well as those on the 

 Copper River under the same term. 1 Indians now in south- 

 eastern Alaska belong to three distinct language groups al- 

 though the larger number of them speak Tlingit. Tlingit terri- 

 tory includes coastal mainland and islands from Yakutat Bay 

 to Dixon's Entrance, or most of southeastern Alaska. Haida 

 have occupied the southern half of Prince of Wales and adja- 

 cent islands for the last two hundred and fifty to three hundred 

 years. Their ancestors crossed Dixon's Entrance northward 

 from the Queen Charlotte Islands and established themselves 

 in Tlingit territory shortly before European explorers appeared. 

 The third group, the Tsimshian, are very recent migrants. 

 Their one settlement is on Annette Island to which over nine 

 hundred of their ancestors migrated from the vicinity of Prince 

 Rupert, British Columbia, in 1887. 



1 Petroff, 1900. Tikhmenef reported the population of Russian America as 

 14,019 in 1819. This included an estimated 5,000 Kolosh. Veniaminov estimated 

 the number of Kolosh in sixteen villages (Haida and Tlingit) as 5,850 in 1835. 

 In 1839 the Hudson's Bay Company enumerated 7,190 Tlingit and Haida, ex- 

 clusive of those at Sitka. The 10th U. S. Census reports 6,763 Tlingit and 788 

 Haida (1880). 



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