804 REPORT — 1889. 



Inhabitants. 



The country is inhabited by a great number of tribes belonging to 

 seven or ei^ht linguistic stocks. Certain similarities of form and 

 phonetic elements between the Tlingit and Haida languages have given 

 rise to the opinion that farther researches may show them to be remote 

 branches of the same stock. This presumption might appear to be 

 strengthened by their divergence from all other stocks inhabiting the 

 territory. Nevertheless the dissimilarity of vocabularies and of gram- 

 matical elements is so great that the coincidences referred to cannot yet 

 be considered sufficient proof of their common origin, although the two 

 languages must be classed together in one group when compared with the 

 other languages of the North Pacific coast. Counting them for the 

 present as separate stocks, we distinguish the following families : — 



1. Tlingit. — Inhabiting Southern Alaska. 



2. Haida. — Inhabiting Queen Charlotte Islands and part of Prince of 

 Wales Archipelago. 



3. Tsimshian. — Inhabiting Nass and Skeena Rivers and the adjacent 

 islands. 



4. Kwakiutl. — Inhabiting the coast from Gardiner Channel to Cape 

 Mudge, with the sole exceptions of the country around Dean Inlet and 

 the west coast of Vancouver Island. 



5. The Nootka. — Inhabiting the west coast of Vancouver Island.' 



6. The Salish. — Inhabiting the coast and the eastern part of Van- 

 couver Island south of Cape Mudge, the southern part of the interior as 

 far as the crest of the Selkirk Range and the northern parts of Washing- 

 ton, Idaho, and Montana. 



7. The Kutonaqa. — Inhabiting the valley of the Upper Columbia 

 River, Kootenay Lake and River, and the adjoining parts of the United 

 States. 



The Tlingit, although not belonging properly to British Columbia, 

 have been included in this report, as they must be considered in a study 

 of the Haida and Tsimshian. 



I do not enumerate the tribes composing the Tlingit and Haida 

 peoples, as the former have been treated by Dr. A. Krause in his 

 excellent work, ' Die Tlinkit Indianer,' while 1 am not acquainted with 

 the subdivisions of the latter. Dr. G. M. Dawson in his ' Report on the 

 Queen Charlotte Islands' gives a list of villages. It seems that the 

 Haida divide their people into several groups, each group comprising a 

 number of villages. The Haida call themselves Qa'eda, i.e. people. 

 They are called by the Tlingit Dekyino', i.e. people of the sea. The 

 Tsimshian call them Haida, which is evidently derived from Qa'eda. 



The following list of Tsimshian tribes was obtained by inquiries at 

 the mouth of Skeena River. 



The language is spoken in two principal dialects, the Nasqa' and the 

 Tsimshian proper. 



I. Tribes speaking the Nasqa' dialect : 



1. Nasqa', on Nass River. 



2. Gyitksa'n, on the upper Skeena River=people of the Ksia'n. 



' New observations made in 1889 seena to indicate that tliere exists an affinity 

 between the fourth and fifth groups. 



