I was initially assigned the Haida and Tlingit of the Canadian Pacific Coast. Because of their location they feed off of the usual foraging foods such as plants, fruits, and nuts, along with the aquatic animals and the land mammals native to the region. Gender roles are pretty clear among the Haida and Tlingit along with most hunter-gatherer communities when discussing which jobs are done by which gender.

Their culture is matrilineal but not matriarchal. This means that while the family name and the family line is traced through the female, it is not the females who generally take the leadership positions in the tribe. While the men take the lead in the house as primarily a social figure, the opinions of the women hold incredible sway. Stories exist of Europeans visiting these tribes and witnessing women clearly take charge of a situation and show just how powerful their opinion is. This differs slightly from the culture of the Chinese Mosuo, the last of China’s matrilineal civilizations. The Mosuo are BOTH matrilineal AND matriarchal, which is the exact opposite of every other Western country, and even some of the hunter-gatherer communities. Here, women have absolute control of their households and their bodies; marriages aren’t forced, or even as binding as they are in Western society. The Mosuo women have an undisputed power over their male counterparts that is more or less the polar contrast to the society we are used to.

The Haida and Tlingit of today are much different from the Western culture of yesterday. Western civilization led both a patrilineal AND patriarchal society where the opinions of the women did not matter at all. This has changed over the years, of course, with the suffrage movement in the early 1900s, followed by the various waves of feminism that have made female voices just as important as the males. In that regards, America, the forerunner of 20th century strength and progress, seems to have “caught up” with this ancient hunter-gatherer society of modern times–a perspective that probably would shock some more conservative thinkers of today.