Haisla

The Haisla, whose name means dwellers downriver in their own tongue, are an Indigenous people of the northern British Columbia coast, based at the village of Kitamaat. They comprise two historic bands, the Kitamaat and the Kitlope, whose territories take in the channels and river watersheds around Douglas Channel and the Gardner Canal.

Their Tsimshian neighbours call them Kitamaat, meaning people of the snow. Their language, X̄a'islaḵala, is the northernmost of the Wakashan languages, with Kitamaat and Kitlope dialects and its nearest relative in Oowekyala to the south; the Haisla were once incorrectly classed as Northern Kwakiutl.

Sharing the Northwest Coast way of life, they fished salmon, hunted sea mammals, built cedar plank villages and held potlatches to validate rank and ancestry. After European ships reached the coast in the 1790s, introduced diseases drastically reduced their numbers.