Special: Boat Building Families of Greater Masset
Learn about the long standing tradition of boat-building in Masset
Permanent Collection
The Collections
The museum currently has an extensive permanent display(alongside a temporary exhibit space) with many items from maritime and settler donated collections. Some are on loan but most have been gifted.
Front gallery: Houses the maritime industries collections: boat building, commercial fishing, whaling and canneries. There are tools and early technologies, boat models, an historic boat and many maritime accessories including a Haida cedar rope, Japanese net line and whaling flescher. Biographies of notable boat builders are included.
In the alcove: mostly settler collections of Howard Phillips and Jessie Bradley with Hibby Gren carvings.. Here you will find typical homestead, post office and telegraph items of the early 1900’s.
In glass cases and other displays:
- More memorabilia from the Howard Phillips and Jesse Bradley collections
- Items from more than 40 other local residents
- Stone tools, beach finds and fossils
- Sealife: shells, corals and sponges
Display of note, not to be missed:
The oldest European made artefact in British Columbia: a spanish olive jar dredged up in the 1980’s off Langara Island.
Masset's Legacy
Since time immemorial Xaadas have made these islands their home. It has been the bounty of the forest and the sea that have provided the foundation of a rich resilient and strong culture to this day.
Gaw (Old Masset village; meaning “inlet”) was historically four separate villages before the government forced all villages onto one reserve: Masset Indian Reserve #1 in the late 1850’s. Haida Gwaii is the unceded and ancestral territory of Xaada
