This glossary accompanies Haida Texts and Myths: Skidegate Dialect. It distinguishes present community names from the historical language and place labels retained in the 1905 edition.

Haida — The people and Nation whose ancestral territory includes Haida Gwaii and whose communities also extend into southeast Alaska. “Haida” should not be used as a generic label for Northwest Coast peoples.

Haida Gwaii — The archipelago and Haida homeland called the “Queen Charlotte Islands” in Swanton's 1905 bulletin. Preserve the old name when quoting or identifying that edition; use Haida Gwaii in present prose.

Haida Nation — The living political and cultural Nation. The Council of the Haida Nation's current language pages are authoritative public companions used here for community names.

HlG̲aagilda — The Haida name used by the Council of the Haida Nation for the community also known in English as Skidegate. Swanton recorded this collection there during the winter of 1900–01.

X̲aayda Kil — The Southern Haida language form associated today with HlG̲aagilda. Swanton called it the “Skidegate dialect.” Thirteen narrative units in the collection print historical Southern Haida text.

G̲aw Tlagée — The Haida name used by the Council of the Haida Nation for Old Massett.

X̲aad Kíl — The Northern Haida language form associated with G̲aw Tlagée and related northern and Alaskan communities. Swanton called northern forms “Masset dialect.” One unit in this collection is printed as a Northern or Masset comparison; that single sample is not Northern Haida coverage.

Southern Haida / Northern Haida — Useful cataloging labels for the two major language groupings. They should clarify the edition, not divide a living Haida language world into unrelated peoples.

Skidegate dialect / Masset dialect — Swanton's historical labels. The book uses them for its Southern and Northern language samples. Present community prose in this room uses HlG̲aagilda X̲aayda Kil and G̲aw Tlagée X̲aad Kíl.

Recorder — The role printed on the title page for John R. Swanton. He collected, transcribed, translated, edited, and annotated the volume. “Recorder” is more accurate than treating him as the author of Haida narratives.

Interpreter — A person who mediates between languages and cultural contexts. Henry Moody served as Swanton's principal interpreter and also narrated material. His work was constitutive, not clerical.

Narrator / source authority — A person who spoke, carried, remembered, or supplied a narrative or historical account. The volume names many narrators and sometimes gives family, town, and transmission relations. “Informant,” the old anthropological default, can hide this authorship and authority.

Henry Moody — Swanton's principal interpreter, a member of Those-born-at-Qā'gials of Skedans whom Swanton says later became its chief, and a named narrator in the collection.

Jesup North Pacific Expedition — The American Museum of Natural History expedition under which Swanton conducted the 1900–01 Haida fieldwork. Swanton was a Bureau of American Ethnology employee seconded to the project.

Bureau of American Ethnology — The United States federal ethnological bureau within the Smithsonian Institution. It paid Swanton's salary and published this collection as Bulletin 29 through the Government Printing Office in 1905.

Historical phonetic alphabet — Swanton's scholarly notation for representing sounds in the texts. It belongs to this edition and should be preserved there. It is not a substitute for a contemporary X̲aayda Kil or X̲aad Kíl learning system.

Partial-bilingual witness — A work that prints both source-language and translated material for only part of its contents. Fourteen of this volume's seventy-two units print Haida; fifty-eight are English-only in the published edition. The book is therefore a complete English reader and a partial-bilingual Haida witness, not a complete source-language corpus.

Public domain — A legal status. Project Gutenberg identifies this edition as public domain in the United States, and the Smithsonian scan carries a no-copyright statement for the United States. Public domain does not erase living Haida relationships, cultural protocols, or attribution.