The People of Denendeh: Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada's Northwest Territories

PREFACE

PREFACE At an anthropological meeting some years ago, the point was made that general ethnographies of North American Indian peoples are not being written anymore. I inwardly acknowledged that I would not write one myself. But later the thought brought me to consider bringing together some of my writings about the Dene, ‘‘The People,’’ the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories . The land of these subarctic Athapaskan speakers, as designated by nineteenth-century linguistic classification, is known by the native term of Denendeh, ‘‘Land of the Dene.’’ In standard ethnological classifications these Canadian First Nations of Dene are grouped as Chipewyans, Slaveys, Dogribs, Mountain Indians, Bearlake Indians, Hares, and Kutchin, now Gwich’in. The Gwich’in’s distinctive Athapaskan language and traditional social organization set them somewhat apart from the others. The other native peoples of the Northwest Territories are the Northern Metis, scattered throughout the area, and the coast-oriented Inuit. From 1951 to the present, my anthropological career has drawn on broader or narrower aspects of Dene society, culture, history, and relationships with the impinging white world. Since a diligent researcher could retrieve most of my writings from their varied publication loci, why should I pull them together? More and more, however, I began to think of such a compilation not just as an offering to North American Indian studies, hunter-gatherer research, or subarctic ethnohistory but also as a historical resource for the people of all ethnicities who live in Denendeh, and especially a resource for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Dene whom I first came to know fifty years ago. My main aim is to offer a record of ways of life that, for all of us, grow dimmer as they recede year by year into the past. From this stance, except for chapter 1, I gladly ignore anthropological ‘‘theory.’’ Although my greatest attention has been on recording and reporting the ways and knowledge of Dene peoples whom I have known, I have at times turned to the reports of kw’etin or mola (whites, European-derived people) who preceded me in the Dene North: missionaries, fur traders, and, for the earlier stretches of interethnic contact, ‘‘explorers.’’ Their records have served me as the reports of the district officers of the European colonial powers in the Middle East served ethnologist Robert A. Fernea (1995:1-2) as ‘‘an interesting source of information for an anthropologist. They had been there where I was, they knew fathers or grandfathers of some of the men I knew, they used the names of tribes and places with whom I had also become acquainted .’’ Moreover, Fernea has come to realize that his own records and published writings are now sources of knowledge for present generations about their ancestors’ lives and times. As Fernea says, ‘‘Handing a group of people a book about themselves may be presumptuous, but it is also a form of recognition, a token of esteem in most cases, a basis for cogitation even if it is wrong in particulars or in general according to local discussion.’’ I hope that this volume may at the least serve these purposes. Except for a visit to Rae in 1979 on an ethnohistorical inquiry (see the section on ‘‘Native Occupation and Status in Fur Trade, 1900-1925’’ in chapter 9), my research activities in the Northwest Territories ended in 1975, so the historical run in this book ends then. The increasing pace and dimensions of change since 1975 must be addressed by others, although in several chapters I have added short explanations, which appear in italics, and updates. My self-appointed task here is to offer what my research can speak to in the Dene experience from the time of earliest contact with the white world to the last quarter of the twentieth century. The subtitle of this book is Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories, not An Ethnohistory or The Ethnohistory. The omission of a defining article is deliberate. ‘‘The’’ or ‘‘An’’ suggests complete or comprehensive coverage. To this I do not pretend. The entries in this volume are drawn from several kinds of documentation: my published writings and unpublished field notes, unpublished essays and field notes of my field companions Nancy O. Lurie and Teresa S. Carterette, and some nineteenth-century records . At the beginning of each chapter and sometimes within a chapter, I have added short statements to provide context and connections among entries . There is order in this volume, but...