The Athabascan Interior: People of the Boreal Forest

In the winter of any year before European contact, a family in the Interior of Alaska would have been moving. The Athabascan peoples of the boreal forest were not nomadic in the sense of wandering without purpose. They were purposefully mobile, tracking the seasonal availability of food across territories they knew as precisely as any map.

The Athabascan language family in Alaska includes eleven distinct languages: Ahtna, Dena'ina, Deg Xinag, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich'in, Han, Tanana, Tanacross, and Upper Tanana. These are not dialects. A Koyukon speaker and a Gwich'in speaker cannot understand each other without a shared second language. Each group occupied a distinct watershed and developed a culture adapted to its particular geography.

The Dena'ina are the only Athabascan group that settled on a saltwater coast. They occupied Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula, where they fished for salmon and hunted beluga whales alongside the activities typical of Interior Athabascan life. Anchorage sits on Dena'ina land; the name Dena'ina means the people in their language, and the Dena'ina Civic and Convention Center in downtown Anchorage carries their name on a building that stands at the heart of the city built on their territory.

The Koyukon of the middle Yukon River developed one of the richest documented ethical systems for relationships between humans and animals in the ethnographic record. Anthropologist Richard Nelson lived and worked in Koyukon villages in the nineteen seventies and documented a set of protocols surrounding hunting, death, and the use of animals that he described in detail in his book Make Prayers to the Raven. The protocols were not superstition. They were an accumulated ecological philosophy, tested over thousands of years, about what happens to a landscape when humans lose respect for what they take from it.

Many of those protocols are still observed.