Ahtna Erotic

The Ahtna are the people of the Copper River, and the river is the first thing to understand about them. Their word for it, Atna', became their name, and their homeland, Atna' Nene', is the basin it drains between the Wrangell, Chugach and Alaska ranges of south-central Alaska. They are Dene, northern Athabaskans, closest in language to the Dena'ina of Cook Inlet to the west. To the north are the Upper Tanana and Tanacross peoples, and downriver, past the canyon, the Eyak and Tlingit of the coast, trading partners for generations.

Copper is the second thing. The Ahtna hammered native copper nuggets from the Chitina drainage and the Wrangell foothills into knives, points and ornaments, and they controlled the trade in it down to the coast. The town of Chitina takes its name from Ahtna Tsedi Na', meaning copper river. That control had teeth: a Russian party under Ruf Serebrennikov was killed in Ahtna country in 1848, and the interior stayed closed until Lieutenant Henry Allen came upriver in 1885, fed and guided by leaders including Nicolai of Taral. Within a generation the deposits Ahtna chiefs had pointed out became the Kennecott mines, with a railway through the valley from 1911 to 1938. The Ahtna saw very little of that money.

The language has four dialects, Lower, Central, Western and Upper, and it is in real trouble. Fluent speakers number in the dozens, nearly all elders, though James Kari's dictionary and village classes keep it teachable. Society is matrilineal, with clans grouped into two sides that still govern marriage and, above all, the potlatch. The memorial potlatch remains the heart of ceremonial life: the opposite side handles a death and is repaid in blankets, rifles and food. The traditional leader, the kaskae, held rank through generosity as much as wealth. Most Ahtna today are Christian, but respect for animals, and for salmon in particular, is not treated as a relic.

Subsistence still sets the calendar. Fish wheels turn on the Copper near Copper Center and Gulkana every summer for sockeye and king salmon, and the Nelchina caribou herd and moose fill the fall. Katie John, an elder from Mentasta, spent decades in federal court defending the right to fish at the old Batzulnetas camp, and the case that carries her name secured subsistence priority on Alaska's navigable waters. Under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act the eight villages, Cantwell, Chistochina, Chitina, Copper Center, Gakona, Gulkana, Mentasta and Tazlina, organized as Ahtna, Incorporated, based in Glennallen, which holds well over a million acres. About 1,400 people identify as Ahtna, many of them in Anchorage now, but the river is still where they go home.