Chipewyan Erotic

The Chipewyan call themselves Denesuline, a name they translate as something close to the real people, and the map of where they live is drawn by caribou. Their country is the long band of spruce forest and open barrens running from Great Slave Lake east toward Hudson Bay, across northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba, northeastern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories. For centuries the year followed the barren-ground herds north onto the tundra in summer and back into the treeline in winter, and hunters still travel long distances to meet them. One of the old regional names, Etthen-eldeli, simply means caribou eaters. The word Chipewyan is not theirs at all. It is Cree, usually glossed as pointed skins, after the caribou-hide shirts that hung to a point at front and back.

Denesuline is a Northern Athabaskan language, close kin to Dogrib, Slavey and Gwich'in and a distant cousin of Navajo and Apache in the American Southwest. It is one of the official languages of the Northwest Territories and one of the more widely spoken Indigenous languages in Canada, still heard at home in communities such as Black Lake, Fond du Lac, Wollaston Lake, La Loche and Lutsel K'e. Most Denesuline are Roman Catholic, a legacy of Oblate missions that arrived in the mid-1800s. Catholic practice sits alongside older obligations: feeding the fire before a gathering, respect owed to the animals that feed you, drum dances that run late into the night, and the hand game, a loud, fast guessing contest played to drums that draws crowds at summer assemblies across Dene country.

Two figures from the fur trade era still get talked about. In 1715 a young Chipewyan woman named Thanadelthur, escaped from Cree captivity, brokered a peace between her people and the Cree that opened Hudson's Bay Company trade at Churchill. Half a century later the leader Matonabbee guided Samuel Hearne overland to the Arctic coast. Smallpox in 1781 and 1782 killed a large share of the population and reshuffled the bands. The twentieth century brought Treaties 8 and 10, residential schools, and in 1956 the forced removal of the Sayisi Dene from their caribou grounds to a bleak camp outside Churchill, a relocation so damaging that Canada formally apologized in 2016. Today Denesuline communities sit on top of the Athabasca Basin uranium deposits and downstream from the Alberta oil sands, and much of their public life is about asserting jurisdiction over that land. The 2019 creation of Thaidene Nëné, a vast protected area co-managed by Lutsel K'e, is the clearest recent statement of that intent.