Dakelh Erotic

The Dakelh call themselves people who travel by water, and the name fits the country: the Nechako Plateau and the upper Fraser drainage in the central interior of British Columbia, a landscape of long lakes strung together by rivers, where the fastest route between two places was usually a canoe. The English name Carrier came from outside, a translation of what Sekani neighbors called them, and is usually explained by an old mourning practice in which a widow carried her husband's cremated remains until the feast that released her from the obligation. The language belongs to the northern branch of Athabaskan, or Dene, which puts the closest relatives immediately around them: Babine and Wet'suwet'en speakers to the northwest, Sekani to the north, Tsilhqot'in to the south. The distant ones are very distant, since Navajo and Apache sit at the far end of the same family. Land is held as keyoh, family territories with named stewards who inherit responsibility for a particular stretch of trapline, berry ground and fishing water rather than owning it outright.

Public life turns on the balhats, the feast hall, where names and crests are transferred, funeral costs are settled, and decisions about territory are witnessed by the people who will have to remember them. The clan and crest system is strongest in the northern communities, who took it up over generations of trade and intermarriage with the coast; southern groups organized themselves more loosely. Sockeye was the staple, taken at weirs, and the destruction of the Babine barricades by federal fisheries officers early in the twentieth century is still argued about as a live grievance. Fort St. James, planted on Nak'azdli territory in 1806, was the first sustained European settlement in what became British Columbia, and the district was called New Caledonia before the province had a name. In 1885 a missionary at that post worked out a syllabary for the language, which Dakelh writers then used for decades. Harder inflections followed: the residential school at Fraser Lake, and the reservoir behind the Kenney Dam in 1952, which drowned Cheslatta land and moved families off it with almost no notice. Fluent speakers are now mostly elders, and the language work running out of Vanderhoof and the Carrier Sekani communities is a deliberate, unromantic attempt to change that.