Dena'ina Erotic

The Dena'ina are the Athabaskan people of Cook Inlet, and they are the only Athabaskans in Alaska who settled on saltwater. Every other Dene nation in the state lives inland along rivers and lakes. The Dena'ina came down out of the interior somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years ago, reached the tidewater of south-central Alaska, and stayed. Their country runs from the Kenai Peninsula and the shores of the inlet north to Talkeetna, east to Chickaloon in the Matanuska valley, and west across the Alaska Range to Lake Clark, Iliamna Lake and the Stony River. Anchorage sits on Dena'ina land. The mouth of Ship Creek was Dgheyay Kaq', the mouth of stickleback creek, before the 1915 railroad camp turned it into a townsite.

Living on the coast changed them. They fished the inlet's five salmon runs with weirs and dip nets, took moose, caribou and Dall sheep in the mountains, and hunted beluga whales in the silty tides, something no other northern Athabaskan group did. From Alutiiq and Yup'ik neighbors they borrowed skin boats and ground squirrel parkas. From their Dene roots they kept the matrilineal clan system: a child belongs to the mother's clan, and clans owed one another marriage partners and funeral duties. Leadership rested with the qeshqa, a rich man who kept a large household, redistributed food in lean seasons, and hosted the potlatches that honored the dead. Strings of dentalium shell, traded up from the Northwest Coast, were the visible badge of that standing. Winters were spent in nichił, semi-subterranean log houses shared by several families, and summers at fish camps.

Russians arrived in the 1780s, built a fort at Kenai in 1791, and were attacked there in 1797. Smallpox in 1838 killed something like half the population. What outlasted the Russian era was the Orthodox Church, which the Dena'ina made their own. The cemetery at Eklutna, north of Anchorage, is the best known result: rows of small, brightly painted spirit houses set over the graves beneath Orthodox crosses, the colors marking family and clan. The language, Dena'ina Qenaga, survives in four dialects with very few fluent speakers, though the writings of Peter Kalifornsky and the mapped place-name knowledge of Shem Pete have given it a documentary record most endangered languages lack. Tyonek, flush with oil lease money after 1965, put up funds that helped launch the Alaska Federation of Natives, the coalition that pushed the 1971 land claims settlement through Congress. Dena'ina today are organized through tribal governments from Kenai and Ninilchik to Nondalton and Lime Village, and through Cook Inlet Region, Inc., the regional corporation. Many live in Anchorage, on ground their ancestors named.