Sahtu Erotic

The Sahtu are the Dene of Great Bear Lake, and the lake is the first thing to understand about them. Sahtú means Bear Water in their own language, and the people call themselves Sahtúot'įnę, the people of that water. Great Bear Lake is the largest lake lying entirely inside Canada, and its trout and whitefish still feed the communities around it. The Sahtu Settlement Area spreads from the lake across the central Mackenzie Valley of the Northwest Territories: Délı̨nę on the lakeshore, Tulita and Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River, and Fort Good Hope and Colville Lake farther north, straddling the Arctic Circle. Their language is North Slavey, a Northern Athabaskan tongue in the Na-Dene family, close kin to South Slavey and Tłı̨chǫ spoken farther south, and still spoken at home in the smaller communities. Its three dialects double as the main branches of the people: the Bear Lake Dene of Délı̨nę, the Hare Dene of Fort Good Hope and Colville Lake, named by outsiders for their reliance on the snowshoe hare, whose skins they wove into robes and blankets, and the Mountain Dene of Tulita, whose ancestors hunted the Mackenzie Mountains to the west. Sahtu Métis families share the region and signed the same land claim.

Catholicism came up the Mackenzie with Oblate missionaries in the nineteenth century, and Fort Good Hope's hand-painted mission church still stands. It did not displace Dene spirituality so much as fuse with it. The prophet Ehtséo Ayah of Délı̨nę, who died in 1940, was a devout Catholic whose prophecies are still recited, among them a vision of Great Bear Lake as one of the last clean refuges on earth. Délı̨nę carries a heavier history too: its men hauled sacks of radium and uranium ore from the Port Radium mine on the eastern shore, ore that fed the Manhattan Project, and enough of them later died of cancer that the town called itself the village of widows. In 1998 a delegation traveled to Hiroshima to apologize. The modern turning points are legal ones. Oil at Norman Wells prompted Treaty 11 in 1921, the Sahtu Dene and Métis land claim followed in 1993, and in 2016 Délı̨nę became the first community in Canada to run a single Indigenous public government for everyone living there. The same year the lake's whole watershed became the Indigenous-led Tsá Tué biosphere reserve. Drum dances, hand games played with hidden tokens against a wall of drummers, spring fish camps and fall caribou hunts still set the calendar. And Délı̨nę makes a straight-faced claim to the first recorded game of ice hockey, played by Franklin's men on the lake ice in 1825.