Sekani Erotic

The Sekani call themselves Tsek'ehne, roughly people of the rocks or people on the mountains, and the name is not decoration. Their country is the northern Rocky Mountain Trench in north-central British Columbia, the long straight valley of the Finlay and Parsnip rivers with the Rockies on one side and the Omineca ranges on the other. It is high, cold, thinly stocked land. Sekani life was built around moving through it: small family groups following moose, caribou, mountain sheep and goat across enormous territories, gathering seasonally, then splitting apart again. Unlike their neighbors on the salmon rivers to the west and south, they had no single fat run to carry them through winter, and that shaped nearly everything, including group size and a style of leadership earned through competence and generosity rather than inherited.

The language, Sekani or Tsek'ene, is Northern Athabaskan, part of the Dene family that runs from Alaska across the Subarctic and turns up far to the south as Navajo and Apache. It sits so close to Dane-zaa, the Beaver language, that linguists argue about where one ends and the other starts, and it shades into Dakelh, or Carrier, at the southern edge. Fluent speakers now number in the dozens, almost all of them elders, and community language work is a race against that arithmetic.

Two events cut deepest. The first was the fur trade. Simon Fraser built Fort McLeod in Sekani country in 1805, the first permanent European post west of the Rockies in what became British Columbia, and debt, trade goods and Oblate Catholic missions followed. Most Sekani today are nominally Catholic, though the older ground of dreaming, prophecy and obligation toward the animals a hunter takes never disappeared and is claimed openly again. The second was the W. A. C. Bennett Dam. When its reservoir filled in the late 1960s, Williston Lake swallowed the floor of the Trench: villages, trails, traplines, cabins and graves along the Finlay and Parsnip. Nobody asked the people who lived there. Families were moved, then moved again, once onto ground where no houses were waiting. The three Sekani nations that came through, Tsay Keh Dene, Kwadacha at Fort Ware, and McLeod Lake, have spent the decades since in litigation, negotiation and rebuilding. McLeod Lake finally adhered to Treaty 8 in 2000, after a long argument over whether the treaty covered them at all. Younger Sekani work in a mixed economy of forestry, mining and band administration and still go out on the land, which in this country is less nostalgia than plain logistics: the store is very far away.