Tłı̨chǫ Erotic

The Tłı̨chǫ are a Dene people of Canada's Northwest Territories, and for most of the last century English speakers called them the Dogrib, a flat translation of the name they use for themselves. Their country is the wedge of land between Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake, where black spruce and muskeg thin out to the northeast into the barrenlands. It is so thoroughly broken up by water that the old map of the region is really a map of canoe routes and portages. Four communities anchor it: Behchokǫ̀ on the north arm of Great Slave Lake, the largest First Nations community in the territory, and the smaller Whatì, Gamètì and Wekweètì, which for most of their history were reached by float plane in summer and ice road in winter. The language, Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì, is Northern Athabaskan, which makes it a distant relative of Navajo and Apache far to the south. It is among the better held Indigenous languages in the north, still spoken at home in the smaller communities and taught in the schools, though the pressure from English never lets up. Catholicism arrived with the Oblate missionaries in the nineteenth century and stuck, sitting beside older Dene practice rather than replacing it, including a living prophecy tradition and a regard for medicine power that people tend not to discuss with outsiders.

Two moments define the modern nation. In 1921 Chief Monfwi put his name to Treaty 11 and, as the Tłı̨chǫ tell it, set the boundary of the territory himself before he would sign anything. In 2005 the Tłı̨chǫ Agreement took effect, the first in the Northwest Territories to fold a land claim and self-government into a single document, giving the Tłı̨chǫ Government title to a contiguous block of roughly 39,000 square kilometers and a working voice on the diamond mines out on the barrens. Between those dates sits Chief Jimmy Bruneau's instruction that Tłı̨chǫ children be schooled to be strong like two people, quoted often enough now to function as a national motto. Mine revenue has not settled everything: the barren-ground caribou herds the Tłı̨chǫ hunted for generations have crashed, and the harvest limits that followed cut closer to the bone than any question of income. What holds is the practice of going out. Each summer the Trails of Our Ancestors canoe journey retraces the old routes into the annual assembly, elders and teenagers in the same boats. Year round there are hand games, a fast and loud contest of hidden tokens and drum crews that draws teams from across the north, and that the Tłı̨chǫ play extremely well.