Taku Erotic

The Taku are a Tlingit people named for a river, and the river explains nearly everything about them. Tʼaaḵu Ḵwáan, a name usually glossed along the lines of geese flood upriver people, is one of the kwáan, the regional divisions of Tlingit country. Its territory follows the Taku River from a glacier-fed inlet just southeast of Juneau, Alaska, up through the Coast Mountains to the lake plateau around Atlin in northwestern British Columbia. That valley is one of the few workable passes between the rainforest coast and the dry interior, and the Taku built their standing on controlling it. They moved coastal goods inland, brought furs and hides back from Athabaskan neighbors such as the Tahltan and Tagish, and guarded the middleman role hard. The Hudson's Bay Company opened Fort Durham on the coast nearby in 1840 and abandoned it within three years.

Their language is Tlingit, a Na-Dene language distantly related to the Athabaskan languages of the interior but nowhere near mutually intelligible with them. Fluent speakers are now mostly elders, and teaching programs in both Juneau and Atlin are working to change that. Society is matrilineal and split into two sides, Wolf (or Eagle) and Raven, which inland people call Crow. You belong to your mother's clan, you marry into the opposite side, and clans hold crests, names, songs and house histories as property. The Yanyeidí, a Wolf clan, are the group most closely tied to the Taku River itself. Obligations between the two sides are settled publicly at the ḵu.éexʼ, the memorial feast outsiders call a potlatch. Many families are Christian, a legacy of Russian Orthodox and Presbyterian missions on the coast, and clan ceremony carries on alongside church life rather than in competition with it.

The international boundary cut the kwáan in two. On the Alaska side, descendants are centered in Juneau and Douglas and represented by the Douglas Indian Association, which they share with the neighboring Aakʼw Ḵwáan. In 1962 the city of Douglas burned the Douglas Indian Village while many residents were away fishing, clearing the ground for a harbor project, and that loss is still a live grievance. On the Canadian side, the Taku River Tlingit First Nation is based at Atlin. Its challenge to a mine access road through the Taku watershed reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. The court found the province had met its obligations, but the ruling helped establish the Crown's duty to consult Indigenous nations before approving development. The watershed is still largely roadless, all five species of Pacific salmon run the river, and the fishery anchors the people on both sides of the line.