NAME OF THE DENES AND THEIR HABITAT IN THE NORTH. 13

Atna, with or without the slight dialectical modification the word may receive
(Etna, Enna, ’Qetné, etc.), is to the Dénés what Barbaroi was to the
Greeks, Etruscans in particular and Ex¢eri in general, to the Romans of old;
what Ayatsiwiyiniwok is now to the Crees of the Canadian plains, Chontalli
to the Nahua of Mexico, Tapua to the Tupi of South America, that is, a term
denoting racial diversity and implying at the same time a sort of national
repulsion or contempt on the part of the person making use of it}.

Therefore any American aborigines coterminous with the Dénés who
may happen to be known under that name are thereby stamped as aliens,
unless they be misnamed. In the latitude occupied by Latham’s Atnas, and
under the known geographical conditions of their habitat, the probability is
that they are Eskimos.

The same argument disposes of the so-called Dénés of Copper River,
since Latham calls them~by the same name, saying that “we may talk of
the Kenay Atnas and of the Copper River Atnas”. He adds: “Both the Atnas
under notice reach the sea”2, which is tantamount to saying: in both places
the coast is inhabited by a non-Déné race.

Discoverers and Authors on the Question.

This was no doubt the opinion of the late Dr. Brinton when he wrote
that “the Innuit are at present essentially a maritime and arctic nation,
occupying the coast and adjacent islands from the Straits of Belle Isle on
the Atlantic to Icy Bay, at the foot of Mount St. Elias on the Pacific’.
Capitain F. W. Beechey, the arctic explorer, declares also that “these people
[the Eskimos] inhabit the northwest coast of America, from 60° 34’ N. to
71° 24’ N.”*, Neither author mentions any break in their territorial boundaries,

Nor does Sir John Richardson, who writes that they extend “along
the north shore to Beering’s Straits, which they pass, and follow the western
coast, by Cook’s Sound and Tchugatz Bay, nearly to Mount St. Elias”®,
The italics are mine. Further on, relying on the accounts of navigators
personally acquainted with the ethnology of the northwestern coast, he grows
still more explicit, and writes: “The inhabitants of the north-western coasts
from Tchugatsky Bay (or, as it is named in the English charts, Prince
William’s Sound) northwards, including the peninsula of Alaska and the
islands in Beering’s Sea and Straits, are considered by Baron Wrangell, Baér,

* Cf. my paper “Who are the Atnas”? in the “American Antiquarian”, vol. XXIII, No. 2.

* Ubi supra, p: 292.

* “The American Race”, p. 59.

* “Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Straits’, vol. II, pp. 299-300.
London, 1831. Eskimos have since been discovered near the eightieth degree of latitude N.,
and vestiges of their habitations still further north.

* “Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. I, p. 341.