4 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

With regard to the nickname Athapaskans, it rests solely upon the
authority of the Smithsonian Institution. Many ethnographers and travellers
had indeed used that word in the same sense before it was invested in 1892
with a sort of official sanction, but the same is equally true of Tinné and
Tinneh. Nay, these latter names Call even claim a semblance of authenticity,
inasmuch as they are intended to represent words taken from the language
of the tribes thereby denominated, while Athapaskan is a hybrid term, half
Algonquin, half English. Lake Athabasca, in Cree a “place of hay and reeds”’},
is frequented by an important eastern Déne tribe, and in 1836 Albert Gallatin
named the whole stock after it. Hence the decision of the Washington ethno-
logists.

Now, would it be proper to name the entire French nation, say, Lyonese
or Parisians, because Lyons and Paris are its chief cities; the English, Man-
chesterians for a like reason, or even the Austrian Tyrolese?

But we are told, in answer to our objection, that “priority demanded
that Gallatin’s name should be retained’. To which I retorted in the most
lengthy of my essays, “methinks that time cannot of itself convert a wrong
into a right’®. And then if simple anteriority is to decide the question, it
might be that even this should turn out to be against the use of Athapaskan
for the entire family. Arthur Dobbs, a former Governor of North Carolina, is
the very first author to furnish us with anything like an account of the
Dénés4, He wrote in 1774. But for a really adequate description of the family
such as it was then known, we must turn to Samuel Hearne’s valuable work,
which, owing to the capture of his fort and papers by the French under La

of, in Latin -enses, etc. Why does not Dall call the Eskimo Myut instead of /anuit? In the
beginning of Chapter Il we will further see that Tinneh is not the counterpart of Kutchin.
Again, Petitot is quite justified in deriving the suffix -o’tinne — which is the only proper
one in the east, as even ‘tinné has absolutely no meaning anywhere — from the verb os’ti
(or ostti in his own graphic system). But this means not to do, but to inhabit, the eastern
o- (western hwo-, kwo- or ku-) implying a reference to a locality, instead of being, as Dall
pretends, “merely an inserted euphonic’”. On the contrary, this is precisely the only part of
the word which changes the sense of es’fd (in the west ws’ten) from to do into to inhabit.
Withal Petitot is right as to the ultimate root of the word.

In his text Dall affirms (p. 25) that “the northern Tinneh form their tribal names by
affixing to an adjective or phrase the word (sic) tinneh, meaning ‘people’, in its modifications
of tin’neh, ta’na or tena, or in one group kutchin, having the same meaning”. This is evidence
of the same delusion, aggravated by a reference to a part of speech, adjectives or adjectival
terms, which has no existence in Déné.

1 This is on the authority of Father Lacombe. Fr. Petitot translates the word “a net-
work of grass” (Mémoire abrégé sur la Géographie de l’ Athabaskaw-Mackenzie, p. 148), while
the early explorers’ maps call that sheet of water “lake of the hills’, a denomination which,
in 1829, J. Franklin restricted to one part thereof.

2? “Bibliography of the Athabaskan Languages”, p. V.

8 “Notes on the Western Dénés”. Trans. Can. Inst., vol. IV, p. 9.

4 “Account of the Country adjoining to Hudson’s Bay”.