NAME OF THE DENES AND THEIR HABITAT IN THE NORTH. 5

Pérouse, did not appear before 1796. I had long imagined that their ex-
pression “Northern Indians” was intended to comprise all the Dénés, such as
known to their contemporaries; but a closer examination of their texts leaves
no doubt in my mind that they meant thereby nothing else than the tribe
now called Cariboo-Eaters. In the case of the latter author nothing can be
more certain. The habitat of those Indians is the barren grounds to the
northwest of Fort Churchill, whence he wrote!. Yet it is incontestable that the
phrase was, in his time and long after, conversely used as synonymous with
Athapaskans or Dénés?.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie is the first writer to refer to the whole stock
by an Anglicized Cree word. He generally calls it Chepewyan, though he also
recognizes as a collective name therefor the word Déné, which he spells
Denee and applies to at least three different tribes. His “Voyages” were
published in 1801. In 1829, the ill-fated explorer, Sir John Franklin, in his
relation of his own journey, usually called them all Chipewyans or Northern
Indians; but he did not fail to add that “they style themselves generally
Dinneh, men or Indians’”*, by which he evidently meant Déné.

All these authors wrote after a lasting contact with, and close study
of, the aborigines they described, long before A. Gallatin, who never lived
with them.

Real Name.

Be this as it may, whether we nickname them or not by a hybrid word
whose elements are derived from the vocabularies of two allophylic races,
or even go to the length of dubbing them /rkAéléit, louse larve, as do the
Eskimos of the lower Mackenzie‘, those Indians will not the less be to them-
selves Déné, that is, men, or people. Such is the name the great majority of

‘ “A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort to the Northern Ocean”. In a footnote to p. 177
of his work he expressly discriminates between the Northern Indians and “their southern friends,
the Athapuscow Indians”, thereby implicitly locating the former in a region which tallies
with the territory of the Cariboo-Eaters. On the other hand, he cannot mean by that expression
either the Yellow-Knives or the Dog-Ribs, who live also to the north of the “Athapuscow
Indians”, since he repeatedly differentiates them therefrom. Thus, pp. 178-79, he mentions the
attempts which “have been made to induce the Copper [Yellow-Knife] and Dogg-ribbed Indians
to visit the Company’s Fort at Churchill River’, and he adds almost immediately that “several
of the Copper Indians have visited Churchill, in the capacity of servants to the Northern Indians”.

* Dr. Th. McKeevor, for instance, who wrote as late as 1819, presents us at the end
of his “Voyage to Hudson’s Bay” with a vocabulary of the language of the “Oochepayyans,
or northern Indians” (p. 74), which, however, contains nothing but Cree words.

* “Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea’, vol. Il, p. 50.

“ Monographie des Déné-Dindjié, p. XIX. According to J. Richardson (“Arctic Searching
Expedition”, vol. I, p. 353), the Eskimos, presumably of a different tribe, call them Allani-
a-wok. The Tsimpsians and Tlinget of the north Pacific Coast name them respectively 7s’ets’aut
and Gunand i. e. “those of the interior’, and to the Crees of the southeast they are Ayatsi-
wiyiniwok, i. e. foreigners.