12 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

he considers as belonging to that hyperborean family the “Inkalit’!, which
is the westernmost Déné tribe, being apparently misled by the Eskimo name
under which he finds it mentioned?.

As regards the two other points, Powell is more explicit. He expressly
confirms in his report the readings of his map, saying: “Only in two places
in Alaska do the Athapaskan tribes reach the coast — the K’nata-Khotana
on Cook’s Inlet, and the Ahtena on Copper River’®. We shall presently
appreciate the appositeness of this declaration, which is no doubt based on
Dall’s description of the “Tribes of the Extreme Northwest”, and possibly
also on Latham’s remark that “at Cook’s Inlet the original Eskimo area
ends, the occupancy now becoming Athabaskan’’¢.

In the first place, I confess that I would be more disposed to accept
the latter statement were Latham’s ideas in this particular less nebulous and
his linguistic notions more accurate. He states a few pages further on that “to
this section belong the Athabaskans of Cook’s Inlet.... They call themselves
Tnai, or Atna = men; so that it is their Eskimo neighbours from whom we
get the name Kenay”>. Now, I beg the reader to carefully note this: —

Atna is a Déné word which means foreigner, alien, and is used with
slight dialectical inflections to designate all the native tribes which are not
Déné, whether in the south or in the north. Thus the Shushwaps are Atna
(Etna) to the Carriers as well as the Tsimpsians of the Skeena River. Latham,
with his usual linguistic acumen, partially realized this, without, however,
grasping the real origin or meaning of the word, when he wrote: “There
are several Atna populations, some closely, some distantly connected. One
lies as far south as New Caledonia, and belongs to a different division of
the great North American group from that to which we refer the Athabaskan
Atnas’’®,

The “Athabaskan Atnas”! Risum teneatis, amici. This sounds to a person
familiar with the Déné dialects and nomenclature almost worse than English
Turks, or Austrian Bantus! Let it be clearly understood once for all that

‘ Evidently the Ingalik-of Dall and the Ingelete of Whymper. Their real aboriginal name
and derivation will be found in our next chapter.

2 A Jate traveller, Warburton Pike, fully corroborates Latham’s opinion concerning the
nationality of the inhabitants of the lower Kuskovim River. “The villages are built in the
typical Innuit style’, he writes . . . “Birch-bark canoes are entirely replaced by a great
variety of models in walrus skin, from the great family boat in which the women, children
and household goods travel from place to place, down to the little kayak, in which the Innuit
hunter [italics mine] spends most of his existence during the summer months” (“Through the
Subarctic Forest”, p. 251, London, 1896). Everybody knows that Innuit is the name assumed
by the Eskimos themselves.

’ Seventh Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethnology, p. 53.

« «The Native Races of the Russian Empire’, p. 289.

5 [bid., p. 291.

° Ibid., pp. 291-92.