Territory

The Athabaskans are the descendants of the migration of Na-Dene speakers, who came to North America 10,000 to 14,000 years ago (the second big prehistoric migration to Alaska).  Today, most Athabaskans live in Alaska and northwestern Canada.  

The Athabaskans lived in the boreal forest biome. This biome is the largest ecosystem on Earth and stretches across the entire sub-arctic expanse of the Northern Hemisphere.  In Canada, Athabaskans occupy northwestern Canada to Hudson Bay.  In Alaska, they lived in the boreal forests of the Interior and Southcentral Alaska.  This territory is north of the coastal Chugach mountains and south of the Brooks Range.  In the west, where the forests turned into the tundra of the Bering Sea coast, Athabaskans were supplanted by the more ocean-oriented Yupik and Inupiaq.  It's not a coincidence that the Athabaskan territory coincides with the boreal forest. The Athabaskans were highly adapted to living in this ecosystem, as the Yupik and Inupiaq were to living along the Arctic coasts.

Athabaskan people in Alaska have traditionally lived along five major riverways of Interior Alaska: the Yukon, the Tanana, the Susitna, the Kuskokwim, and the Copper River drainages.  Sufficient food could be hard to find in the forests where Athabaskans lived.  Because of this, Athabaskans were highly nomadic, traveling in small groups to fish, hunt, and trap. Athabaskans had the lowest population density of any Alaskan Native group.   When the first Europeans discovered Alaska, the total Athabaskan population was approximately 10,000.   As a point of comparison, the Tlingit, Yupik, and Aleut, who lived in much smaller territories than the Athabaskans, all had nearly twice as large populations.

Next Page

To navigate through the textbook, click on the next page button or go to the navigation menu on the top left.