Vuntut Gwitchin

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The Vuntut Gwitchin or Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is one of the Canadian First Nations in the northern Yukon near the Alaska border . You belong to the Gwich'in . Main place of residence is Old Crow . Their language is Gwichʼin, which belongs to the Athabaskan language family . The group became known in specialist circles through what is probably the oldest find of human traces in Canada in the Bluefish caves , which are at least 10 to 12,000 years old.

Closely related groups live in Fort Yukon and Arctic Village , Alaska , and Blackstone. The residents there are called Tukudh (Dagoo). At the Peel River , the Tetlit Gwich'in live.

The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is one of the four First Nations that signed the Yukon Land Claims agreement , a land rights treaty, in 1993.

In 2004 the tribe reportedly had 756 members, but according to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development , only 512 people were registered as members of the tribe in August 2009.

The name Vuntut Gwitchin means "people of the lakes".

language

The language, also known as Loucheux, Kutchin or Tukudh, is spoken in Fort Yukon, Chalkyitsik, Birch Creek, Venetie and Arctic Village. Other groups with the same language live in Aklavik , Inuvik (the largest Canadian city north of the Arctic Circle), Arctic Red River, and Fort McPherson .

history

The Gwitchin lived as nomads and lived mainly by hunting caribou . Even today, the tribe draws a considerable part of its food from the Porcupine caribou herd . Also Muskrats are hunted. Around 25 miles north of Old Crow are numerous lakes where they are hunted. This happens annually from April to June. Each family had their own hunting ground.

They came into indirect contact with Europeans at the end of the 18th century. Alexander Mackenzie first came into contact with Gwich'in in 1789, and Fort Good Hope was built in 1806 . Glass beads established themselves in the region as a barter good and a measure of value. Middlemen brought Russian and British goods into the region, with the Tlingit dominating this trade in the west and the Gwich'in in the northeast. The Gwich'in, sometimes referred to by the British as "Rat Indians", who hunted muskrats - in contrast to the "Rat Indians" further south - tried to prevent the Hudson's Bay Company from relocating the trading center to Fort Yukon in easternmost Alaska . which they succeeded in doing for a few years.

Originally the Vuntut Gwitchin lived around Fort Yukon , Johnson House and LaPierre House as well as Whitestone Village, but also in other places. They were very interested in Fort Yukon, Britain. In 1867, when the border between Alaska and the British or Canadian territory was drawn, they moved to the Canadian Rampart House , a trading post.

Archdeacon Robert McDonald (1829–1913) evangelized with the tribe as early as the 1860s. With the support of the tribe, he translated the entire Bible into their language, as well as prayer books and hymns. He also developed a writing system, which, however, has inconsistencies. Therefore, in the 1970s, his writing was superseded by a system developed by Richard Mueller, linguist and Bible translator.

In the 1870s, Chief Deetru` K`avihdik, whose name means something like "I can go crow", died. In honor of him, the region was named after him and is now called, slightly modified, "Old Crow". The main town today is Old Crow, a small town with around 250 inhabitants located in the far north of the Yukon. It cannot be reached by vehicle, only by plane.

As a result of the Klondike gold rush , which drew around 100,000 people to the Yukon, the need for meat and fur increased suddenly from 1896, so that many Indians went hunting. Whites also hunted, which led to overhunting around Dawson as early as 1900 . Some Gwich'in looked for work on the ships that sailed the Yukon, but unlike the Tukudh-Gwich'in from the upper Porcupine River and the Teetl'it-Gwich'in from the upper Peel River , the Vuntut could not do much Participate in local trade around Dawson. The Territory's government attempted to ban non-Yukoners from hunting by paying a $ 100 fee from 1923 to 1929, but in the north this obstructed the Gwich'in, benefiting the Vuntut Gwitchin, the only Gwich'in group in the north Yukon were. The last hunting expeditions took place at the end of the 1930s. Cornelius Osgood (1905–1983) was one of the first to study the Gwich'in culture, but predominantly that of the Alaskan groups.

Current situation

Lake landscape in the Vuntut National Park

In the 1993 treaty, the Vuntut National Park was established with effect from 1995 , which primarily serves to protect the Porcupine herd. It is jointly managed by Parks Canada and the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. On the basis of further contracts, the Ni'iinlii Njik (Fishing Branch) Territorial Park was founded in 1999 .

At the same time, the Vuntut Development Corporation invests in local ventures such as the Yukon airline Air North , in which it holds 49%.

The tribal house, the Abel-Chitzé Building , offers high-speed access to the Internet and in recent years the film equipment has been used to produce two videos. The tribe has already hosted three film festivals.

In November 2009, of the 514 registered Vuntut Gwitchin, only six men and one woman lived on their own reservation, one woman lived on another reservation. The rest of the tribe lived either on their own crown land (243), on that of another tribe (10) or outside the reserves (253).

The chief is Joe Linklater.

A shop, a department of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police , a care station, bed and breakfast , plus a tribal office, a skating track, a youth center and a community center make up the infrastructure. Potlatches , dances and entertainment evenings take place in the latter . The Chief Zzeh Gittlit School , which also teaches the mother tongue, has also been in operation since the early 1970s . The school has its own cabin in the wilderness where students learn traditional techniques. The elderly tell stories and myths to introduce the children to their culture. Students aiming for a higher education than grade 9 (i.e. after the 9th grade) must go to the capital of the territory, Whitehorse .

literature

  • Asen Balikci : Vunta Kutchin Social Change: A Study of the People of the Old Crow, Yukon Territory , Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination and Research Center, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources 1963.
  • RJ Le Blanc: Old Crow heritage study, Vuntut National Park , Ottawa: Parks Canada 1991.
  • Cornelius Osgood: Contributions to the Ethnography of the Kutchin , New Haven: Yale University Press 1936, ISBN 978-0-87536-522-0 .
  • E. Sherry and Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation: The Land Still Speaks , Whitehorse 1999.
  • Shirleen Smith: People of the Lakes ~ Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich'in Elders / Googwandak Nakhwach'anjoo Van Tat Gwich'in , 2010.

See also

Web links

Remarks

  1. The contract can be found here: Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation Self-Government Agreement .
  2. According to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development , First Nation Profile, Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pse5-esd5.ainc-inac.gc.ca
  3. On the publication that won the Aboriginal History Book Prize , cf. People of the Lakes on the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation website.