The Dena’ina People of Lake Clark: Homeland, Fish Camps and Place Names

For nearly 900 years, Kijik was one of Alaska's longest year-round native villages. It stood on the shore of Lake Clark, a place the Dena'ina Athabascan people call Qizhjeh Vena, in the Dena'ina language 'a place where people gather lake.' The National Park Service describes this page as a student research page, written at a 5th grade reading level.

Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) is the ancestral homeland of the Dena'ina Athabascan people. NPS photo by E. Kramer.

A long human history

The first people settled the Lake Clark region more than 10,000 years ago, drawn by salmon, caribou, moose and edible plants. The Dena'ina have lived there for thousands of years, and many of those plants and animals are still harvested today. The land and water continue to support and shape Dena'ina culture.

Kijik

Kijik is the English adaptation of Qizhjeh, 'place where people gather,' and for inland Dena'ina families it remains a sacred gathering place. People traveled along established routes between Qizhjeh and nearby villages to trade and keep in touch. Bill Trefon, Jr. recalled that Kijik had been a winter village where everyone gathered, and remembered it from his own childhood, with dog teams and a lot of fun.

Explorers, trappers, traders and cabin builders arrived in the late 1800s, and with them came disease. A flu-measles epidemic hit in 1902 and many residents died. By 1909 the survivors had left for other villages, including Old Nondalton. The area still has great cultural importance to local Dena'ina people.

Trails to the coast

Trails and travel corridors ran from Qizhjeh to the north, west and east. Those going east reached the Cook Inlet coast, where the Dena'ina and the Alutiiq (a maritime people who originated in the Kodiak archipelago) traveled and traded. For at least 3500 years trails and small settlements along the coast have served for hunting, fishing and trade, and stone tools as old as 10,000 years have been found at some of the sites.

Subsistence

The Dena'ina still depend on hunting, fishing and gathering for food, which in Alaska is called subsistence. Their communities are not connected to Alaska's road system, so people use what the remote land provides, and access to wild foods and the knowledge to get them means food security. Passing on traditional values, which include never taking more than is needed and respect for the natural environment, means the survival of their culture. Sockeye salmon have been vital for food and survival for thousands of years, and many local residents who are not Dena'ina also connect to fish and wildlife through subsistence today.

Olga Balluta described fish camp as the place and time when the family puts up its fish for the winter, as dried, canned, salted or frozen fish.

Sockeye salmon fillets drying on a rack. NPS photo by L. Rupp.

Sockeye salmon, K'q'uya in the Dena'ina language, hang in a smokehouse at fish camp. NPS photo by T. Vaughn.

Continuing traditions

Despite extreme changes to land ownership and technology, the Dena'ina remain connected to their traditional lands. Many descendants of the people of Qizhjeh live in villages in and around the park, and for generations they have handed down the values and techniques of their culture and way of life.

Place names

Most places in Lake Clark have Dena'ina names that came before any other. Those names tell of the Dena'ina people's relationship to the place and remind us that people have been part of it for a long time. The Dena'ina name places to remember them and to record what they found or what happened there; traditionally the names were part of the maps people carried in memory to travel and find places. Olga Balluta said the names are very important because they are about the people's history and what they have done.

Berries gathered by hand. NPS photo by B. King.

Sources

• National Park Service, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, "People of Lake Clark" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/people-of-lake-clark.htm), described there as a student research page; a work of the United States government. Quotations from Dena'ina elders are paraphrased, and two pictures of children are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.