LOCATION: The nomadic Kaska are primarily located in the southeast Yukon and north British Columbia, of Canada, between the Coastal and Rocky Mountain ranges.
LANGUAGE: The Kaska are an Athabascan-speaking language group. They are related to the Tahltan and Taglish Athabascan, once known collectively as Nahani. One source also states (Handbook of Indians of Canada, F.W. Hodge, 1968) that the "division of Nahane was comprised of the Achetotena (Etchareottine) and the Dahotena (Etagottine) tribes.
HISTORY: According to one Michael G. Johnson (The Native Tribes of North America, 1994), "continuous contact with whites began in the 1820’s with the establishment of a Hudson’s Bay post on the Liard (river) followed by increasing intrusion by miners and freelance traders and trappers. In 1969 there were 533 Kaska in the Liard River Band near lower post and Watson Lake." It is unlikely that these were the only natives in the area since the people do not consider themselves members of a specific political "tribe" as such. Ethnographers typically define Alaskan and Canadian Native Americans by linguistic category for this reason. There are, however, two types of clan designations as "matrilineal moieties" known as the Raven (crow) and Wolf in English.
DAILY LIFE: The Kaska were "primarily caribou hunters and lived in temporary dwellings such as tepees or huts made of poles and brush, or sometimes in summer, simple lean-tos. Transport was by (birch-bark) canoe, snowshoe and toboggan" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1985). The Kaska believe in the powers of animal spirits and the practices of medicine men. Reincarnation is also a facet. Sub-arctic societies or composite bands are large enough for distinct personality features to be seen as reincarnations of people in the groups past.
Farb, Peter, An Explanation of Reincarnation, The Sub-Arctic: Living with Expediency, Man’s Rise to Civilization, New York, E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc.1968
Kaska, Yukon Native Language Centre,
http://www.yukoncollege.yk.ca/ynlc/index.html
Written by: Joshua Anttila