Introduction
There are about twenty tribes in Canada that speak dialects of the Athapaskan or Na-Dene language family. The Slavey are located between Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake, and on the southern portion of the Mackenzie River. Prehistorically, the people lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle with a simple form of social organization.
Traditional Slavey Settlement Patterns and Lifeways
The Slavey relied on migratory animals such as caribou, fish and water fowl for much of their food. Their semi-nomadic way of life was due to the scattered and seasonal occurrence of these migratory animals, along with small game species that were trapped in deadfalls and snares in their home territories. Moose and bear were also abundant in the marshy woodland territory that the Slavey occupied. They would hunt the moose by imitating a moose call using a birch bark tube or by rubbing a large bone or piece of antler against a tree trunk to imitate the male moose. When a moose came to investigate the hunter killed the animal with a bow and arrow. The animals were also hunted when the snow was deep and covered with a thick crust of ice. The hunter would run the moose to exhaustion by wearing snowshoes and run atop the ice where the moose broke through the crust and tired easily. It could then be taken easily with a bow and arrow or spear. The most common way, however, was to herd moose or caribou into a fenced area – a corral, compound or surround – where snares were set to trap the animals (Crowe 1974).
Fishing was also very important to the Slavey and in fact, as is the case for all Subarctic Indians, fish were their staple food. They aggregated in the summer in large fish camps along major rivers or lakes where they then used nets made of willow bark to catch, clean and dry large quantities fish. They dispersed in the winter to small fish lakes where they lived in small family bands of no more than two or three closely-related nuclear families. At these winter camps they netted fish under the thick winter ice, they trapped small game, and they occasionally hunted solitary moose with bow and arrow (ibid., Allen 1998, Siddon 1990).
The Slavey were primarily occupied with day-to-day survival and a need to move constantly due to their harsh environment, and because of this their social organization took a simple form. They were divided into several regional bands, which consisted of independent local bands divided into different family groups who worked together. These family groups were called “nodal kindreds” (Allen 1998). Each family band hunted in its own separate territory where boundaries were defined by tradition and use (ibid.).
Conclusion
The Slavey were an Athapaskan-speaking, nomadic, band-level people who lived in the harsh climate of Subarctic northern Canada. This environment shaped the way they subsisted and organized themselves both spatially and socially. They are often thought of as people of the caribou or moose but in fact were people of the fish, for it was fish that were their staple food and therefore the primary constraint in their lives. They now live in government-created, modern settlements in the Canadian Northwest Territories (Vanstone 1974, Asch 1988, Morrison & Wilson 1986, Leechman 1956, Jenness 1977) .
Allen, W. E. 1998 Sustainable Resource Economies vs. Extractive Surplus Economies in the Canadian Subarctic: A Reassessment of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. Doctoral Dissertation, Dept of Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara.
Asch, M. 1988 Kinship and the Drum Dance in a Northern Dene Community. Edmonton: The Boreal Institute for Northern Studies.
Crowe, K. J. 1974 A History of the Original Peoples of Northern Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press.
Jenness, D. 1977 Indians of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Leechman, D. 1956 Native Tribes of Canada. Toronto: Gage Publ. Ltd.
Morrison, R. B. & C. R. Wilson, eds. 1986 Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc.
Nelson, R. K. 1973 Hunters of the Northern Forest. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.
Siddon, T. 1990 The Canadian Indian. Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.
Vanstone, J W. 1974 Athapaskan Adaptations: Hunters and Fisherman of the Subarctic Forests. Chicago: Aldine.
Written by: Sara K. (Soeters) Allen