Description
The Tutchone, a First Nation people numbering several thousand, are among the most numerous of the more than 7200 Yukon Aboriginal people of First Nations heritage. Their homeland is the vast plateau dissected by the Alsek and Yukon River headwaters, flanked on the southwest by the Coastal and St Elias mountains and on the northeast by the Selwyn range. They numbered around fifteen hundred in 1974.
Language
Athabaskan
Culture
The Tutchone hunted caribou, moose, sheep and smaller game, especially marmots, varying hare and ground squirrels. They also took birds and fresh water fish, and some bands had access to annual salmon runs. Some 19th-century Tutchone, influenced by the Coast Tlingit with whom they traded, had plank dwellings, but most lived in double lean-tos of brush or domed skin tents. Since dog traction came only with European contact, belongings were limited to those which could be easily carried or made on the spot, such as the snares used to catch animals of all sizes.