Dane-zaa

The Dane-zaa are an Athabaskan-speaking First Nations people whose homeland lies along the Peace River in north-eastern British Columbia and north-western Alberta, Canada. Long known to Europeans as the Beaver, they hunted the prairies and forests of the upper Peace country, took part in the fur trade from the 1790s, and today live in a number of First Nations communities on both sides of the provincial border.

Spellings vary between communities. Dane-zaa, used by the Dane-zaa Language Authority, is usually glossed as "the Real People"; other nations write Dane-Zaa, Dene Tsaa or Dunne-za. The English name Beaver came from neighbours: the Dakelh called them Tsattine and the Plains Cree Amiskiwiyiniw, both meaning people who live among the beaver, and French traders used Gens de Castor.

The region has a very long human history. At Charlie Lake Cave, a few kilometres north of Fort St. John, archaeologists have found stone tools, a bone bead and two deliberately buried ravens up to about 10,500 years old, among the oldest evidence of ritual in Canada. These finds belong to earlier peoples, but they show how long the area has been lived in.

Before the nineteenth century the Dane-zaa ranged further east, towards the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers and north to Lake Athabasca, as well as along the upper Peace, which they call Saaghii Naachii, "big river". In the late eighteenth century Cree groups, armed with guns obtained through trade, pushed them north-west. According to Dane-zaa oral history, a peace agreement made around 1800 set the Cree south of the river and the Dane-zaa north of it, which is said to explain the river's English name. The valley remained a meeting ground for trade, celebration and the settling of disputes.

Alexander Mackenzie reached the upper Peace in 1793, and in 1794 Rocky Mountain Fort was built at the mouth of the Moberly River. Fur-post journals from 1799 to 1800 record people who were ancestors of today's Doig River and Blueberry River nations. Dane-zaa hunters supplied traders with bison meat and grease, but by 1823, when the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed the North West Company, bison had become scarce. The Dane-zaa of Fort St. John signed an adhesion to Treaty 8 in May 1900.

Dane-zaa spiritual life has long been guided by Dreamers, prophets whose songs and teachings are said to have foretold the arrival of Europeans; Charlie Yahey, the last of them, died in 1976. The Dane-zaa language is closely related to Slavey, Sekani, Tsuu T'ina, Chipewyan and Kaska. It remained the main home language until children began attending school in the 1950s, and English became dominant from the 1980s. The 1918 influenza epidemic, residential schools and the loss of a traditional gathering place all contributed to the decline. Documentation work, including the anthropologist Robin Ridington's recordings from 1959 onwards and a 2004 to 2011 place-names project, now supports revitalisation.

About 1,600 Dane-zaa live in British Columbia and roughly 770 in Alberta, though only a minority speak the language. Communities include the Doig River, Blueberry River, Halfway River, Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations in British Columbia, and the Beaver First Nation and Horse Lake First Nation in Alberta. Oil, gas, forestry and hydro development have reshaped much of their land, and in 2021 the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled in Yahey v. British Columbia that the province had breached its Treaty 8 obligations to the Blueberry River First Nations through the cumulative effects of industrial development.

Our 1492 map draws the Dane-zaa territory under the label "Beaver", an approximate outline across the Peace River country of today's Canada, set among the wider Athabaskan-speaking Dene peoples.