Dane-zaa

The Dane-zaa, known to Europeans as the Beaver, are an Athabaskan-speaking people whose name is usually translated as the Real People or those who live among the beaver. They once ranged further east, from Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca across the upper Peace River country; Charlie Lake Cave near Fort St John shows ten thousand years of occupation.

They hunted bison on the prairies and moose and caribou in the woods, and followed the Dreamers, prophets whose songs and visions ordered spiritual life. In the late eighteenth century armed Cree traders pushed them northwest, until a peace settlement around 1800 made the Peace River the border and gave it its English name.

Alexander Mackenzie opened the fur trade in 1793, and the Dane-zaa provisioned posts with bison meat and grease until herds thinned after the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed the North West Company in 1823.