Dunezza

The Dunezza, or Dane-zaa, are Athabaskan speakers of the Peace River country straddling northern British Columbia and Alberta, known to Europeans as the Beaver, meaning people who live among beavers. Before the nineteenth century they ranged farther east around the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca; Charlie Lake Cave shows more than ten thousand years of indigenous occupation.

Armed through the fur trade, the Plains Cree pushed them northwest in the late eighteenth century; the ensuing peace, with the Cree south of the Peace River and the Dane-zaa north, gave the river its name.

Alexander Mackenzie met them in 1793 and built Rocky Mountain Fort in 1794; hunters provisioned the posts with bison meat until bison grew scarce in the early 1820s. Their Dreamer prophets had long foretold the Europeans' coming, and their songs shaped Dane-zaa life in the fur-trade era.