Han Hwech'in

The Han, or Han Hwech'in, are an Athabaskan people whose name means people of the Yukon River. Their forested homeland straddles the Alaska-Yukon border on the upper Yukon and its tributaries.

Their speech, closest to Gwich'in, may have roots reaching back to the early Holocene, some 8,000 years ago. River life governed the year: king and chum salmon caught in weirs and nets in summer were dried for winter stores; between the runs families left their riverside moss houses to hunt moose and caribou, sheltering in domed skin tents on the trail.

Long confused by traders with a Gwich'in band, they were among the last Northern Athabascans to meet Europeans, whose posts reached the upper Yukon only in the middle of the nineteenth century, so that in 1837 their country saw only trade goods passed hand to hand from the coast.