Kaska

The Kaska Dena are an Athabaskan-speaking people of northern British Columbia and the southeastern Yukon, spread across the Dease, Liard and Pelly river country in five local bands.

They followed a seasonal round after caribou and berries, travelled waterways by canoe, and migrated to the Pelly River salmon runs and the fishing grounds at Watson Lake. Their trade gatherings centred on Daelyu, the place where we gather to trade, later the site of Lower Post.

The easternmost band carried furs to the North West Company post of Fort Nelson after it was founded in 1805. No company stood in their mountains, and in the 1820s Anglo-Canadians still counted them among the Nahani, the people of the west, whose furs reached traders through neighbouring middlemen.