Denaakk'e

The Koyukon, who call themselves Denaa and their language Denaakk'e, are an Alaska Native Athabaskan people of the interior, with villages strung along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers. Archaeological evidence traces their occupation of the region back at least a thousand years.

As hunters and trappers they followed a seasonal round of salmon fishing, caribou and moose hunting and fur taking, trading furs to coastal Iñupiat and Yupik, through whom Russian goods and tobacco reached them before any European arrived. The first Russians ascended the Yukon as far as Nulato in the 1830s, finding that a smallpox epidemic had already devastated the village; introduced diseases would cut deep into the Koyukon population in the years that followed.