Nahani

Nahani, meaning people of the west, is an Athabaskan collective name adopted by Anglo-Canadian traders in the early nineteenth century for interior nations west of the upper Liard River, among them the Kaska, Tagish and Tahltan.

The community represented here is the Tsetsaut, an Athabaskan-speaking group whose name, given by the Nisga'a and Gitxsan, means those of the interior, marking them as migrants from farther inland.

Their country lay around the heads of the Behm and Portland canals and the Meziadin Lake salmon grounds, between Tlingit and Nisga'a lands. In 1830 their strength was estimated at up to five hundred people, but raiding and disease had already driven them from the Behm Canal back toward the Portland Canal, leaving them the weakest of the Athabaskan peoples on this coast.