Tse'khene

The Tse'khene, better known as the Sekani, are an Athabaskan-speaking Dene people of northern British Columbia, whose lands cover the Finlay and Parsnip river drainages. Their name, joined to Dene for people, means people on the rocks. Their culture resembled that of the neighbouring Dunneza, from whom they had probably diverged by the eighteenth century; late in that century the expanding Plains Cree drove them westward.

They lived mainly by hunting big game, supplemented by berries and river fish, cremated their dead, and were said to practise polyandry before conversion to Catholicism.

Simon Fraser of the North West Company built Trout Lake Fort, later Fort McLeod, on McLeod Lake in 1805, though sustained direct contact with the Sekani dated only to the 1820s, when company posts drew them into the fur trade.