Dena'ina

The Dena'ina, formerly called the Tanaina or Kenai people, are an Alaska Native Athabaskan people whose homeland covers Cook Inlet, the Kenai Peninsula, Iliamna Lake and Lake Clark. Migrating from the Mulchatna and Stony River country, they reached the coast around 1000, displacing the Kachemak people, and became the only Northern Athabaskan group to settle saltwater shores.

Coastal salmon and beluga grounds allowed a more settled life; society was organized into matrilineal clans and two moieties. Russian fur traders reached the inlet in 1741, and in 1786 the Lebedev-Lastochkin Company built Fort Nicholas at Kenai, the first European settlement on the Alaskan mainland.

In 1797 the Dena'ina stormed the fort in the battle of Kenai, leaving more than a hundred dead. A smallpox epidemic in the late 1830s carried off about half their population.