Tanana

The Tanana are a cluster of Alaska Athabaskan peoples, the Lower and Middle Tanana together with the Tanacross bands, native to the Tanana River drainage of the east-central Alaskan interior. The Tanana Valley holds some of the oldest traces of human life in Alaska: the Nenana hunting culture goes back to about 9000 BC, before the boreal forest took shape around 8000 BC.

In historic times the Tanana lived as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in small bands of twenty to forty people, each with a central winter camp and seasonal fish and game camps, under a matrilineal clan order.

Without formal tribal government they were strongly territorial, linked their villages by trail networks and traded or occasionally warred with neighbouring peoples, while Russian goods filtered in through middlemen long before any European reached the valley.