Tlingit

The Tlingit, whose autonym Lingít means people of the tides, are a Na-Dene-speaking Northwest Coast people of the Alexander Archipelago and the Alaskan panhandle. In the rainforest they built a semi-sedentary life around salmon and other sea harvests, organised into matrilineal clans grouped under the Raven and Wolf or Eagle moieties, with hereditary chiefs and hereditary slavery.

Their river villages commanded passes through the Coast Mountains, and the Stikine, Taku and Chilkat Tlingit grew wealthy as middlemen trading with the Athabaskan peoples of the interior.

Russians knew them as the Koloshi, and Russian settlement from the 1790s met fierce resistance: Tlingit forces destroyed the first post at Sitka in 1802, and the Russian-Tlingit War of 1802 to 1805 ended only with the Battle of Sitka in 1804, after which trade and warfare with the Russian-American Company continued side by side.