Tsatsaotine

The Yellowknives, who called themselves T'atsaot'ine, were a Dene people of the Canadian Subarctic, named after the yellow-bladed copper tools they shaped from deposits near the Arctic coast. Their hunting grounds stretched north and east of Great Slave Lake around the Yellowknife and Coppermine rivers, while their canoe routes carried trade east to Hudson Bay.

They mined and bartered native copper, drawing European explorers: in 1771 a Yellowknives band guided Samuel Hearne overland from Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Coppermine on the Arctic Ocean.

By the early nineteenth century they were the largest and most powerful Dene group of the region, but their long feud with the neighboring Dogrib ended in disaster in the 1830s, when Dogrib raids nearly destroyed them. The survivors scattered south of Great Slave Lake or merged with the Dogrib.