Wet'suwet'en

The Wet'suwet'en are a branch of the Dakelh, or Carrier, people, living along the Bulkley River and around Burns and François lakes in British Columbia. Their endonym means people of the Bulkley River, and they speak Witsuwit'en, an Athabaskan language. Their kungax oral history recalls the ancestral cedar village of Dizkle, abandoned after an omen of disaster.

Society is ordered into five matrilineal clans divided among thirteen house groups under hereditary house chiefs, acting through the feast system. The canyon village of Witset shows roughly five and a half thousand years of habitation, its salmon fishery disrupted when a rockslide blocked the runs and people resettled at Hagwilget.

In 1822 the Hudson's Bay Company founded the Babine Establishment on Babine Lake, trading leather and salmon with the Wet'suwet'en and Babine. The post was moved and renamed Fort Babine in 1836.