Sakawyiniw

Sakawyiniw names the Woodland Cree, the Sakawithiniwak, the largest Indigenous group in northern Alberta. Their country lies along the Athabasca River, and Calling Lake, a large lake in a bend of the river about sixty kilometres north of the town of Athabasca, sits within it. The local First Nations gave the lake its name after the sound of its ice cracking.

Before the eighteenth century the Woodland Cree's territory reached west of Hudson Bay and north as far as Churchill. By the 1700s they had become middlemen in trade with peoples farther west, and once they had acquired guns through that trade they expanded their territory, driving other tribes farther west and north. From about 1778 the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers, which run through their country, carried the fur trade from the Mackenzie River toward the Great Lakes.