The name of the Yellowknife, a people located to the north and east of Great Slave Lake in the present-day Northwest Territories of northern Canada, was applied to them by fur traders because of their copper-bladed, yellow-colored knives. It was sometimes given as Red-Knife. They were also known simply as the Copper Indians because of the copper found in their homeland, especially along the Coppermine River. Even their Native name in Athapascan, Tatsanottine, relates to copper, translating as “people of the scum of water,” a figurative expression for the metallic element. Other ATHAPASCANS, the AHTENA, living along the Copper River and its tributaries in present-day southeastern Alaska, have also been referred to as Yellowknife and Copper Indians.
The lifeways of the Yellowknife resembled those of the neighboring CHIPEWYAN living to their south. In fact, some scholars have discussed the Yellowknife as a Chipewyan subgroup. The DOGRIB (thlingchadinne) to their west, their traditional enemies, also had similar customs. These and other SUBARCTIC INDIANS lived in small nomadic bands of extended families, hunting, fishing, and gathering the few edible plants in their rugged homeland.
Samuel Hearne, exploring for the Hudson’s Bay Company, encountered the Yellowknife in 1770. By the early 19th century, they were depleted in numbers by diseases passed to them by fur traders as well as by starvation. The fact that the knives, axes, and other cutting tools they had traditionally made for trade with other tribes for food were no longer in demand because of European iron tools made survival more difficult. In 1823, a Dogrib war party attacked the weakened Yellowknife near Great Bear Lake, forcing them to withdraw from the caribou herds in the region and leading to their absorption by the Chipewyan. Some Yellowknife may have joined the Dogrib. Other Yellowknife managed to remain around the trading post of Yellowknife, which non-Indians had founded at the tribe’s main village on the Great Slave Lake at the mouth of the Yellowknife River. A group known as Yellowknives Dene is based at Yellowknife, now the capital of the Northwest Territories. A group who refer to themselves as the Rocher River/Tultson River Yellowknives are seeking recognition by the Canadian government.
World History
