Ahtna Place Names Lists

2nd edition revised

Alaska Native Language Center • 2008

Cover-Kari, Ahtna 20090304.indd 1 3/9/09 10:55:27 AM About the cover:

Detail from the 1887 map drawn in 1885 by the Henry T. Allen U.S. Military expedition. The four maps with Allen’s report are considered to be the most accurate maps of Alaska prior to the professional mapping by the USGS in the late 1890s. Of the map work Allen (1887:117) wrote: I think the great care taken to secure a correct description of the rivers will be of great value... Each of the maps is constructed on a polyconic projection from tables published by the Bureau of Navigation, and ... on a scale if 1 inch to 4 miles. The considerable detail on Copper River geography and on Ahtna sites, trails and place names is recognition of and tribute to the “shared knowledge” and geographic expertise of the Ahtna leadership who facilitated the travel of the three-member expedition.

Copper spear point tsedi k’a’ found off Turnagain Arm in the 1990s. Since Copper River was the main regional source for copper is possible this was made by an Ahtna copper smith. From the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Photo by Walter VanHorn.

Cover design by Dixon Jones, UAF Rasmuson Library Ahtna Place Names Lists

2nd edition revised

James Kari

Alaska Native Language Center

1983 1st edition published by Copper River Native Association & Alaska Native Language Center, 1st printing 500 copies

ISBN no. 978-1-55500-099-8 contact: James Kari Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus Alaska Native Language Center University of Alaska, Fairbanks [email protected] Table of Contents

List of Maps and Tables ...... iii Format, Symbols and Abbreviations ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... vi Ahtna Athabascan place names as shared knowledge ...... 1 References ...... 33 0 Extraterritorial and regional ...... 37 1 Copper River, mouth to Chitina ...... 38 2 Chitina River ...... 44 3 Copper River above Chitina to Klutina River ...... 49 4 Tonsina River ...... 59 5 Klutina River ...... 63 6 Copper River, Klutina River to Tazlina River ...... 67 7 Tazlina River ...... 68 8 Matanuska River, headwaters to mouth ...... 76 9 Copper River, Tazlina River to Gulkana River mouth ...... 83 10 Gulkana River ...... 85 11 Delta River ...... 103 12 Copper River, Gulkana to Gakona River and up Gakona River ...... 105 13 Copper River, Gakona River to Chistochina River and up Chistochina River ...... 108 14 Copper River, Chistochina to Slana River ...... 114 15 Slana River ...... 117 16 Tok River ...... 124 17 Upper Copper River above Slana River ...... 129 18 Nabesna River, Chisana River, White River ...... 132 19 Nenana River, Healy area to headwaters ...... 135 20 Susitna River, headwaters to Devil Canyon ...... 141

Map 1. The Ahtna language area ...... 3 Map 2. Distribution of Ahtna place names ...... 4 Map 3. Nine career travel maps ...... 6 Map 4. 1981 sketch map by Jake Tansy of Upper Susitna River area ...... 8 Map 5. Two sets of Ahtna place name clusters ...... 26 Map 6. Guide to drainage sections and numbers ...... 36

Table 1. Chronology of sources with numbers of Ahtna place names ...... 9 Table 2. Summary of Ahtna-origin names as official names on USGS maps ...... 10 Table 3. Chronology of sources pertaining to Matanuska River & Tazlina Lake-River trails . . 11 Table 4. Summary of Ahtna place names data by drainage in 1983, 2004 and 2008 ...... 13 Table 5. Analyzability of Ahtna place names ...... 14 Table 6. Some patterns of Ahtna place name content ...... 16 Table 7. Landscape terms NOT common in Ahtna place names ...... 18 Table 8. Landscape and toponymic structures in Ahtna ...... 19-22 Table 9. Ahtna riverine directional structure ...... 23 Table 10. Riverine directionals in place names ...... 27 Format, Symbols and Abbreviations A. Sample of entry format no. Ahtna place name map name or location ‘literal translation’ (A> = Ahtna-origin name) 91.1 Tsedi Na' A> Chitina River 'copper river' 61.5133, -144.2926 [1] Wrangell 1839, Allen 1887:22.deLaguna 1970:4; Orth:Indian name meaning "copper river" reported by Dall (1870, p. 272) who spelled it "Chechitno" and "Chetchitno." 92 Tsedi Cae'e mouth of Chitina River 'copper mouth' 61.5126, -144.3961 [1] 93 Saghani T'ox Na' first ck on S bank 'raven nest creek' 61.4991, -144.3512 [3-AB] 94 Saghani T'ox mt at first ck on S bank 'raven nest' 61.4941, -144.3293 [2-AB] 95 Hwyii Detaani Bene' lake 1063 NE of Strelna Lake 'pond inside lake' 61.535, -144.2147 [2-AB] latitude, longitude [2-AB] = sources for name, comments on name name salience & initials of Ahtna source

B. General abbreviations XX marked for further questions N, S, E,W north, south east west mi mile ck creek mt mountain sth. something (c’- indefinite prefix)

C. Ahtna place name entry conventions: [....] transliterated or reconstructed place name (name not re-elicited) “...” spelled as quoted from source (...) word that is used optionally: Tek'ez'aann Ghatgge ('En) dialects: C Central, L Lower, W Western, U Upper, M Mentasta languages: D Dena’ina, MT Middle Tanana, Tc Tanacross, UT Upper Tanana

D. Map name and location conventions: “Fish Creek” locally used unofficial name “long” triangulation point on USGS maps > official name that derives from an Ahtna or other Athabascan place name or from a Native personal name: A> Tanada Lake n.k. location of feature is not known

E. Literal translation conventions: ‘....’ literal translation within single quotes “...” interpretive translation (folk etymology) by Ahtna speaker (no literal translation) ‘?... initial ? = possible or speculative translation ‘...?...’ untranslatable word or morpheme within the name

iv ‘...’, or ‘...’ name with two possible translations ‘....~’ ellipsis, missing stem in place names; lit. translation is approximate or speculative  opaque morphemes, not translatable by speakers and that do not seem to match with other morphemes in Ahtna inventory

F. Ahtna speakers as sources and place name salience *See speakers’ initials as listed in Acknowledgments below 3-JMc obscure name reported by Jim McKinley. percentage of 2208 names 0 name not known (name is absent, transliterated or inferred) 22 = .09% 1 well-known names; 589 = 27% 2 locally known names; 1313 = 59% 3 obscure names, known by some experts; 284 = 13%

PIC

Jack John Justin and James Kari discussing place names at Jack’s Upper Nabesna cabin in September of 1981. Photo by Robert John Jr. using Jack’s Polaroid camera.

v Acknowledgments

I thank all of the Ahtna speakers and the other Athabascan speakers who have contributed names to the lists in this report. Listed here by dialect area are 110 persons who are sources of names and locational information either with Frederica deLaguna (1954-1968), Constance West (1973), Holly Reckord (1973-1975) or myself (since 1974). Perhaps another fifty Ahtna persons (most of whom are unnamed) have contributed Ahtna place names (to Allen, various USGS geologists and others). Therefore about 160 speakers of Ahtna or of neighboring Athabascan languages have contributed names and locations that are presented in this 2008 edition of Ahtna Place Names Lists.

*Note: Initials of speakers who cited as sources for names, e.g.: [2-AB] Lower Ahtna: Jim McKinley (JMc), Fannie Shtienfield, Andy Brown (AB), Frank Billum (FB), John Billum (JB), Walter Charley (WC), Mildred Buck, Wallya Hobson (WH), Mollie Billum, Maggie Eskilida, Bacili George (BG), Bob Marshall (BM), Henry Bell, Etta Bell, Adam Bell. Also with deLaguna or West: Tenas Charley, Douglas Billum, Mary Ann Billum, Rena Jacomet

Central Ahtna: Martha Jackson, Fred Ewan (FE), Markle Ewan Sr., Nancy George, Harry Johns Sr., Sophie Lincoln (SL), Louis Lincoln, Ruth Johns , Ben Neeley (BN), Hazel Neeley, Alice Gene, Buster Gene, Jack Tyone, Jim Tyone (JTy), Nick Tyone, Andrew Stickwan, Elsie Stickwan, Frank Stickwan, (FS), Pete Stickwan, Danny Ewan, Eileen Ewan, Harding Ewan, Oscar Ewan, Pete Ewan, Stella Ewan, Annie Tyone, Maggie Joe, Frank Hobson, Betty Tyone, Mamie Charley, Andy Tyone, Fred Sinyon, Stewart Nickolai, Markle Pete (MP), Virginia Pete, Nick Jackson, Tenas Jack, Jeannie Maxim, Annie Ewan. Also with deLaguna or West: Arthur Jackson, Tony Jackson, Grandma McKinley, Oscar Craig, Copper Center Pete, James Sinyon

Upper Ahtna: Katie John (KJ), Fred John Sr. (FJ), Kate Sanford, Jack John Justin (JJJ), Bell Joe (BJ), Adam Sanford (AS), Frank Sanford, Johnny Nickolai, Howard Sanford, Huston Sanford, Ruby Sinyon, Laura Hancock, Paul Sinyon, Gene Henry (GH), Molly Galbreath, Lena Charley, Jerry Charley, Doris Charles, Lillian Boston, Wilson Justin. Also with deLaguna: Mentasta Pete, Frank Charley, Long Lucy

Western Ahtna: Henry Peters, Jake Tansy (JT), Dick Secondchief, Morrie Secondchief, Joe Secondchief, Johnny Shaginoff (JS), Mary Shaginoff, Roy Tansy, Katie Wade (KW), Louise Mayo, Jane Nicholas, Lilly Tansy, Jennie Peters, Bud Carlson, Irene Pederson. Also with deLaguna: Jimmy Secondchief, Oly Nicklie

Other contributors: Dena’ina: Shem Pete; Middle Tanana: Bessie Barnabus; Tanacross: Andrew Isaac, Oscar Isaac; Upper Tanana: Oscar Jimmy, Mary Tyone

I acknowledge the work of the late Frederica de Laguna on Ahtna culture which is largely unpublished. Her 1970 manuscript on Ahtna sites and place names served as a starting point for this research in the 1970s. I also thank Holly Reckord for her contributions to Ahtna names and sites and her excellent 1983 report. I also thank Siri Tuttle, Gary Holton, Andrea Berez, Ben Potter Ezekial Beye, and Adeline Kari for their help with aspects of this report.

Funding for the 1983 Ahtna Place Names Lists came from a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum to Copper River Native Association. Since then, Ahtna place name work continued without

vi funding whenever I had a chance to work with Ahtna experts. During 1998-2003 funding for Ahtna fisheries research through ADFG and USFWS contributed to advances in the Ahtna place names. In 2005 a contract through BLM for the Eastern Alaska Management Plan also contributed to some place names work. During 2007-2008 a grant from NSF (0553831) “Ahtna Texts” (Siri Tuttle, PI), also contributed to this work. The lower Matanuska River place names from Kari and Fall 2003 were sponsored by several small projects. The Upper Tanana place names in Kari 1997 were for a project sponsored by Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

PIC

James Kari and Fred Ewan viewing some Ahtna place names at the Mt. Drum viewpoint south of Glennallen in August of 2008. Photo by Andrea Berez.

vii Jake Tansy with C’enaa Dzele’ ‘sign, omen mountain’ in the background, (feature 1451, Rusty Hill near Valdez Creek village site) in August of 1982. Photo by Priscilla Russell.

viii Ahtna Athabascan Place Names as Shared Knowledge

0. Overview of Ahtna place names research

For over thirty-five years I have been collecting Ahtna and other Alaska Athabascan place names, and making generalizations about Athabascan geographic knowledge. There is no area of language research that I enjoy as much as discussing names and geography with expert speakers of Athabascan. At times when we are engrossed in the minutiae of names, places, and maps, I think to myself, “This is my idea of a religious experience.” I continue to be amazed that this is a shared, memorized verbally transmitted geographic system that is congruent across language and dialect boundaries. For Ahtna we can marvel at the strict purity, orderliness, symmetry, functionality, and memorizability of the geography. The assembled lists of 2208 Ahtna place names are a shared and strongly confirmed geographic names corpus. The large portion of the names (about 60%) has been confirmed by several speakers. Thanks to experts such as Jake Tansy, Jim McKinley, Katie John and Adam Sanford, Ahtna has the most comprehensive geographic name data set for any Alaska Native language.

There are many generalizations that we can make based upon the Ahtna place names corpus. The names are 98% analyzable or partially analyzable. The place names can be summarized in terms of information content, structural patterns, distribution, memorizability, use in overland navigation, occurrence in narratives, and many other features. Seven of these names were reported 212 years ago and probably over 30% have been reported repeatedly and consistently by ten or more different Ahtna speakers.

Ahtna is a member of the Athabascan language family, the largest indigenous language family in North America in territory. More anciently, the Athbascan languages are part of the Na-Dene language stock that includes Eyak and Tlingit. The most famous and striking themes about the Na- Dene language stock are the sheer size of the language area in western North America, and the unique typological profile of the languages featuring elaborate verb complexes with strings of rigidly ordered prefixes before a verb root. Furthermore, the recent compelling evidence that the Yeniseian language family of Central Siberia is related to Athabascan and Na-Dene (Vajda 2009, to appear), is prompting some wide-ranging questions about how and when Dene-Yeniseian may have been configured in Siberia, Beringia. and Alaska.

There is a similar look and feel to the place names in Athabascan languages, so much so that many place names from Hupa in Northern California or Navajo in the Southwest can be adjusted to have Ahtna pronunciations and are plausible as Ahtna place names. There are similar structural patterns, and many of the same high frequency nouns, postpositions and derivational prefixes are the same. I have often pondered if these tendencies to name geographic features in similar ways in different environmental settings may in fact signal important trends in the prehistory of the Athabascan language family. The Ahtna place names lists are primary data for future discussions on the role of geography in the prehistory of Athabascan, Na-Dene and Dene-Yeniseian.

I first collected Ahtna place names data between 1975 and 1983. Ahtna Place Names Lists (Kari 1983) presented 1378 names in 21 drainage subsections with two accompanying wall maps. In the intervening years I gradually added names to the lists, and I continued to label Ahtna place names onto a set of laminated 1:63000 scale maps for portions of the language area. In 2001 I put the

1 names into an Access data base. In 2005, for a project with BLM Glennallen office and the report Copper River Native Places (Kari and Tuttle 2005), we began to map the place names as points on GIS shape files. In 2008 I reviewed the records at the Ahtna, Inc. office in Glennallen. Also I added many notes about sources on Ahtna place names. In late 2008 the level of review of the data on Ahtna place names is fairly even. Thus after accumulating a foot-high set of printed drafts, for the first time since 1983 the Ahtna place names lists are now published in a revised 2nd edition.

The Ahtna language area is predominantly the drainage of the Copper River, a 250-mile long stream that heads on the north slopes of the Wrangell Mountains and then flows into the Gulf of Alaska. The Wrangell Mountain group is considered the largest mountain in circumference in the world at about 300 miles, according to geologist Carl Benson (p.c.). Today there are about 1000 persons who call themselves Ahtna, and there are about 50 speakers of the language. The Ahtna people have a strong sense of identity and territory. Many Ahtna live at or near traditional village site areas, and they are members of nine federally recognized tribes: Mentasta Lake Village, the Native Village of Chistochina (Cheeshna), Gakona Village Council, Gulkana Village Council, the Native Village of Tazlina, the Native Village of Klutikaah (Copper Center), the Native Village, of Chitina, the Native Village of Cantwell, and Chickaloon Village Traditional Council. All but one of these tribes (Chickaloon) belongs to Ahtna Inc., the regional Native corporation that was founded in 1974 with the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act. Ahtna Inc. owns and manages a large amount of land within the boundaries of the traditional Ahtna language area.

Map 1. The Ahtna language area

We draw the Ahtna language and dialect boundaries as seen on Map 1. We can confirm these boundaries at the onset of historic contact in the 1880s. The language area is approximately 35,000 sq. miles in area and includes all of the Copper River drainage above Childs Glacier; in the northeast: most of the Tok River drainage; in the north: the upper Delta River to the Black Rapids area; in the northwest, the upper Susitna River above Devil Canyon and the upper Nenana River above Healy River; and in the west, the upper Matanuska River above Chickaloon River. We have included some Ahtna names beyond the language area, such as in lower Copper River (16 names, Sec. 1), the lower Matanuska River (73 names, Sec. 7), the lower Delta River area (11 names, Sec. 11), and the Nabesna-Chisana area (56 names, Sec. Sec. 18). Thus the report presents Ahtna place names for an area well over 50,000 sq. mi. We have documented Ahtna territory with place names lists and extensive information about former band and individual territories, sketch maps and illustrative narratives. The patterns that are portrayed in these sources are based upon a highly conservative and rule-driven oral tradition. Our portrait of Ahtna territory in Copper River Basin and adjacent areas reflects human foot travel on trail networks without much use of boats and without major dependence on motorized vehicles.1 The compiled Ahtna place names network is “shared knowledge”– a mutually known geographic system that is highly functional, flexible, particularistic and learnable. The Ahtna place names precede all historic modes of transportation, land ownership patterns, and varioua s land m nagement jurisdictions.

1Aboriginally the Ahtna had four or five types of water craft. In Ahtna country birchbark canoes were useable in warmer months in one region: the upper Gulkana River lakes to the Tyone Lake area.

2 Delta Creek LOWER TANANA Billy Sand Healy T MIDDLE Łuu Creek s’ Creek e Delta Tahwdzaeye’ ntadaas Na’ TANANA +

River West Fork Mckinley Park Gerstle Ladue R Tl’ahwdicaaxi Na Dzeł River Dot Lake Ghatggeh ’ ) (Dzeł Ghatggey Na’ TANACROSS Map 1.

+ Henggey Xasatl’aadi Mansfield Village Tah Hwdisaade Nenana ’ a Ahtna Tanacross Cantwell River Ł N West uy i Tetlin Junction in n Fork + Dghilaay Ce’e YidateniYi Na’ anest’aa + Tl’azii Tok Na’dateni Nay’dlaxi Robertson Language Area River

Tetlin Tanana l River with some Ahtna place names Hwniidi Valdez C’aałi To Tezdlende Ben l Creek Ts’eteyk River Na’ C’ilaan Na’ Sasnuu’ Tanen’dalyaa version 1.2, 12/20/08 Bene’ Last Tetlin Village Ts Upper Nałk’edze

Nitiil iis Tl’edze’ Na’ Northway River Maclaren Maclaren Charlieskin language boundaries Kacaagh Bene’ Ggax K’estsiik’e Village Tsulatna’ Bene’ MentastaMendaesde Lake Tak’ats’ Kutl’aa Slana S

Di’idaedl Na’ Bene’ t

’ River

C’iidze’ Na’ a

N Tetlin River

Chistochina Sasutna’ a UPPER

Nataghił’aade River CentralCentral ’ Susitna dialect boundaries Titiy’niłtaan River West Slana TANANA Fork na River Copper ’Usts’eni Na’ Gulkana ko Bene’ Banazdleni Gulkana River + River Ga Nabesna Creek TyoneNilben Na’ C’ulc’ena’

River River Ggax Kuna’ Ggax Batzulnetas Chunilna Chistochina Nataełde ’anilna’ Cets’i Na’ Ts Tsiis Tl’edze’ l I’delcuut Na WesternWestern Chisana settlements Caegge River lkeenta Ta River Ben K’atggeh lTyone Nabaes Na’ ’ Black Village Łiidzi Nabesna Dzeł Cene modern roads se’ Bene’ Ts Dehsuun’ River ’itaeł Na’ + Caegge

Ye Sheep Kaghalk’edi Ggax Kuna’ Siz’aani River Sasnuu’ Gakona etsaan’ Na’ River K’aasi Na’ Bene’ Ts Oshetna Bene’ Gulkana Nen’ C’ulc’ena’ Mt Sanford + Hwniindi

K’ełt’aeni

’ Ben Daes Glennallen Chisana a

ii N Bene’ Ciisi K’ena’l N Nelts

a Tazlina Copper River & Northwestern RR Kashwitna a ’ River a + Mt Wrangell ’ River i l in zdlen Na’ Tazlina K’ełt’aeni N Te ’ d a

’ t Tezdlen Cae’el a

y a Copper Center gh N a i i l Tl’ati Cae’e COPPER d N e a n Bendiil ’A T N da Chickaloon Hw River DENA’INA N Bene’ Dadina

a Xez Ghae Na’ Nadzax Na’ ’ RIVER River Nay’dini’aa Na’ + K’ats’i Tl’aadi White River ● Chickaloon Ts’itonh Na’ Klutina Nataełde (Ahtna names, land) Matanuska Tl’atina’River A’ River Na’ entsii N Moose Creek Sutton Tl’atibene’ K a’ Ggax Kuna’ (Ahtna names, water)

Ben Tah ’ats’i K Wasilla Palmer nsina To tsina R Nuu Tah River Ko Matanuska + Chitina Zdlaaygha Xez Ghae Eklutna Kentsii Tsedi Na’ McCarthy + Ts’itonh Na’ Ts Bene’ edi Na’ Birchwood Deghilaaye Nizii Na’ CHITINA RIVER

Eagle River LowerLower Di Kayaxi Na’ a’ + Tebay N Tiekel River Hanagita ALUTIIQ ay Snakniili River Łts’a River

Valdezl Tatitl’aa T’aghes Nuu’ Na’ Kiagna River Tasnuna Dadaa’i Na’Bremner River River October 2008 N Ellamarl l Base map by Matt Ganley, Map-Alaska Tatitlek Whittier Granite Creek Text and Ahtna names by James Kari

Kaliakh Map Projection: River UTM Zone 6, NAD1927 6 Map 2. Distribution of Ahtna place names

n = 2111 Ahtna place name

Miles 0 25 50 100

Map by Ben Potter Map 2. The distribution of Ahtna place names

Map 2 shows the distribution of 2113 names (over 90 of the names are not yet mapped). This gives some sense for the areas of greatest density of names and the distribution of names both within and beyond the language boundaries. A few of the more distant features with Ahtna names, such as Tyonek and Dawson, are about 307 miles apart; Tyonek and Salcha are about 250 mi. apart (as the airliner flies). Note that it is misleading to treat all the names as points, when stream names are in fact linear features and mountains and lakes have polygonal shapes.

A useful way to introduce Ahtna geography is through what can be called “career travel maps.” In Map 3 we present career maps for nine people that we consider to be the foremost experts on portions of Ahtna territory based upon my recollection of who reported names in specific areas. It is noteworthy that only seven or eight people can represent the entire range of the language area as well as some adjacent Athabascan language areas. If we added the career maps of other experts, Map 3 would be more complex and less informative.

Map 3. Nine Ahtna career travel maps

Map 3 gives a sense of how the able-bodied men served as emissaries between the settlement areas, and knew two or three band territories. Several speakers knew some names in five adjacent Athabascan language areas: Dena’ina, Lower Tanana, Middle Tanana, Tanacross and Upper Tanana as well as Eyak. In Kari and Tuttle 2005 we profile each of these experts in our discussion of Ahtna band territories and land use. The depth of coverage for each person varies from very extensive (for Jake Tansy and Frank Stickwan), to a basic outline (for Frank Billum).

The late Jake Tansy of Cantwell has provided the most detailed travel, land use, and place name materials of any Ahtna speaker. We consider Jake Tansy’s ethnogeographic materials to be among the best ever recorded in Alaska. Jake Tansy was born in 1906 at Valdez Creek and resided in Cantwell for many years until he passed away in the fall of 2003. Jake was the expert on the uplands of the upper Nenana and Susitna Rivers–the traditional territory of the Valdez Creek-Cantwell Ahtna band. The Ahtna place name corpus for Jake=s area was refined for over 20 years. Jake had a rare combination of skills as an outdoorsman, handyman and raconteur. Tansy 1982 is a fine collection of Ahtna yenida’a legends. Jake’s career Ahtna place name network (on Map 3) represents the northwest edge of Ahtna territory and extends from the upper Nenana River above the Healy River, and along the upper Susitna River to Devil Canyon, an area that overlaps with those for John Shaginoff and Jim Tyone. Sources for Jake Tansy include numerous tape recorded interviews by myself and others. Jake Tansy was one of the main sources for the BLM report by Dessauer and Harvey (1980) and for Rebne (2000), a history of the community of Cantwell. Extensive comments by Jake Tansy on Ahtna fish and fishing are in Simeone and Kari 2002 and 2005. I have transcribed several of Jake’s recorded narratives, but most remain untranscribed and unpublished.

Jake Tansy had a highly technical way of using Ahtna place names as well as the other directional and spatial features of his language to travel and to navigate in the Ahtna landscape. In November of 1982 Jake drew this sketch Map 4 of the upper Nenana-Susitna River area between Brushkana River and Clearwater River as he commented on names, trails, and resources. Map 5 is another demonstration of the Jake Tansy’s precise geographic expertise.

5 Nine Ahtna Career Travel Maps Travel Career Nine Ahtna 3. by Dael Davenport, BLM 2004 Davenport, Dael by

6 Map 4. 1982 sketch map by Jake Tansy of Upper Susitna River area

In the following sections we focus on: Sec. 1, the sources on Ahtna geography; Sec. 2 , methodological and mapping issues; Sec.3, policies used for dialects, translations, and annotations. In Sec. 4 we summarize the principles features of Ahtna geography. A forthcoming article (Kari 2009) “Ahtna Geographic Names: A Case Study in Athabascan Geographic Knowledge” goes into more detail on the topics in Sec. 4 Also it discusses the many similarities between Ahtna place names and those in other Athabascan languages.

1. Sources on Ahtna place names

The Ahtna culture and language are well-documented. Of singular importance is the highly readable description of the Ahtna people at the onset of historic contact in 1885 by Henry T. Allen (1887). DeLaguna and McClellan’s 1981 sketch of Ahtna in the Handbook of North American Indians is an excellent synopsis of Ahtna ethnography and sources. I have maintained lexical and text files on Ahtna since 1974. The Ahtna Athabaskan Dictionary (Kari 1990) is an alphabetical morpheme list with examples.

The cumulative record on Ahtna place names and sites is from an impressive array of sources. The first documentation of the Ahtna language and Ahtna place names was thirteen words, including seven place names, written in 1797 in a journal kept by Russian navy-man Dmitri Tarkhanov. A translation of Tarkhanov’s journal by the late Lydia Black (2008) has just been published. Tarkhanov stayed for a couple of weeks in the vicinity of Chitina, mainly at the Ahtna village on the west bank transcribed by Tarkhanov as “Takeka.” This is clearly Hwt’aa Caegge, the place name for the Ahtna village at the mouth of Fox Creek. Another important source on Ahtna and Dena’ina place names and trails is the 1839 Wrangell map. The 1887 Allen report and map contains about 46 Ahtna place names (all but three have been reconfirmed).

In the early history of exploration of Interior Alaska, the travel skills and geographic expertise of Athbascan guides had an enormous but still largely unappreciated impact on trail reconnaissance, cartography, and place naming. The importance and comprehensiveness of the Athabascan geographic expertise in Eastern Alaska can be gleaned from the most detailed sources on this period (such as Allen 1887, Rohn 1899, 1900, Powell 1910). Consider the implications of this comment in Orth (1967:468) on the origin of Jacksina Creek: “Prospectors’ name, a combined personal name with an Indian ending (-na) meaning stream, or river, reported in 1902 by F. C. Schrader, USGS. Schrader gave the Indian name of the stream as "Di-bot-i-chit-in-da." [Debee Jiidi Nda].” In 1902 a Nabesna speaker with limited English skills informed Schrader about this blended place name for Jacksina and the corresponding name in his language. On Sept 22, 1981 I obtained for Jacksina Creek from Jack John Justin, Debee Jiidi Niig, the same name but with a contrasting term for ‘stream.’

The sources assembled for these lists include sketch maps, word lists, early professional topographical maps, commercial maps, and Ahtna-origin names that have accumulated on USGS maps in the region since the 1890s. The magnificent reference work by Donald Orth (1967), Dictionary of Alaska Place Names, is a source on variant spellings of names and dates when names first were published by the USGS. Research specific to Ahtna geography began with deLaguna’s

Seattle Ck Seattle Brushkana river Brushkana

Nenana River 6.

Butte Lake Butte NORTH Nikoli’s camp Nikoli’s 5.

Denali Highway Denali Susitna River caribou fence 4.



Valdez Creek Valdez townsite Valdez Creek Valdez

3. Roosevelt Lake Roosevelt 2. Clearwater River 1.

Raft Creek

Peter Seconchief’s location Highway Denali Map 4. Map 4. map of Sketch area, Susitna River Upper 11/6/82 Tansy, Jake by 1-6: whitefish harvest whitefish 1-6: locations 8 research on Ahtna in 1954, 1958, 1964 and 1968. Her 1970 manuscript is a compilation of about 250 Ahtna place names and site references from her field work. Many of these names are also presented in Reckord 1983 which has names and site reports on 115 Ahtna villages. The documentary sources for Ahtna place names are summarized in Table 1 in chronological order, dating from 1797.

Table 1. Chronology of sources with numbers of Ahtna place names 1790s Tarkhanov (Black 2008) 7 names

1830s 1839 Wrangell map 18 names

1870-1880s Dall 1875, Allen 1887 46 names, features

1890s Abercrombie, Rohn, Lowe, Mendenhall, Schrader, 57 Glenn, Bourke

1900s Rohn, Powell, Geohagen, USGS 89

1910s USGS surveys (via Orth 1967) 38

1920s USGS surveys, S. Baker 1928 16

1930s USGS surveys 19

1940s USGS surveys 4

1950s USGS surveys 36

1960s USGS surveys 6

1970s directed place names research: delaguna 1970 ms., 200+ & 138 names West 1973 ms. & features

1980s directed place names research: Reckord 1983, 115 & 1378 Kari 1983

totals estimated 500 Ahtna place names attested one or more times prior to the 1980s

estimated 1700 place names documented through Kari’s work

Due to the remarkable detail of the 1887 Allen report and map (a portion of which is reproduced on the cover of this report) and the intense mapping activity in the 1890s with the copper prospects on the Chitina River, about 125 Ahtna place names were mapped or written down prior to 1910. In subsequent decades another 100 Ahtna-origin names were added to quad maps by USGS field staff. When we combine these historic sources with our directed research with Ahtna speakers on sites and place names, it appears that more 30% of the names in the current lists have been documented two or more times, and the well known names have been documented numerous times. We also keep track of what appear to be Ahtna names that were documented but that are not recognized by Ahtna speakers (about 31 names).2 Also about 70% of the names on these lists were obtained either during

2 An example is Yetna Creek in Copper Center, which appears on maps as of 1952 but was consistently rejected by Jim McKinley and others as not being one of the locally used Ahtna place names.

9 the research for the 1983 report or for the current edition.

The Ahtna language has had an impact on the official geographic names in the region. Approx- imately 237 official names out of 2206 records (or 10.7%) are either based upon 1) Ahtna language place names that can be associated with specific Ahtna place names; or 2) on the personal names of Ahtna people. Table 2 exemplifies several types of Ahtna-origin official names. A symbol A> (or UT>, or D>) before the name marks an Ahtna-origin or other Athabascan-origin name.

Table 2. Summary of Ahtna-origin names as official names on USGS maps Total: approx 237 official names out of 2208 records (10.7%)

map name source name translation comment

1. Map name is version of actual A.p.n. for same feature: 127

Eska Creek Ts'es Tac'ilaex Na' ‘fish run among rocks creek’

Dadina River Hwdaadi Na' ‘downriver river’

Chakina River Hwts'a'i Na' ‘brushy creek’

2. Apparent A.p.n. but name not recognized or very disjunct: 7

Golconda Creek Not known Name published in F. H. Moffit (1920).

Shindata Creek Una' Ts'esaas'itggey Na' ‘its creek has white Shindata recorded by USGS in sand creek’ 1932.

3. Translation or partial translation of A.p.n.: 36

Dog Creek i'ke Na' ‘dogs’ creek’

Bone Creek C'eggaan' Ts'enn' Na' ‘arm bone creek’

Dry Tok Creek Una’ Tuu Koley Na’ ‘its creek has no water creek’

4. Anglicization of A.p.n. (coincidental similarity) : 4

St. Anne Lake Ts'edael Bene' ‘? lake’

Notch Creek UT: Nach’ety ‘game trail crosses’

Goose Creek Gguus Kulaen Na' ‘celery exists creek’

5. Ahtna-influenced names, extended from A. language names: 35

Nutzotin Dze Cene ‘base of mountains’ Allen 1887 UT term niits’ Mountains hut’iin ‘people from upriver’

10 Dadina Lake Cedidzaasi Bene' ‘bushy tail lake’

6. Personal name of Ahtna or other Athabascan person applied to a feature: 20 (+ others)

Ewan Lake iidzi Bene’, aedzi ‘soil lake’ Bene’

Old Man Lake Bendaes Bene' ‘shallows lake lake’ The two periods in which most Ahtna-origin names appeared on USGS maps were 1898 to 1910 and 1932 to 1955. Translations or partial translations of Ahtna names confirm aspects of the Ahtna name system. While personal names are uncommon among the Ahtna-language place names, features that are named for Ahtna people, such as Ewan Lake or Old Man Lake, provide recognition of Ahtna people on the landscape.

It is also possible to assemble elaborate philological evidence from sources on historic and orally- obtained names from Ahtna speakers to demonstrate the antiquity of some of the regional trail systems. Table 3 lists sources on Native place names and main trails on the major route between the Copper River and Knik Arm, which was along the Tazlina River and Matanuska River (essentially the route of the Glenn Highway). This list is not complete, but most of these sources can be examined in Kari and Fall 2003 or in this report. These sources can be grouped into categories: names in journal entries (1, 3), Native-drawn sketch maps (2, 4, 8), early historic sketch maps (6, 9), early professional topographic maps (5, 7), a site report with routes and names (11), narratives with names (12, 14), and consolidated native-language place names lists (13, 15, 16), and (10) Orth’s gazeteer of Alaska place names.

Table 3. Chronology of sources pertaining to Matanuska River & Tazlina Lake-River trails source reference source profile 1. Tarkhanov 1797 Black 2008:79 sequence of 6 place names 2. Wrangell 1839 Kari & Fall:85-87 map with 3,4 names, MR & other trails indicated 3. Sereberinikoff 1848 Allen 1887:20-21 S. & party of 11 reach Tazlina L from CR 4. Allen 1885 Kari & Fall 2003:310 sketch map Taral to Knik Arm along MR 5. Mendenhall 1898 Kari & Fall 2003:289, 296 fine topographic map, trails & sites on MR 6. Johnston & Herning 1899 Kari & Fall 2003:275 trails up, off MR 7. Meiklejohn 1900 Kari & Fall 2003:291 fine topographic map, trails & sites 8. Moffit 1904 Kari & Fall 2003:231 sketch map with names, Knik to upper Susitna R 9. Herning 1906 Kari & Fall 2003:306 sketch map Knik to CR, MR trail and others 10. Orth 1967 many cited in this report citations on ca. 30 MR, TR names & sources 11. various speakers de Laguna 1970 :22-23 dozen names, route descriptions, sources 12. Jim Tyone 1978 Kari & Fall 2003:223-25 text from 1912, & 37 names along MR trail 13.various speakers Kari 1983 238 Ahtna names on Mat. R and Tazlina R 14. Johnny Shaginoff 1985 Kari & Fall 2003:257 text, 70 place names on MR and Talkeetna Mts 15. various speakers Kari & Fall 2003:288-311 121 place names in Ahtna and Dena’ina on MR 16. various speakers Kari 2008 258 Ahtna names on Mat. R and Tazlina R

There is some overlap and repetition between all of these sources on sequences of Ahtna or Dena’ina names, on bilingual place names, on routes and intersecting trails. Such repeated confirmation via geographic particularism is the hallmark of shared Athabascan geographic knowledge–foot travel is facilitated by the memorization of place names and vice versa. Such reconfirmation is typical of other Athabascan languages where there has been systematic geographic research and is a measure of the conservative nature of the verbally transmitted Athabascan place names system. There are many reasons why we can claim that the large portion of Ahtna place names recorded in the 20th

11 century date from antiquity, perhaps even to the original occupation and spread of the Athabascans throughout Copper River Basin.

2. Place name methodological issues

The complexity of Native language place names research tends to be underestimated. Systematic ethnogeographic research involves a combination of linguistic, ethnographic, philological, and historical methods, as well as a mapping component. There can be numerous sources of place names data for one region, with inconsistent spellings and locations. A place names list from one expert speaker can vary in authoritativeness as he moves from an area he knows intimately, to one that he knows from hearsay. In my view the integrity of the Native language place names data is more difficult to maintain than are data in other sub-areas of dictionary work (e.g., anatomy, plants, verbs, morphology, etc.) The most fundamental axiom in place names research is that all the names and geographic locations for the language area must be consolidated. Unless this axiom has been attended to, the accuracy of the place names data can be seriously compromised. (See Kari and Fall 2003:41-44 for detailed discussion of methods.)

My preference for mapping is the use of marked-up laminated maps, which can be revised in the course of review. I have seen problems surrounding the computerized mapping of indigenous place names. If data transmission data onto GIS software only goes in one direction, there will be problems with detection of errors and making revisions. Often there are no protocols for making updates and corrections. The computer technician using the GIS software must be expert in the features of the software, and he also must be familiar with the geographic area in order to navigate through maps efficiently. There are other complications in producin g place names maps with the ARC GIS software, such as control over micro-typography for the placement of place names, and the considerable expense of the wide-bay printers and the production of color maps.

The Ahtna names were updated numerous times first on handwritten and typed lists by drainage, then on computer files and print outs. In recent years they have been in an Access data base. The numbering of names is referred to as a “sequence number.” This is an essential device for maintaining approximate ordering for features within a drainage after the place names have been brought into a data base. The GIS mapping with Ahtna names began in 2004 with the help of the staff at BLM in Glennallen and has now moved over to the Ahtna Inc. Lands Dept. with the help of Ezekial Beye, formerly of Ahtna Inc. In August of 2008 Beye and I did a sequential review of the records and maps. We made numerous changes and corrections in names and locations, and eliminated unintended duplicates. Later in 2008 Gary Holton at ANLC and I made some improve- ments that can point toward standardization in formats for other Alaska place names research and mapping efforts. Zeke Beye experimented with some printed place names maps. Ahtna Lands Dept. now has the materials to produce place names maps for local areas for local review and circulation. We plan to have periodic updates of the Ahtna names and locations. To my knowledge this is the first time that this level of accuracy has been achieved in Alaska for place names in a traditional language area.

There are numerous issues with the mapping of Ahtna place names, as would be typical of a detailed geographic name corpus for such a large area. In some cases, speakers such as Shem Pete or Andy Brown reported on names they knew only from hearsay. Zeke Beye and I experimented with a confidence level for the mapping, but this has not been done consistently. Since all of the features

12 have been mapped as points and since the lists lack this confidence ranking, the latitude-longitude markings should be seen as approximate. About 96 features have no lat./lon. and are yet unmapped. There are ten features marked as n.k. or as unmappable, but nevertheless such names need to be on record and assigned to a drainage section. Table 4 is a summary of the Ahtna place names data by drainage at three stages of this project, the 1983 report, in 2004 and in late 2008. See Map 6, the reference map to these sections.

Table 4. Summary of Ahtna Place Names Data by drainage in 1983, 2004 and 2008 Sec. Drainage No. of nearby federally recognized tribe names 0 Extraterritorial and regional 13/23/30 1 Copper River, mouth to Chitina 66/90/97 Chitina Traditional Village, Native Village of Eyak 2 Chitina River 54/72/88 Chitina Traditional Village 3 Copper River above Chitina to Klutina 63/166/169 Chitina Traditional Village, Native Village of River Klutikaah 4 Tonsina River 53/68/71 Chitina Traditional Village 5 Klutina River 73/78/89 Native Village of Klutikaah 6 Copper River, Klutina River to Tazlina R 11/14/17 TazlinaVillage Council, NativeVillage of Klutikaah 7 Tazlina River 93/129/140 Tazlina Village Council 8 Matanuska River 85/138/141 Chickaloon Village Traditional Council 9 Copper River, Tazlina River to Gulkana R 27/35/39 Tazlina Village Council, Gulkana Village mouth 10 Gulkana River 202/314/345 Gulkana Village 11 Delta River 24/37/48 Gulkana Village 12 Copper River, Gulkana to Gakona R & 36/47/47 Gulkana Village, Native Village of Gakona up Gakona R 13 Copper River, Gakona River to 59/98/116 Native Village of Gakona, Chees-na Tribal Chistochina R & up Chistochina R Council 14 Copper River, Chistochina to Slana River 35/49/58 Chees-na Tribal Council 15 Slana River 84/126/131 Mentasta Lake Tribal Council 16 Tok River 51/77/81 Mentasta Lake Tribal Council 17 Upper Copper River above Slana R 36/52/55 Mentasta Lake Tribal Council 18 Nabesna River, Chisana River, White River 30/35/56 Mentasta Lake Tribal Council, Northway Village 19 Nenana River, Nenana to headwaters 42/112/118 Native Village of Cantwell 20 Susitna River, headwaters to Devil Canyon 180/247/274 Native Village of Cantwell Totals: 1983 report: 1383 as of Dec. 2003: 2007; as of Oct. 2004: 2106 as of Dec. 2008: 2208 with changes in location; changes in spelling & translations; duplicates eliminated; Nabesna R additions

3. Policies on dialects, translations and annotations of place names

There is variation in the ways that place names are pronounced by Ahtna speakers according to the rules of the dialects. See the summaries of the dialect patterns in Kari 1990:20-29. In these lists the names are usually written as in the dialect area of that region, or in the fullest and most conservative form, and we limit listing out dialect-specific variants. Thus the name for Paxson Lake is presented in its most conservative form: Tak’ats’ Bene’ ‘cold water lake’. In the dialects we find these variants: W = Tak’ats’ Bene’, CL = Tak’a’s Bene’, U or M = Tak’ats Menn’. For the Upper or Mentasta dialect we use the regular conventions of the Ahtna writing system. An Upper Ahtna name

13 spelled as Tsezii Tatinitaan would be said Tsezii Tatinit, with a final nasalized vowel, and a name written with -nn such as Siz’aann has a final syllable that is not nasalized. See Kari (op. cit.) for more details on Ahtna dialect patterns.

For the larger Ahtna language area the best illustration of bilingual naming and overlapping band territories is the upper Nabesna River area and the names reported by Jack John Justin and Fred John. The Nabesna language is a distinct dialect of Upper Tanana. Most of the Upper Ahtna and Nabesna speakers have been fully bilingual, and all of the mutually known features have dual names. We have included some of the more well known place names in the upper Nabesna area, especially those from Reckord 1983 that were reported mainly by residents at Chistochina. The source languages are very distinct, and the dual names look and sound distinct, but are in fact always cognate names: e.g. Upper Ahtna: Tsec’eggodi Na’ vs. Nabesna Upper Tanana: Tthich’ehgodi Niig, ‘he is chipping rocks stream’. Each name conforms to the sound correspondences of its language. The sources for Nabesna names are narratives by John and Justin in Kari 1986, Reckord 1983, and Kari 1997, as well as Kari’s field notes with Justin.

The literal translation policy for the Ahtna place names strives for consistency. Literal translations for names are given within single quotes. Within double quotes are some interpretive translations or folk etymologies by Ahtna speakers. ‘?...’ at the beginning of the literal translation indicates a speculative translation. Some names are ambiguous and given two translations. Also marked is ellipsis, or a missing stem in place names; where the literal translation is approximate or speculative: ‘....~’ as in Bendiilna’ Mendeltna Creek ‘lake flows ~ creek’, where it seems that the stem -len ‘current flows’ got lopped off of the name. The omega symbol () is for opaque morphemes or stems that are not translatable by speakers and that do not seem to match with other morphemes in Ahtna inventory. In a name Ts'en Dabaas Na', Ts'endabaas Na’ ‘bone  creek’ or ‘from  creek,’ dabaas looks like a verb, but it does not match other verb stems, and we have no other information on it. In contrast, a name Ts’isos Na’ is treated as of questionable meaning, ‘? stream’ because there are possible matching morphemes (possibly ‘straight black bear’) although no specific meaning was given for the name. Since we have tried to be consistent, it is possible to track the literal translations for analyzability, and this is summarized in Table 5. It is notable that 89.5% of the place names in this report are readily translated and can be grouped within the Ahtna lexicon (as presented in Kari 1990). As we whittle down the corpus in terms of degrees of analyzability, it is really striking that the Ahtna names are 98% analyzable to some degree. This degree of clarity, or transparent analyzability, as we mention in Sec. 4.7, is typical of Athabascan languages, and is an ubiquitous and dramatic demonstration of the Athabascan territorial ethos. Table 5. Analyzability of Ahtna place names type Ahtna example location total none possible, name not “Tauganye” place on Wrangell map 12/ .05% known opaque names  (part or C’iidze’ Na’, McLaren River no other use or meaning, stem does not 29 / 1.3% all of name uncertain) C’ezaeni hill by Crosswind L match with others ’Atna’ Copper River folk etymologies (often Keghiil Na’ Gilahina River ‘“steps against place” 18 / .08% from single speaker) stream’ speculative (with ?) et'aes island on Ewan Lake ‘?larch’ in Middle 110 / 4.9% Tanana

14 ellipsis in names Bendiil Bene’, Bendiilden -diil- not meaningful < ben dilen bene’ 38 /1.76% (truncated, meanings Tazlina Lake -ti- not meaningful, similar to tuu inferred) Tl’atina’ Klutina Lake ‘water’ homophonous, ambig- K’et’aeni Mt. Wrangell ? morphemes clear, but 67 / 3% uous, variant names meaning is not (multiple meanings) K’aasi Na’ Oshetna River ‘quiver river’ or ‘jagged peak river’ fully analyzable names: 1976 89.5% total fully, partially analyzable: 2167 (out of 2208) 98.2%

A fascinating demonstration of the purity of the Ahtna name corpus is in one of the rare Ahtna borrowed place names. Bayliisde is the name for the town of Valdez (from Spanish but pronounced in Alaska as val-DEEZ), a name that dates from 1790. This name has been reshaped to sound like a regular Ahtna place name. With the enclitic -de ‘place of, where’ it is treated as if this is a form of a verb theme ‘handle pl. objects’ that has undergone five or six levels of derivations, yielding bayliisde ‘where s/he customarily puts things by him.’ The underlying form of such as verb would be: /b+gha#y+d+0+lae+s+den/, 3SUB-by-3OBJ-QUAL-CLAS-handle pl.-CUST-place of

The 2008 version of Ahtna Place Names Lists is a concise presentation of the Ahtna place names network. The annotations about names are confined to citations of sources for the names and some brief comments about meanings, but extended annotations about places and sites are not provided. Of course, a fine project would be to produce a nicely illustrated and annotated Ahtna geography.

4.0 Principle features of Ahtna geographic names

The Ahtna place names lists are the most comprehensive set of geographic data for any Alaska Native language. We can examine in some detail the fundamental principles of what is an extremely profound and flexible geographic system that has facilitated Ahtna travel and land use since antiquity. We can begin to identify how specific features of Ahtna geographic names allow speakers to name, classify, and navigate the landscape. The analysis of the Ahtna geography has been directed toward place name content, distribution and structure of Ahtna place names. Also there are numerous socio-cultural manifestations of Ahtna geography. Altogether these constitute the schema that structure Ahtna thought about landscape and spatial cognition.

Furthermore, the Ahtna geographic system is representative of Athabascan languages in the north. In Ahtna and in other Athabascan languages place names are only one feature of a large battery of linguistic markers that are encoded for space and orientation. Other linguistic markers include riverine directionals, postpositions for space and direction, and various verbal prefixes and suffixes that mark directions and areas. The Athabascan landscape and geography system is highly functional and informative. Most of the place names describe the natural environment or are a mix of cultural activities and metaphors. Various features of the system facilitate memorization and efficient foot- travel. There is a noticeable “Athabascan generative geography capacity.” For example, names can occur in clusters that facilitate memorization. We summarize these interrelated principles in Sec. 4.1-7.

15 4.1 Place name content

As we noted above in Table 5, over 89% of the Ahtna place names have straight-forward meanings, and an astounding 98% of the are fully or partially analyzable. The names emphasize the natural history, they can also signal a myriad of details about access or resources. The largest portion of Ahtna names (about 75%) are for natural history such as hydrology, landforms and rocks, and various biota (vegetation, fauna). The portion is similar to that of Dena’ina (Kari and Fall 2003:40). A smaller portion of the names (about 15%) are for human activities (subsistence places, material culture, and human built structures, trails or human events). Also references to weather phenomena (ice, low water, wind) are fairly uncommon. There are only a few loan words in Ahtna place names. As for what is referred to as “the works of man”, other than the designations of trails, and subsistence harvest locations or technologies, there are only few names that refer to specific events (ten or so). Names like Sc’aen C’anizetde ‘where a child drowned’ (for an incident that occurred in the 1930s) are uncommon. Also uncommon are obviously post-contact names (i.e., after the 1880s).

Ahtna and Alaska Athabascan cosmography and sense of the sacred deserve more attention and discussion. Kari and Tuttle 2005:16-19 has preliminary discussion of Ahtna valued and sacred places. Overt and covert sacred gestures are embedded throughout Athabascan beliefs and customs, however, it appears that gods or supernatural beings are very rarely designated in place names. It is also noteworthy that there is very little mythic association in the Ahtna place names. There are two names that appear to be mythic, but, we find that these two places lack known myths. There are a few personal names in the Ahtna place names and only 2 or 3 of these appear to be commemorative. With two or three exceptions, sacred or commemorative activity are not overtly flagged in Ahtna place names. It is clear that avoidance behavior and aversion toward self-aggrandizement or cultural grandiosity has affected the content of the Ahtna place names. The less common patterns are revealing in an of themselves, and some of these are presented below in Table 6.

Table 6. Some patterns of Ahtna place name content unrecognized or no “Tauganye” place on Wrangell 1839 map 13 recorded Ahtna p.n. “Golconda Creek” map namefor N Fork Bremner R transliterated names [Tsaa K’ae] ‘cache place’ 7 borrowed place Bayliisde <- Valdez ‘where he cust. put things by 6 names him’ names with loan Xoos Ghadl Zdlaade ‘where there are horse wagons’ 6 words (rare) religious/ritualisitc/ Uti’sneldziits’i The Peninsula ‘the one we dance out to’ 4 commemorative Tsedi Kulaenden (place named Copper Village ‘where copper exists’ (very rare) for first discovery of copper) personal names VERB+ta’, NOUN ta’ hill at DNR bldg ‘father of rags is standing 8 (all & others Hwc’ele’ Ta’ Ik’e upon it’ (personal name of Doc Billum) males) Ngedzeni historic names Hwnax Nakey’tnelghelden miners’ site on Klutina Lake ‘where logs go 6 (clearly post-contact, around’ rare) mythic (rare) Saghani Ggaay Dyiseni Bese’ point on N bank of Copper River ‘one that 2 raven made bank’

16 incidents Sc’aen C’anizetde 6 mi. on S Dry Creek trail, ‘where a child 10 (uncommon) drowned’ K’a’ Tinighel Bene’ lake in Upper Tonsina, ‘arrow dropped in water lake’ weather events or ts’ibaay Mt. Watana S of Sustina River ‘whirlwind’ uncommon patterns longest name Saghani Ggaay Detl’uule’ ‘where raven forgot his rope glacier’ Nanelna’ Luu’ Wernicke Glacier

There is still more to understand about repetition in Ahtna and Alaska Athabascan place names. There is routine repetition in names such ‘yellow water stream,’ ‘water lily lake’, ‘big lake’, ‘round lake,’ ‘narrow lake’, However, both 753: Paxson Lake and 1594: Lake Louise, the large lakes at the heads of the two main drainages have the same Ahtna name: Sasnuu’ Bene’ ‘sand island lake.’ such a pair of names is striking and implies that they were intentionally or strategically named as such. There are some unique-sounding names that are repeated for distant places such as Cedidzaasi ‘brushy tail’ for 244, 245, a stream and lake below Dadina River and for 965.1, a location near Gakona.

4.2 Place name distribution

Interesting issues in Ahtna and Athabascan place name distribution remain unexplored. For convenience, as is shown above in Map 2 in our GIS mapping all places have beean tre ted as points. However, if we had tried to list out all of the more predictable place names (as in Table 8 below for example for stream mouth, stream headwaters, uplands), another 800 or more names could be added. Also if the names are carefully plotted as points vs. lines, or as large and small polygons, we would see how remarkably comprehensive the naming system is.

The Ahtna band territories show a recurrent pattern: a) a segment of the main stem of the Copper River; and b) and upland lake districts that are mostly west and north of the Copper River (see Reckord 1983 for further discussion). Also there is significant logistical information embedded in the Ahtna name system about distances between winter settlements, summer fish camps, game lookouts, fall hunting camps, fall and spring fisheries.

By our count there are about 445 named features along the main stem of the Copper River– streams, stream mouths, clearings and flats, and nearby bluffs and hills. Almost every side-stream of any size upstream of Bremner River has a documented Ahtna place name. All the larger tributaries have full nomenclature for their side streams. The order of these tributaries is the key to the organization of the geography. Also areas of hindrance that are difficult to access have fewer names, such as sections of the Copper River on the Wrangell Mountains side of the Copper River. The area of the densest coverage of Ahtna names is the lake-studded basin that includes the drainages north of Tazlina River-Tazlina Lake, west of the Copper River between Tazlina River and lower Gulkana River and the West Fork of the Gulkana River, and the Lake Louise-Tyone Lake area. In this region there are abut 505 recorded lace names or about 23% of the corpus. Scored by the low ridge Nen’ Yese’ ‘land ridge’ (which was an ancient beach to Glacial Lake Ahtna), this is the logistical hub of the language area, and it is significant this is the only truly navigable subdistrict of the language area for traditional birchbark canoes.

17 There is a principle that works against excessive proliferation of names. Streams have a single name for the whole drainage, with linked features such as lakes often grouped with the main name. We also note in Table 7 below some of the common Ahtna landscape terms are almost never used in proper place names. The Ahtna do not have high density, large-scale naming for rocks, sloughs or specific eddies on the Copper River. Another issue in name density and distribution is the “course grained” effect of the names. A name for a hill or ridge is an informal polygon of the outer contours of the feature. Where the environment may have changed due to an event such as glacial outwash at a river mouth, the name system would simply adapt to the changes. Also we discuss below in Sec. 4.5 how combinations of specifics + generics and riverine directionals + basic place names create sets of named features can be easily learned and recognized.

4.3 Place name structure

Ahtna has a well-defined domain of landscape and geographic terminology. There are many commonly used mono-syllabic nouns and compound nouns with specific meanings: lake, flat, ridge, hill and so forth. Many of the geographic terms can be classed as ‘areal nouns’, a group of words that ends in a suffix, -e. About 22 these appear as generic terms in binomial place names (shown below in Table 8). Before we summarize the structure of the place names, it is useful to show as in Table 7, the commonly used landscape terms that are rare or non-existent in the geographic names corpus. These scarce patterns seem to be significant.

Table 7. Landscape terms NOT common in Ahtna place names village, settlement kayax, -kayax Dala Kayax site between lakes at head 2 /2 Manker Ck ‘Dala’s village’ house, cabin hwnax Hwnax Ggaay at Jim Tyone’s place ‘small 5/ house’ on a flat surface kaak’e, kaa’a Tl’ogh Kaa’a on upper Manker Ck ‘grass /2 surface’ shoal, low island daes, -daeze’ Mendaes Menn’ Mentasta Lake 4/ 2 ‘shallows-lake lake’ shore, beach baaghe Cen Ce’e Flat W of Dry Creek Village 3 / 2 ‘edge of big flat’ the end of, limits of laaghe K’ay’ Laaghe mountain at head of Upper /3 Susitna R ‘end of the willows’ above treeline hwdaaghe none 0 flank on mountain, ridge -ghak’aay Ughak’aay ’Sngedzeni “Chitina Mt" 2/ ‘someone is standing on its ridge’ slope, side of hill, nen, hwnene Bes Nen bluff near Valdez Ck ‘river bank 3 / 1 mountain or terrace slope’ bluff, ledge, mesa -daa’a, tadaa’a, Tsiis Daa’a ridge W of Long Glacier 3 / 1 tl’adaa’a ‘ochre bluff’ lookout nexk’aedi Naex K’aedi, Nehk’aedi point on Capital 1/ Mt ‘lookout place’ ice ten Ten ’Aaxden Sugarloaf ‘where there is 3/ ice’

18 overflow ice, aufeis ggaet, lggaet Ts’i’ilggaedi Na’ ck into Copper from N 3/ at mi 29. ‘overflow-ice-comes-out ck’ snow on ground tsiitl’ Natsii’ggosden Mount Tiekel ‘where 1/ snow avalanches’ falling snow yaas none 0

Areal nouns like -baaghe ‘shore’ and hwnene, -nene ‘slope’ can compound with many other terms on an ad hoc basis, c’ena’ baaghe, ‘shore of stream’ ben baaghe ‘lake shore’, dghilaay nene ‘mountain slope’, bes nene ‘riverbank slope’. For a distant mountain Ahtna speakers can readily point to the zone above tree-line called hwdaaghe, a slope called hwnene, or a accessible flank on the mountain called -ghak’aay, but these features would not have specific place names. Such ad hoc use of some landscape terms, such as those in Table 7, eliminates the need to call such features by proper place names and contributes to an economical distribution of Ahtna place names.

For Ahtna there are three broad structural patterns in the place names. These patterns are similar in other Alaska Athabascan languages but also have parallels in more distant Athabascan languages, such as Hupa or Navajo. A) about 30% of the Ahtna names are nominalized verbs with the suffixes (y)i or den These are summarized in Table 3-B. B) About 7% of the Ahtna names are binomial postpositional phrases, involving a noun and the common postpositions, ‘on’, ‘by’ and so forth. Also there are binomials NOUN+ ADJECTIVE (usually ‘big’ or ‘small’) These are summarized in Table 3-C and 3-D. C) Over 60% of the names in the Ahtna lists are binomials or trinomials where the head of the phrase is the last term– one of the commonly used generic terms, ‘river’, ‘river mouth’, ‘hill’ and so forth. There are 22 Ahtna generic terms, summarized in three categories, water terms, land terms and cultural terms in Table 3 E1-E3 below.

Table 8 is a synopsis of the basic structural system in the lists of 2208 Ahtna place names. Just about any structural pattern and morpheme can be queried and counted. Also we see in the examples in Table 8 the Athabascan simplex-complex grammatical dichotomy is reflected the name corpus, i.e. the simple structure of nouns and postpositions vs. the complex structure of the verbs.

Table 8. Landscape and Toponymic Structures in Ahtna Symbols: - hyphen indicates possessed form or compound form of noun / left of / = number of “specific” place names; right of / = number of “generic” place names Total number of Ahtna place names: 2208; ** more such names could be generated, increasing the total

geographic term Ahtna term example total A1. Irregular non-canonical names irregular, clearly non- none none Athabascan borrowed place names enmaec Fairbanks 6

A2. Plain monosyllables e.g. Tuu ‘water’, Tl’ogh ‘grass’ none unmodified generics e.g. Dze ‘mountain’, Ben ‘lake’ none a few land features NOUN C'aai ridge W of Amphitheater 5 Mountains ‘snowshoe footstrap’

19 geographic term Ahtna term example total a few land features NOUN+NOUN Xez Ghae Fermi Peak, Mt Haley 17 ‘pus grease’ a few land, water features VERB Ts'ezdaa mt 5330' on S side of Slana R 11 ‘someone is sitting’ B. Common verb suffixes or enclitics in place names: VERB+ENC (without generic) sites, some streams, lakes, -den, de Taghaelden, Taral ‘barrier in water place’ /174 hills: ‘at, where, specific place, place of VERB’ landforms, some water -(y)i Ni’aani Mount O'Neil ‘that which ca./250 features: inanimate relative protrudes’ ca. 200 suffix, ‘that which is VERB’ hills, mts., ridges other suffixes, ‘sg. animate’ -(n)en Ba’ane Ts’ilaaggen Tak’adze’ spring 6 2 mi up Klutina ‘spring of someone-killed- him outside (of CR)’ ‘pl. animate’ -ne Tl’ahwt’aene Kaltenden ck 3 mi up 1 Chetaslina R ‘where the upper Copper River people’s trail ascends’ C. Common areal nouns or postpositions in place names: NOUN + PP or VERB+PP in a region, over an area, tah Ben Tah lakes N of Sanford R ‘among /15 among the lakes’ below, beneath t’aax, t’aa Bes T’aa Paxson site ‘beneath the bank’/12 on, at a place k’e, k’et, k’edi Tes K’et hill by Copper Center airfield /19 ‘on the hill’ by, at, near gha K’ey Tsaaygha Hogan Hill ‘by the small /24 birch’ along, the distance of, ridge ghaay Ses Ghaay ridge at head of Coal Ck /10 ‘end ridge’ base, lower area of cene Dze Cene upper Tanana River area ‘base /8 of the mountains’ tip of, point of cii Nidaeggi Cii middle point on large /15 island on Susitna Lake ‘objects dropped to a place point’ cavity, hole, depression, place k’ae, k’aet Tez’aani K’ae near mouth of East Fork /28 Chistochina R ‘fishtrap place’ between ghatgge Ben K’atgge Tyone Village ‘between the 4 /15 lakes’ D. NOUN+ADJ various water or landforms ce’e ‘large’, ggaay Dghelaay Ce’e Mt. McKinley ‘big /41 ‘small’, ts’aek’e mountain’ ‘narrow’, others E.1. Water features: Common geographic nouns or nominalized verbs stream (primary generic) -na’ Tsedi Na’ Chitina River ‘copper river’ /611 stream, water (secondary) tu’, tuu’ Tsedi Tu’ Chitistone Creek ‘copper 4 /5 water’

20 geographic term Ahtna term example total stream (as specific) una’, c’ena’ Una' Hwdatguugi Na’ ck into Charley 31/ Lake from NW ‘its-ck is-enclosed ck’ stream mouth, confluence -caek’e Tsedi Cae’e mouth of Chitina River 3/116** ‘copper mouth’ headwaters -tl’aa, tl’a- Gguus Kulaen Tl'aa upper Kuskalina 28/33** River ‘celery exists headwaters’ lake ben, -bene’ Kaggos Bene’ lake 4 mi. E of Sourdough 93/277 ‘swan lake’ enclosed lake, pond detaani, deltaande Takaa’a Detaani Pippin Lake ‘enclosed /10 lake on the tundra’ glacier uu, -luu’, -uu’ Tsedi Na’ uu’ Chitina Glacier ‘copper 7 / 63 river glacier’ stream from hillside ts’inieni, ts’edinieni uu T'aa Ts'inieni upper Klutina River /3 ‘one that flows from beneath glacier’ stream into head of lake dinieni, dieni Cen Ce’e Dinieni ck into Moose Ck /9 from Cen Ce’e ‘one-that-flows-in big flat’ lake outlet k’eseh, k’estsiik’e K'eseh Klutina Lake outlet ‘outlet’ 3 /6 straight, broad stream plain or tayen, -tayene’ Deniigi Ts’edle’ Tayene’ Delta River 3/ 15 channel from mouth of Phelan Ck to Black Rapids ‘moose's brush straight-stretch’ confluence of streams idghidlende, edidleni eggedlenden confluence of Long 7/ i’udghidlende Glacier Ck and Kotsina R ‘where streams join’ spring water tak’ats’, -tak’adze’ Tak’ats’ Bene’ Paxson Lake ‘spring- 3/ 4 water lake’ E.2. Land features: Common geographic nouns or nominalized verbs land, country, area, plateau nen’, -nene’ Tatl’ah Nene’ upper Copper River area 7 / 9 ‘headwaters land’ mountain CLW dghelaay, dghilaay, Dghateni Dghilaay Nenana Mountain 5 / 54 -dghelaaye’, -ggalaaye’ ‘stumbling trail mountain’

U or UT dze, -dzele’ Saas Dze mt on Boulder Ck on S 'sand 22 / 23 mountain' rock, boulder, mountain tsae, tse- Tsezen Na’ ck into Butte Ck from Tsezen 42/1 ‘black rock creek'’ rock, stone ts’es, -ts’ese’ Ts’es Detbaey upper Nadina ridge off 26/1 Snider Peak ‘stone that is grey’ hill tes, -tese’ Nay’tsen’staan Tese’ hills at mouth of 47/10 Raft Ck ‘chunk of meat is there hill’ separate hill, isolated hill, z’aani Ts’es Z’aani hill W of Dadina R ‘boulder /12 bluff that is in position’ ridge ses, -yese’, -yedze’ Nen’ Yese’ ridge between Charley Lake 8 /19 and Lake Louise ‘land ridge’ plain, clearing, flat cen, -cene’ Cetakolyaes Cene’ Monahan Flat ‘things 14 /12 (meat) are brought down flat’

21 geographic term Ahtna term example total riverbank bes, -bese’ Tsaani ’Ae Bese’ bluff N of Kotsina 34 / 22 mouth ‘bear trap bank’ point, peninsula sdaa, sda- Sdaa Cii point on E side of middle Tyone 23/2 L ‘tip of the peninsula’ island nuu, -nuu’ T’aghes Nuu island below Tasnuna River 5 /25 mouth ‘cottonwood island’ uplands, upland area of stream ngge’ Stl’aa Na’ Ngge’ upper Slana River area /28** ‘rear river uplands’ sand saas, sas- Saas Daexi bluff NW of Tazlina R bridge 18/ ‘falling sand’ soil, earth, dust, loess aets, -laedze’ Dzuuggi Laedze’ Alice Peak ‘the 7 /4 princess’ soil’ gorge, canyon deyii, dyii, denyii Nanikaeni Dyii canyon on Nenana R at 8 / 2 Slime Ck ‘those (rocks) which fell across canyon’ E.3. Cultural or man-utilized features: common geographic noun roots or nominalized verbs trail tene, teni Hwtsii K’ae Tene trail to weir site at 1/42 mi.149 ‘trail to bridge place’ trail extends tinitaan (vb.) Uk’ese Natinitaan Bene’ Monsoon Lake /32 ‘trail-crosses its-outlet lake’ l+ten (vb.) Tl’ahwt’aene Kaltenden ck 3 mi up /8 Chetaslina R ‘where the upper Copper River people’s trail ascends’ home of, residence of -ak’ae U’e Sc’eldii Ta’ Ak’ae Eskalita’s camp /6 at mouth of Tebay R pass, portage -tates (CLW), ates (U) Tatitl’aa Tates Thompson Pass ‘back /20** water pass’

Thus two dimensions are strongly represented in every Ahtna place name. The specific names are highly analyzable and informative, and there is a rich array of generic terms and basic structural patterns for classifying the landscape. The first row in Table 8 may be one of the most important facts about the Ahtna place names, there are no (zero!) irregular, odd-looking, non- canonical place names.

4.4 The riverine directional system

The riverine directional system is ubiquitous in Ahtna just as it is in the other Northern Athabascan languages. The Northern Athabascan riverine directionals add a truly elaborate dimension above and beyond common cross-linguistic categories like postpositions, areal nouns, or deictics. The importance of the directionals is seen when they are used in concert with place names, verbal derivation for space and path, and other systems. The directionals can be used in indoor and outdoor settings. The over-riding influence of the directionals should be researchable through the study of texts as well as through gesture and body-language studies in areas where the major-rivers have totally different geographic axes such as the Copper River (that flows in an arc north to south) versus the Tanana River (that flows east to west). The riverine element in

22 Ahtna and Alaska Athabascan is so pervasive that it constitutes an organizing semantic template or “semplate” in terms of the semantic theory of Levinson and Burenholdt 2008. In Table 9A we show the riverine directionals system as a distinct word category, with prefixes and suffixes applying to the set of nine roots. In 9B we show how many of the riverine directional concepts are also present in the verb complex as derivational strings. Five of the nine roots are ‘riverine.’ In Alaska Athabascan languages the terms for ‘up vertically’ and ‘down vertically’ are embedded in the directional system, and not in the postposition system.

Table 9. Ahtna riverine directional structure 9A. meanings 9 roots 5 prefixes 5 or 6 suffixed forms -0, -xu, -t, -dze’, -ts’en, di in, to downstream daa’a ’u- ‘far’ -daa’a, -daaxe, -daat, -daadze’, daandi in, to upstream ne’ da- ‘close’ -n’e, -nuuxe, -niit, niidze’, niindi uplands, upland area, from ngge’ na- ‘intermediate’ -ngge’, -nggu, nggat, -nggadze’, the river -nggandi

lowlands, toward the river tsene ka- ‘adjacent, next’ -tsen, -tsene, tsiit, tsiidze’, tsiindi across naan P+gha ‘in relation to’ -naane, naaxe, naadze’, naandi beyond, other side ’ane’ -’ane’, -’aaxe, -’aat, -’aadze’, -’aadi forward, ahead, front, to nse’ -nse, nse’, -nsghu, -nset, -nsedze’, perimeter -sdii down igge’, yax -ygge’, -yggu, -yggat, -yggadze up tgge’, dak -tgge’, -tggu, -tggat, -ggadi 9B. Derivational verb prefix strings with riverine & directional meanings (Kari 1990:638-48) ‘up river, extending, going upriver’ ko+ce#d+i (0 mom) ‘off from shore’ ni+c’a# (n mom) ‘up, ascending’ da# (ss mom) ‘down, downstream’ ko+da#d+i (i mom) ‘up vertically, standing up’ dak/tgge’ n#(s rev) ‘descending to water, to lowland’ ko+tsi#d+i (i mom) ‘crossing, across’ +ke# (n mom) ‘crossing, across’ na#(n mom) ‘up vertically’ ni+c’a#i (0 mom) ‘up from shore’ ta# (ss mom) ‘downriver, down on the river’ s# (gh mom)

In Ahtna narratives directionals are commonly used along with place names to triangulate locations and directions with the named place. It is especially interesting to see the automatic way in which expert Ahtna speakers contrast the main drainage with the large tributaries when they list place in narratives. During the same recording session with Chief Jim McKinley in January of 1981 Jim summarized with brilliant detail 70 major Ahtna village sites along the Copper River for 27:47 min. Next in a separate segment he mentioned 48 place names going up the Klutina River for about 17 min. Here are two excerpts from each segment with the contrasting ‘upstream’ vs. ‘upland’ with regular directionals marked in italics, and one directional place name in bold italics. During these two narrative segments, about 55 minutes in length, Jim is completely consistent in the contrastive uses of ‘upstream’ vs. ‘upland’.

23 a) ‘upstream’ order along the Copper River Duu yet kanii k’a xona, yet kanii xona, T’aghes Tah, T’aghes Tah dae’ hwdi’aan see, /There then, the next place upstream, then is ‘among the cottonwoods’, it is named ‘among the cottonwoods’.

T’aghes Tah yet stsiye ghida’. /My grandfather stayed there at ‘among the cottonwoods’ [Wood Camp village site] b) ‘upland’ order along the Klutina River Cu little bidze’ nahwgholnic you know. /Let me tell a little bit more.

Tl’atina’ Ngge’ gha. /about the ‘rear water river uplands’ [Klutina River Uplands (place name)].

Tl’aticae’e dae’ konii. yii ucae’e yegha ts’ini’aayi gha su /‘rear water mouth’ thus it is said. There at the mouth the current flows out by there.

Tl’aticae’e dae’ konii de. /Thus is said ‘rear water mouth’

Yet kanggat yedu’ Ts’ekul’uu’i Cae’e dae’ konii. /The next place upland of there then is said thus ‘one-that-washes-out mouth’.

The directionals are flexible, are used both extemporaneously and in place names and in various other vocabulary items. They are three-dimensional, and can be applied at any level of scale–to local points, to nearby or to far away regions. Place names that are formed with riverine directionals are summarized in the following section and in Table 10.

4.5 Place name clusters and the Ahtna “Generative Geography Capacity”

Steve Levinson in his landmark book Space in Language and Cognition (2003:69) makes the point “there are possibilities of generative systems of place names which as far as we know, are never exploited in societies of simple technology.” Perhaps by “simple technology” Levinson would refer to a hunter-gather economy as practiced by the Ahtna and other Northern Athabascans. There is a clear generative geography capacity to the Ahtna geographic system, and these features are similar in all Alaskan Athabascan languages and to a lesser extent in distant Athabascan language such as Hupa and Navajo. There seem to be at least two intersecting sets of principles or “ground rules” that contribute to the “Athabascan Generative Geography Capacity.” Further research on Ahtna and other Athabascan geographic names can clarify more features of this capacity, the sum of which make the geographic system learnable and functional. Streams and landforms are treated as natural fractals, shapes that can be subdivided into parts. there are a couple of patterns that generate derived place names for parts of the geography. The most common canonical generative pattern is: SPECIFIC+GENERIC(+GENERIC). This is the compounding of a specific name and the common generic terms shown above in Table 8. There can be clusters of names based upon a name for a stream or for a prominent landform. Most

24 common are name clusters for streams, with a term for the entire stream drainage, and a set of names with the generic terms, perhaps ‘mouth’, ‘lake’, ‘hill,’ ‘river bank,’ ‘headwaters’, ‘glacier’, ‘pass’ or ‘uplands’. This is the default pattern for any drainage of some length.

Another set of principles in Ahtna and Northern Athabascan the generative geography capacity ermploys the riverine directional system. Table 10 summarizes the more common patterns of place names with the directionals. These often appear as pairs and trios of names.

Table 10. Riverine directionals in place names A. Directionals in Place Names 1. DIR (plain) (rare) Danse toward Cook Inlet area, to southwest ‘in the forward direction’ Ba’aaxe Tanana Valley area ‘area outside, beyond’

2. DIR+DIR (uncommon) ’Utggu Daa’a upper end of CR Delta ‘up above downstream’ Dadaa’ Ngge’ plateau W of lower Gulkana river ‘upland of nearby downstream’

3. DIR+i ‘the one in DIR’ (common): These can be seen as a trio of nearby names. Xensdii mt 3350 W of Susitna Lake ‘the next one ahead’ ’Usdii, ’Usdicde Lone Butte ‘the one far ahead’ (an ancient boundary mark) ’Usts’eni Na’ West Fork Gulkana R ‘stream of the one out ahead-side’

4. DIR+GENERIC (common) Ba’aaxe Tuu’ Tanana River ‘outside water’ Hwniidi Ben Butte Lake ‘upstream lake’ Hwdaadi Na’ Dadina River ‘downriver river’: a pair of names Hwniidi Na’ Nadina river ‘upriver river’

5. DIR+ place name (to create sets of names) (common): a trio and a pair Hwtsuugh Naknelyaayi mt 4716 S of Denali Highway ‘lower ridge-that-extends-across’ Henggu Naknelyaayi mt above 4716' ‘upper ridge-that-extends-across’ Naknelyaayi Ghatgge Na’ Rock Ck ‘between extends-across creek’

Daniits’en Tezdlen Bese’ upper Tazlina Bluff ‘upstream side swift-current bank’ Dadaats’en Tezdlen Bese’ lower Tazli na Bluff ‘downstream side swift-current bank’

6. place name+DIR (common) place name + ngge’ uplands of stream or mountain, entire drainage (very common) Tsedi Na’ Ngge’ Chitina River uplands ‘copper river uplands’ Stl’uuli Ngge’ passes over mountain at Carlo Ck ‘braided one uplands’ Dze Ghatgge ’Ane’ Delta River area ‘beyond between the mountains’

I only recently recognized the function of the ngge’ ‘uplands’ term, (6 in Table 10) as I reviewed Ahtna narratives from the1980s by Adam Sanford, Jake Tansy and others. This directional root compounds to form other place names, typically trinomials to indicate the entire area of a stream drainage. The Ahtna use of ngge’ nicely illustrates the scalar flexibility and the generative capacity of Ahtna geography. This is highly productive and can be used for both shorter streams

25 and major tributaries to convey the overall district of the drainage pattern. Some uplands place names may not be common, but they can be used in narratives on an ad hoc basis.

Map 5 illustrates two sets of place names clusters that are near Cantwell, where specific names for two adjacent hills generate into sixteen distinct names. This is a fine example of Jake Tansy’s precise and functional application of the generative capacity of the geographic names.

Map 5. Two sets of Ahtna place names clusters near Cantwell

Set 1 is an elaborate illustration of the SPECIFIC+GENERIC (+GENERIC) type. Yidateni is the westmost hill of the hill-group called Reindeer Hills at the intersection of the Denali and Parks Highways. This hill is the most well-known Ahtna place name in the Cantwell area. Ahtna speakers usually associate this with the verb theme ‘to be cold,’e.g. as ‘cold inside(area).’ The Ahtna name seems to have been reanalyzed from a Lower Tanana name Beyada’ Tena meaning ‘jaw trail.’ However the meaning ‘jaw trail’ is novel to Cantwell Ahtna speakers. According to Jake Tansy, the specific name in Set 1, Yidateni, appears in a cluster of ten compounded names. On Map 5 note how the irregular fractals of the landscape are neatly tied together. Names 3, 5, and 8 are double compounds.

Set 2 with Yaadi T’ox ‘golden eagle nest’, the middle and east Reindeer Hills, is an uncommon pattern: (DIRECTIONAL)+ SPECIFIC (+GENERIC) (+GENERIC). Names 4 and 5 have a precise verbal derivation hwt’aghieni ‘current that flows beneath’ that is appropriate for stream and lake that begin at the base of the ‘upstream golden eagle nest.’ Name 5 is a triple compound.

This “Athabascan Generative Geography Capacity” is very prominent in Ahtna and in other Alaska Athabascan languages where place names are fairly well documented. One can learn a group of specific names for streams or hills and by applying the rules, then travel about and memorize a good section of territory. Furthermore, there is a set of counter-principles that limits name compounding for some landscape classes (‘above timberline,’ ‘shore’ as summarized in Table 7).3 These play a role in maintaining economy and low-density in the sets of names.. Further research, especially with travel narratives, can explore how this generative capacity intersects with the many other directional and spatial grammatical features in Ahtna and Athabascan languages.

4.6 Other socio-cultural features of Ahtna geography

There are numerous Ahtna socio-cultural themes that reference the Ahtna geography. Attitudes toward the reporting of Athabascan place names are cautious and consistently so. Ahtna and other Athabascan names are virtually never coined, but are instead reported as they were learned. Speakers leave features unnamed unless they can report the oral place names (Kari 1989a). Indications of the ways in which Ahtna geography has been carefully taught and memorized are

3 In the 2008 version of the Ahtna place names lists the predictable sets of names are not always listed. For example there are 605 stream names but only116 stream mouth names are listed in the report, and virtually all of the streams can have the predictable mouth name.

26 Map 5. Two sets of Ahtna place name clusters Set No. 1 with Yidateni 1. Yidateni West Reindeer Hill; Cantwell village reanalyzed from `jaw trail' or possibly ‘one that is cold inside’ 2. Yidateni Dyii canyon at Windy ‘jaw trail canyon' 3. Yidateni Dyii Dghilaaye' Panorama Mountain 2 3 `the mountain of jaw trail canyon' 4 4. Yidateni Caek'e mouth of Jack River 5 `mouth of jaw trail' 3 5. Yidateni Caek'e Tes 1 1 hill at mouth of Jack River 5 `mouth of jaw trail hill' 2 4 6. Yidateni Na' Jack River; Cantwell village `jaw trail - creek' 6 10 7. Yidateni Tl'aa Caribou Pass `jaw trail headwaters' 8. Yidateni Tl'aa Bene' Caribou Pass lake 9 `jaw trail headwaters lake' 9. Yidateni Deghilaaye' mountains on both sides of upper Jack R 7 `jaw trail mountain' 8 10. YIDATENI NA’ NGGE’ 9 entire Jack River drainage `jaw trail - creek uplands'

Set No. 2 with Yaadi T’ox 3. Hwniindi Yaadi T'ox 1. Yaadi T'ox, Hwdaandi Yaadi T'ox east Reindeer Hill 4554' middle Reindeer Hill ‘upstream golden eagle nest’ ‘(downstream ) golden eagle nest’ 4. Hwniindi Yaadi T'ox Hwt'aghiłeni 2. (Hwdaandi) Yaadi T'ox Na' stream below E Reindeer Hill upper "Fish Creek", ck from Reindeer Hill ‘the one that flows beneath upstream golden eagle nest’ ‘(downstream) golden eagle nest creek’ 5. Hwniindi Yaadi T'ox Hwt'aghiłeni Ben lake N of 10 mile, at base of east Reindeer Hill ’lake of the one that flows beneath upstream golden eagle nest’

27 in the repetition of names both in the historic records and in the place name lists and sketch maps obtained with Ahtna speakers in the past 30 years (as noted in Table 3).

Ahtna has a set of inherited chief titles, seventeen have been documented, that are derived from place names for some prominent villages. (Kari 1986:15, Simeone and Kari 2002:40-42, Kari and Tuttle 2005:15). These chief titles are unique among the Ahtna and the Upper Inlet Dena’ina, and they imply a certain level of wealth and social stratification. Ethnonyms form a distinct geographic vocabulary domain in Ahtna and throughout Northern Athabascan. Athabas- cans had a sense of the great scope of other Athabascan territories in part through ethnonyms. See the discussion in Kari and Fall:27-29 for the western neighbors, the Upper Inlet Dena’ina. Fish stocks are designated by place names. Simeone and Kari (2002:24) note: “the Ahtna give names to salmon runs that emanate from particular home streams. This is especially well documented for the Upper Ahtna, where for example, twenty-one different salmon runs...have distinct names.”

Songs for the Ahtna and other Athabascan peoples of eastern Alaska subdivide into many genres. Memorial songs are tied to people and place names. The Ahtna lead singers knew how to invoke the proper mood at a potlatch by their presentation of the regional songs. In potlatch oratory in eastern Alaska the visitors would pay respect to an iconic hill or mountain that is in view of the village site. As far as I know Fred John’s short speech to Mentasta Mountain is the only published example of this type of potlatch oratory (Kari 1986:13-14).

Another important type of evidence is from ways in which local ethnogeography is embedded in the oral literature. It is quite noticeable that the Ahtna yenida’a myths with human-animal interaction are ageographic and always lack place names or any local geographic references. For example, the collection of yenida’a stories by Jake Tansy (1982) contain no place names and can be considered as pure fiction. On the other hand, the presence of place names in narratives appears to be the mark of Ahtna non-fiction. The clan-origin stories, the pre-contact incidents reported by Fred and Katie John when two groups of Russian are killed, as well as much earlier regional war incidents (Kari 1986), are non-fiction, prehistoric events that take place at specific places. Notably, there are several famous Ahtna narratives that show that the Ahtna were capable of militant defense of territory when small groups of Russian came into the Copper River in the first 75 years of historic contact (Kari 1986).4 There are only a few geography based myths that take place in the Ahtna territory, such as the formation of Mount Wrangell, K’et’aeni.

We noted in Kari and Tuttle 2005 that features of Ahtna language and oral literature imply very long-term occupation of most the language area by Ahtna or early Athabascan peoples. There is zero evidence that the Ahtna have ever shared the Copper River Basin with any non-Athabascan peoples. One line of evidence is the absence of non-Athabascan influences upon the language (as indicated by our extensive lexical files, including place names, the many narratives). As noted in Kari and Tuttle (2005:19-20) “Two clan-origin locations imply long-term occupation of Copper River Basin by ancestral Ahtna people:”

4 Katie and Fred John of Mentasta told detailed accounts of two incidents in which parties of Rus- sians were killed in Katie John’s ancestral band territory, the Slana-Batzulnetas area. These incidents occurred in in the 1790s and in 1848. Another incident that occurred in Yukon Territory with the Southern Tutchone in the 1830s involved a war captain that came from this same band territory (Kari 1986:69-114).

28 Uti’sneldziits’i, The Peninsula, near the mouth of Tasnuna River. This mountain name means ‘the one we dance out to.’ Here the Naltsiine clan descended from the sky and created the Dits’i’iltsiine or Canyon clan. Nitiil Bene’, South Tangle Lake at the head of the Delta River was the site of the origin of the Caribou Clan, where a human baby was found among caribou. Thus two major clans of opposite moieties originated at two ends of the Copper River Basin. One could argue that the Caribou Clan origin is evocative of Ahtna presence in the Tangle Lakes during ancient times, and that the founding of the Dits’i’iltsiine at The Peninsula implies Ahtna ceremonial investigation of the lower river some time after glacial Lake Ahtna discharged. Note that the Caribou Clan is a Central Alaska Athabascan clan in Ahtna and the Tanana Valley languages, but that only Ahtna among the Alaska Athabascans have a Dits’i’iltsiine or Canyon clan. When Ahtna experts discuss famous sites and events, such as the origin of the Caribou Clan, they assume long-term occupation by Ahtna or other Athabascans, “by people who talk like us” (p.c. Fred Ewan). This geographic symbolism is suggestive of ancient occupation of the entire Copper River drainage by the Ahtna.

There are some excellent examples of Ahtna travel narratives. One section of Kari 1986 has travel narratives by Fred and Katie John, Adam Sanford and Jack John Justin. Jim Tyone gave a nine-minute summary of camping places on trails from Tyone Lake to Knik, a distance of about 170 miles, mentioning 37 place names (Kari and Fall 2003:223-225). Also a brilliant 3 min. 5 sec. text by Jake Tansy summarizes in great detail about 115 miles and nine trail segments (Kari 1999:36-39). A new collection of Ahtna travel narratives will be published next year (Kari and Tuttle to appear). In the “elite travel narratives” we see the orchestration of all of the spatial and orientation features of these languages (Kari 2004). There are numerous issues that deserve further study. For example, the ways in which salient places are selected and ordered; the use of riverine directionals before and after place names, or the differences between name sequences and trails when the weather is cold and frozen or when it is unfrozen.

4.7 Summary: Ahtna and Athabascan Geography as shared knowledge

Northern Athabaskan geography has been a web of inter-connected place names networks. Names with similar structural, semantic and distributional properties are interlinked from language area to language area across huge and continuous bioregions. Multilingualism and intermarriage have been common between people of neighboring Athabascan languages. Shared knowledge of geography has been vital for all aspects of Athabascan travel and land use. The geography has been constantly reinforced by the same core principles that govern geographic naming in neighboring Athabascan languages.

As we address both the commonalities and regional differences in comparative Athabascan geographic knowledge and territoriality, we begin to notice various retentions, archaisms, and regional variations in generic terms and other structural patterns. For the Athabascan languages where there is good place names documentation, such as Ahtna, Upper Tanana, Lower Tanana, and Dena’ina, we can study these similarities and differences in detail. These subtle differences among the Athabascan geographic data can offer insights into the time depth of the Athabascan language family. Here is a recap of the most significant patterns that have been found among the Alaska Athabascan geographic names.

29 a) Throughout the Ahtna language area, and into Upper Tanana to the east or into Dena’ina to the west, the same place names extend across Athabascan language and dialect boundaries. Speakers who are not acquainted share the same name for mutually known features. This pattern of multilingual naming seems to extend across the extended Northern Athabascan territory. b) In Ahtna and in all Athabascan languages there is striking purity in the content of the place names (as noted in Table 5). Names function as signs. The information in place names is analyzable, functional, and informative. This is due to the recurrent use of many common nouns (e.g. water, rock, soil, colors, common flora), the common postpositions, and the many common verb themes. The content of the place names often refers to natural history or to traditional activities. Names that are opaque and unanalyzable still conform to canonical structure. There are very few non-Athabascan elements in large corpora of place names other than a few loan word place names. d) There are principles for what gets named and also for what is left unnamed. There are principles for name distribution as is mentioned in Secs. 4.2-3. Affordance and accessibility of streams and landforms are factored in. The sequencing of named places is emphasized, whether it is the order of sidestreams on the main river or it is the order of landmarks on overland trails. e) There are similar grammatical patterns in place names in Athabascan languages, as in Table 8 for Ahtna. The patterns reflect the dichotomy between simplex nouns (noun + generic and noun+postposition), and complex verbs (nominalized verbs with common verb themes such as ‘current flows,’ ‘linear object extends’, and the common stative-classificatory verbs). It is striking that in distant Athabascan languages even highly complex grammatical derivations are often the same in verbs in place names. f) Streams and landforms are treated as natural fractals, shapes that can be subdivided in parts. As noted in the previous Sec. 4.5 place name compounding creates clusters of name that are both naturalistic and readily memorized. Also note that the Ahtna lists are under-specified; i.e. many predictable names, steam mouths, headwaters, passes have not been listed out. g) The riverine directional system also plays a key role in Northern Athabascan generative geography, as we outlined Tables 9 and 10 and in the Sec. 2.5. The directionals are flexible and can be applied at any level of scale–to local points, to nearby or to far away regions. Place names combine with riverine directional for the purposes of triangulation. The Ahtna use of ngge’ ‘uplands’ to mean an entire drainage (Table 9, no. 6) nicely illustrates the scalar flexibility and the generative capacity of Ahtna geography. h) When comparing sets of names in adjacent Athabascan languages, there are some region- marking traits that are highly recognizeable. There are seven mutually exclusive hydronyms in Northern Athbabascan (Kari 1996a). The hydronymic districts are the most overt and salient pattern we have detected in the Northern Athabascan geographic naming. For example, in eight western Alaska Athabascan (including Ahtna) the term*-na’ is used in streams whereas in four eastern Alaska Athabascan languages *niq’ (lit. ‘on the upstream’) is used, as in Upper Tanana niig, niign or in Tanacross ndííg. Several languages even have primary vs. secondary

30 hydronyms which give a ‘street’ vs. ‘avenue’ effect to stream names, as in Tanacross *ndííg (the common term) and *nda’ (the uncommon term) are used in opposition (Kari 1996a). i) Other noticeable features of Athabascan name inventories include “ensembles” of similar names for features, a topic that deserves more attention. In place names sets we often can detect name ensembles on vegetation, hydrology and rock-lithic themes. There is some patterned repetition that may be strategic naming as in the example of Sasnuu’ Bene’ mentioned above. Some overt boundary-marking place names have also been detected in Alaska (in Koyukon, Dena’ina, Ahtna, Lower Tanana, and Tanacross.

The Ahtna place names network is a demonstration of the ancient and very profound Athabascan geographical system. The profile of the “Athabascan Generative Geography Capacity” that is emerging in Ahtna and other Athabascan languages is a rule-driven territorial ethos that is based upon shared geographical knowledge. This territorial ethos has been passed by the oral tradition for many millennia, allowing Athabascan speakers to classify, learn, name and navigate the landscape.

In another paper (Kari to appear, 2009) I develop the “Athabascan Geolinguistic Conservation Hypothesis”. I suggest that features of the rare Athabascan language structure and the highly similar Athabascan geographic names networks as well as shared boundaries have contributed to linguistic homogeneity and an aversion against change within Athabascan languages. Various levels of time depth for Athabascan expansions or contractions have been masked by the apparent closeness between languages. The compilation and analysis of Athabascan geographic data (place names, landscape lexicon and narratives) can contribute many insights into aspects of this exciting continental and trans-continental prehistory.

5. Future Ahtna geography publications and research

There are numerous activities and publications goals that can be based upon on Ahtna geography. For one thing, we intend to keep the drainage-based files updated and to coordinate with the Ahtna Inc. Lands Dept. on file exchange and mapping. A set of maps on perhaps six or eight large sheets can be planned at a scale that can display most of the Ahtna place names. Such maps can be displayed in local communities. To be sure, there will be errors in place name locations, or perhaps in name variants or name spellings. We intend to collect and make corrections to the files and maps perhaps once a year. Another useful project is to draft a wall map (like Map 1 in a larger format) of the major Ahtna place names, with about 150 or more names for villages, major stream, lakes and land forms. Such a map will be helpful for learning Ahtna names or for presenting the geography to the public.

This version of Ahtna Place Names Lists is concise and extended annotations for places are not provided. There are many important cultural or historical facts about Ahtna territory, the major village sites, places associated with well-known people or that figure in stories. Reckord’s 1983 report is an excellent example of annotations about some of the most famous places in Ahtna territory. An annotated and illustrated Ahtna geography in a format like Shem Pete’s Alaska

31 (Kari and Fall 2003) would be a fine project. For Ahtna there is much more source material from many more speakers than there is for the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina.

We intend for the Ahtna place names data to be available to qualified researchers. It is possible to extend the use of the Ahtna place names data into other spheres that can enhance knowledge of Ahtna lands and history or Athabascan ethnogeography.

Some research issues that can be pursed include: 1) Integration of copper River Basin archaeological site data with the Ahtna place name data. Ben Potter (1996, 2008) has a major data base of site information for Interior Alaska. Also we have already seen through the work of the BLM Glennallen the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park that Ahtna place names can be useful indicators in the search for new sites.

2) Experimentation with more natural GIS mapping of the features with line, and polygons, points, etc.

3) Semantic analysis of the Ahtna place names (for names that refer to flora, hydrology, technology and so forth).

4) Referencing and mapping place names in Ahtna language narratives. For example, a classic 1981 Jim McKinley narrative mentions 70 Ahtna villages along the Copper River.

5) Reconstruction of the Ahtna trail system is relevant to many contemporary issues in this region. By combining trail-related place names and narrative data with place names lists and sketch maps by Ahtna speakers made in the past thirty years, as well as various computer techniques (such as least path analysis), it is possible to reconstruct large portions of the aboriginal Ahtna trail system.

32 References

*Note: Many citations from Orth 1967 on Ahtna-origin names are not included in the following references.

Abercrombie, W. R. 1898. The Copper River and Adjacent Territory. Map in 20th Annual Report. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office. ___. 1900. Alaska 1899, Copper River Exploring Expedition. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office. Allen, Henry T. 1887. Report of an Expedition to the Copper, Tanana, and Koyukuk Rivers in the Territory of Alaska in the Year 1885. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Baker, Shirley. 1928. Letter to Mr. Itscher, Alaska Road Commission. National Archives, Records of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. RG 22, Box 43. Typescript with 14 place names by William Simeone. Black, Lydia. 2008. Commentary on Journal of 1796 by Dmitrii Tarkhanov. In Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka, Russians in Tlingit America, The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804. Ed. by N.M. Dauenhauer, R. Dauenhauer, and L. Black. Seattle:University of Washington Press. Pp.67-90. Bourke, Joseph 1898-1899, [1899 Sketch map of Copper river]. Bourke Papers, Valdez Museum and Historical Archive Association, Valdez, Alaska. Buck, Mildred and James Kari. 1975. Ahtna Noun Dictionary. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. Cohen, Kathryn Koutsky. 1980. History of the Gulkana River. Fairbanks: Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Research and Development. Dall, William H. 1875. Map Showing the distribution of Tribes of Alaska and Adjoining Territory. Dept. of Interior. USGS. Dessauer, Peter F. and David W. Harvey. 1980. An Historical Resource Study of the Valdez Creek Mining District, Alaska, 1977. Anchorage District Office, Bureau of Land Management. Dunn, Robert. 1909. Conquering Our Greatest Volcano. Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Vol 118, March: 497-509. Geohagen, Richard H. 1903. [Ahtna Wordlists]. Ms. Alaska State Historical Library & Alaska Native Language Center. Glenn, Edward F. and William R. Abercrombie. 1899. Reports of Explorations in the Territory of Alaska. U.S. Adjutant General's Office, Military Information Division, Publication 25. War Department Document 102. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Hayes, Charles Willard. 1996. Journal of Charles Willard Hayes, 1891. In Schawtka’s Last Search. Ed. by Arland S. Harris. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Irving, William. 1957. An Archaeological Survey of the Susitna Valley. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 6(l):37-52. Kari, James. 1983. Ahtna Place Names Lists. Fairbanks: Copper River Native Association and Alaska Native Language Center. 105 pp. & 2 wall maps. —. 1986 (editor). Tatl'ahwt'aenn Nenn', The Headwaters People's Country, Narratives of the Upper Ahtna Athabaskans. Fairbanks:Alaska Native Language Center. —. 1989. Some Principles of Alaskan Athabaskan Toponymic Knowledge. In General and Amerindian Ethnolinguistics, In Remembrance of Stanley Newman, ed. by M. R. Key and H. Hoenigswald. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 129-151.

33 — . 1990. Ahtna Athabaskan Dictionary. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. —. 1994. Local vs. Regional Place Naming Conventions in Alaskan Athabaskan Languages. In Proceedings of the twenty-third Western Conference on Linguistics, Vol 6. Ed. by S. Hargus, G McMenamin, and V. Samiaan. Fresno: California State University. Pp. 233-249. —. 1996a. A Preliminary View of Hydronymic Districts in Northern Athabaskan Prehistory. Names 44:253-271. —. 1996b. Names as Signs: the Distribution of ‘Stream’ and ‘Mountain’ in Alaskan Athabaskan. In Athabaskan Language Studies, Essays in Honor of Robert W. Young, ed. by E. Jelinek, S. Midgette, K. Rice, and L. Saxon. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. Pp. 443- 475. — . 1997 Upper Tanana Place Names Lists and Maps. Ms. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. 33 pp. and 10 maps. — . 1999. Draft Final Report: Native Place Names Mapping in Denali National Park and Preserve.National Park Service. —. 2004. A Discussion of Three Ethnogeographic Narratives: Nick Kolyaha (Of Iliamana), Jim McKinley (of Copper Center), Jake Tansy (of Cantwell). Alaska Native Language Center Working Papers No. 4: 172-79. —. 2007. Dena’ina Topical Dictionary. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. — . forthcoming 2009. Ahtna Geographic Names: A Case Study in Athabascan Geographic Knowledge. Paper presented at Landscape in Language, Oct. 28, 2008, Albuquerque & Chinle. Kari, James and James A. Fall. 2003. Shem Pete’s Alaska, The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina. University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks. 2nd edition. Kari, James and Siri Tuttle. 2005. Copper River Native Places, Report on Culturally Important Places to Alaska Native Tribes of Southcentral Alaska, Bureau of Land Management, Glennallen Field Office. ___. (to appear). Yenidan’a ts’en koht’aene tene kulaen de: Since Ancient times there have been the Ahtna People’s Trails. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center.. de Laguna, Frederica. 1970. [Sites in Ahtna Territory.] Ms. Typescript. 46 pp. de Laguna, Frederica and Catharine McClellan.1981. Ahtna. In Handbook of North American In- dians, Vol. 6, Subarctic. Edited by J. Helm. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Pp. 641-64. McKinley, Jim. 2000. Ahtna Village Names Along the Copper River. Ms. Transcribed by James Kari. Tape AT23, rec. on 1/12/81. Mendenhall, W.C. 1898. Reconnaissances from Resurrection Bay to the Tanana River, Note Book No. 1. USGS, Denver, [Dena=ina and Russian vocabulary], ms. 3 pp. — . 1900 A Reconnaissance from Resurrection Bay to the Tanana River, Alaska, in 1898. U..S. Geological Survey Annual Report 20(7):265-340. Mendenhall, Walter C. and Frank C. Schrader. 1903. Mineral Resources of the Mount Wrangell District, Alaska. USGS Professional Paper 15. Washington: US Govt. Printing Office. Moffit, Fred H. 1904. [Map of Matanuska-Susitna rivers, drawn by a local Ahtna-Dena'ina person]. Inside front cover of field notebook 89. U.S.G.S.Archives, Menlo Park. ___. 1912. The Headwater Regions of Gulkana and Susitna Rivers. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 498. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. ___. 1918. The Upper Chitina Valley, Alaska. USGS Bulletin 675. Washington:US Government Printing Office. Orth, Donald J. 1967. Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. Geological Survey Professional Paper 567. United States Geological Survey. Washington: Government Printing Office. Potter, Ben Austin. 1997. A First Approximation of Ahtna Region Archaeology. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. University of Alaska Fairbanks.

34 ___. 2008. Exploratory Models of Intersite Variability in Mid to Late Holocene Central Alaska. Arctic 61:407-425. Powell, Addison. 1900. Report of Addison M. Powell, In Abercrombie, W. R. 1900. Alaska 1899, Copper River Exploring Expedition. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Pp. 131-138. ___. 1901a. Powell’s Map of the Upper Copper River District. Map, Valdez Museum. ___. 1910. Camping and Trailing in Alaska. New York: Wessels & Bissell. Pratt, Kenneth L. 1998. Copper, Trade and Tradition Among the Lower Ahtna of the Chitina River Basin: the Nicholai Era, 1884-1900. Arctic Anthropology 35:77-98. Rebne, Brenda. 2000. Cantwell Village History. Report to National Park Service. Reckord, Holly. 1983. Where Raven Stood: Cultural Resources of the Ahtna Region. Occasional Paper No. 35. Fairbanks: Cooperative Park Studies Unit. Remington, Charles Henry. 1939. A Golden Cross(?), on Trails from the Valdez Glacier. By Copper River Joe. Los Angeles: White-Thompson Publishers. Rohn, Oscar. 1899. A Reconnaissance of the Chitina River and the Skolai Mountains in 1899, Alaska. 21st Annual Report USGS:395-440. Washington: US Govt. Printing Office. ___. 1900. Report of Oscar Rohn on Exploration in the Wrangell Mountain district. In Abercrombie, W. R. 1900. Alaska 1899, Copper River Exploring Expedition. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Pp. 88-94. Simeone, William E. and James Kari. 2002. Traditional Knowledge and Fishing Practices of the Ahtna of Copper River, Alaska. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence Technical Paper No. 270. ___. 2005. The Harvest and Use of Non-salmon Fish Species in the Copper River Basin Office of Subsistence Management Fisheries Resource Monitoring Program. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence. Tansy, Jake. 1982. Hwtsaay Hwt'aene Yenida'a, Legends of the Small Timber People. Ed. by James Kari. Anchorage: NBMDC, 89 pp., reprinted in 1997 by Ahtna Heritage Foundation. West, Constance F. 1973. An Inventory of Trails and Habitation Sites in the Ahtna Region. Unpublished ms. [Also audio tape collection from that project]. Wrangell, Ferdinand von. 1839. Statistische und Ethnographische Nachrichten über die Russischen Besitzungen an der Nordwestküste von Amerika. Ed. by K. E. von Baer. St. Petersburg. Reprinted in 1980 as Russian America: Statistical and Ethnographic Informa- tion. Kingston: Limestone Press. ___. 1980 [1839]. Russian America, Statistical and Ethnographic Information. Translated from the German edition of 1839 by Mary Sadous1d. Richard Pierce, ed. Kingston, Ontario: The Limestone Press.

35 2 18 0-20 16 17 3 1 15 6 14 13 4 13 6 9 12 2008 section numbers: 2008 section numbers: 5 11 10 7 20 8 19 Language Ahtna Place Names Lists: A-W Sections Lists: Names in 1983 Ahtna Place Map 6. Guide to Ahtna place names by drainages and section drainages numbers names by place Ahtna Guide to Map 6.