From Abstract:

Anthropologists sometimes suggest that northeastern Athapaskan‐speaking Indians have distinctive ideas about the relationships among individual autonomy, knowledge, and power. One feature of northeastern Athapaskan culture, as realized among the Bearlake Athapaskans, is the significance attributed to experiential knowledge and primary epistemic reasons in the justification of beliefs. Individual authority is based on and legitimated by primary knowledge. The epistemological and political significance of such knowledge derives from the Bearlake hunter‐gatherer mode of production. 

Access this Resource:

Read this article from JSTOR. 

Read this article from American Ethnologist. 

https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1992.19.3.02a00040

Rushforth, Scott. "The Legitimation of Beliefs in a Hunter‐Gatherer Society: Bearlake Athapaskan knowledge and authority." American Ethnologist 19, no 3 (1992): 483-500.

These two texts provide stories and images describing lifestyles of Sahtú Dene peoples long before they met any Europeans. They describe food, subsistence practices, economy, leadership, travel, hunting and trapping, seasons, gathering, consensus, stories, roles of different age groups, healing, laughter, traditions, dancing, drumming, spirituality, games, and persistence. The books are bilingual, providing both English and Dene versions of each topic.

Access this Resource:

Search for volumes one and two at a local library. 

Dene Resource Book One : Hunting and Gathering

Dene Resource Book Two : Camp Life

Vandermeer, Jane Modeste, Mitsu Oishi, and Fibbie Tatti. The Sahtuotine Long Ago. Two Volumes, Government of the Northwest Territories Department of Education, Yellowknife NT, 1991.

This text can be viewed somewhat as a continuation of Rushforth’s 1984 framework of Sahtú Athapaskan values (capability, generosity, autonomy, and self-control or emotional restraint). In this book, Rushforth and Chisholm unpack these values and discuss them as continuous, throughout time and across generations. 

From description: 

The Bearlake Athapaskan-speaking Indians of Canada's Northwest Territories have valued industriousness, generosity, individual autonomy, and emotional restraint for many generations. They also highly esteem "control" in human thought and behavior. The latter value integrates the others in a coherent framework of moral responsibility that persists as a central feature of Bearlake culture. Rushforth here provides an ethnographic description and analysis of these beliefs and values, which considers their relationship to examples of Bearlake social behavior.

Access this Resource: 

Search for this book in a local library. 

ISBN-13: 9780816512416

Rushforth, Scott and James S. Chisholm. Cultural persistence: Continuity in meaning and moral responsibility among the Bearlake Athapaskans. Tucson and London: The University of Arizona Press, 1991.

Thesis Abstract:

Ascribing a cash value to the products of the bush activities of the Dene of the Northwest Territories of Canada resulted from a need to demonstrate the significance of these activities in the face of increased northern development. The majority of research in valuation studies occurred during the 1970s and was brought on by proposed large-scale development projects such as the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and the James Bay Hydroelectric Project. Utilizing techniques such as the calculation of the cash value of locally available food products that could substitute for food acquired through hunting, fishing, and gathering, researchers were successful in establishing the importance and viability of subsistence production. However, most researches cautioned that the precise results obtained were exceedingly general and approximate, and did not actually represent the total value of bush products to the people using them. 

With the change in the nature of northern development in the 1980s toward the situation where industry is conducted alongside bush-subsistence activities, the objectives of describing the value of bush production altered. Protection of the ability to undertake these activities, often through compensation or mitigative measures, has required detailed descriptions of the nature of the resources in question. Techniques used during the 1970s to arrive at general cash-equivalent values over large areas were inappripriate for compensation purposes, and, importantly, the factors that could not be included in previous calculation ("intangibles" such as cultural and spiritual value, independence, and teaching children bush skills) required inclusion in any scheme seeking to protect bush activities. Some of these values are described in the context of Dene production activities conducted in the spring and summer of 1984. 

An alternative framework for assessing the significance of the bush-subsistence sector of the Dene economy is propsoed in the form of a political economy/mode of production analysis. The merits of this approach are that it enables the inclusion of aspects that were designated as intangibles in previous studies through its attention to the social relations of production; it is concerned in part with the historical background and thus affords a broader perspective than the limited view of previous valuation studies; and it is possible to analytically separate the cash-market sector from the subsistence sector of the Dene economy, in order to examine the interrelationships between the two. 

Finally, the ability of compensative and mitigative measures to ensure the continued ability of the Dene to conduct their way of life is questionable. Due to the tendency of compensative measures to deal only with specific, fxed, and finite assets, compensation is inappropriate for protecting the fluctuating, systemic, and social resoruces at stake in subsitence production. Ultimately, it is only through the political power to control land-use activites on the land that they require that the Dene way of life, along with their ability to guide and change it, may be protected. 

Access this Resource: 

Available from the University of Alberta.

Smith, Shirleen. Value and compensation: subsistence production in the Dene economy, Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. MA Thesis, Anthropology, University of Alberta, 1986. 

Abel presents the stories of Dene prophets, men and women who travel to a different world and return with lessons for humanity. Prophets, shamans, and medicine people existed before European contact, perhaps under different names. Post-contact, missionaries were concerned about Dene spiritual leaders. Prophets began to use the language of Christianity and thus claimed an authority equal to, or greater than, missionaries.

Abstract: 

Throughout the nineteenth century, European and Canadian observers recorded instances of “prophets” arising among the Dene in the northwest. These men and women reported having travelled to the land of the spirits or to heaven, where they learned new rules for human behaviour which would bring about a change of circumstances for the better. Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society and particularly the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were concerned about these events and interpreted them in a variety of ways. Anthropologists and historians have considered similar postcontact events in North American Indian societies as “revitalization movements” and “crisis cults.” These concepts are examined and found somewhat misleading when applied to the Dene prophets. Instead, the activities of these prophets are interpreted as manifestations of traditional cultural responses to the various pressures of life in a harsh northern environment.

Access this Resource: 

doi:10.7202/030954ar

Full text available from Érudit: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/030954ar

Abel, Kerry. “Prophets, Priests and Preachers: Dene Shamans and Christian Missions in the Nineteenth Century.” Historical Papers 21, no. 1 (1986): 211-224.

Broch worked closely with trappers in Fort Good Hope and published on a number of important subjects beyond this comprehensive book, including ethnobotany (in 2009), forest fire fighting (1977), and colour terms (1974).

Access this Resource: 

Search for this book in a local or University library. ISBN: 9780936508689.

Broch, Harald. Woodland Trappers: Hare Indians of Northwestern Canada. Bergen: Dept. of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, 1986.

Lange begins by commenting that her approach considers gender and family to be historically determined, with an eye to the inextricability of gender, family, and means of production and survival. She comments that for the Dene, family structure and work designated within it were essential to survival, and that respect accorded to Dene elders (manifested through many things, including the tradition of arranged marriage) was a significant part of social fabric.

The federal day school system, housing, and social welfare transformed largely nomadic people to sedentary villagers, in the mid 1940s and forwards. “Traditional leadership and social organization has [therefore] been profoundly undermined.” (2-3). Using interpreters, Lange conducted discussions and interviews with 38 people in Délı̨nę (then Fort Franklin) in 1986, seeking to include elders in particular. She spoke with 16 men, 22 women, and about 10 of each group were elders. Lange notes later that one of the interviewees was the child of Louis Ayha, now an elder as well.

The importance of unequivocally obeying elders was emphasized by many of Lange’s interviewees; yet, there was a striking difference in people who had been born before and after 1945 regarding arranged marriages. Younger Dene women at the time of interviews were “as appalled by the thought of arranged marriage as most other young Canadian women,” (8) while elder women appear to think it worked out alright in the end.

Access this Resource: 

Search within the book on Google Books (no full preview available): https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=qKeAAAAAMAAJ

Lange, Lynda. “The Changing Situation of Dene Elders and of Marriage, in the Context of Colonialism: The Experience of Fort Franklin 1945-1985.” In Northern Communities: The Prospects for Empowerment, edited by Gurston Dacks and Kenneth Coates. Edmonton: Boreal Institute for Northern Studies, 1986.

Rushforth contends that Athapaskans have four basic values: (1) individual capability and work ethic, (2) generosity and community support, (3) individual autonomy, and (4) emotional and behavioural control or restraint in social settings (p. 3). He says that the Sahtuot’ine word “seodit’e” (meaning restraint, care, and control) integrates the four above values and presents a distinct system of morality and meaning.

From introduction:

This monograph has two primary purposes. The first is to fill an obvious gap in our knowledge of Northeastern Athapaskan Indians, Dene, by providing an ethnographic account of one of the least known groups—the Bear Lake People. Previous references to Sahtúot’ine have implied that they are either Hare or Dogrib Indians yet, as Cornelius Osgood pointed out in 1931, they have their own identity distinct from both of the latter groups. Accordingly, Bear Lake culture and society merit distinct consideration. In this study I attempt to describe aspects of Bear Lake culture from an internal perspective.

Access this Resource:

Access this monograph through your University on JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16ssp

Rushforth, Scott. “Bear Lake Athapaskan Kinship and Task Group Formation.” Ottawa: Musée National de l'Homme. Collection Mercure. Division d'Ethnologie. Service Canadien d'Ethnologie 96 (1984): 1-184.

Abstract: 

The status of berdache among North American Indians was filled by persons, usually male, who remained members of their biological gender but assumed important social characteristics of the other gender. Concentrated in western and midwestern North America, berdaches were few. The status tended to disappear after Indian societies came under outside political control. Male berdaches, particularly, combined the social roles assigned to both genders. They could dress like women, combine male and female dress, or alternate modes of dress. Their occupational role permitted a combination of male and female work to achieve exceptional productivity. Gender mixing also characterized their sexual behavior; often homosexual, they showed strong tendencies toward a bisexual orientation. Their transformation often required supernatural validation. The ritual roles of male berdaches, like other features of their status, rested on their definition as nonwomen. Traditional explanations of the berdache status seem based upon misunderstanding of its features. It was not a status instituted for homosexuals; homosexuality was a reflex of assuming the status rather than a factor promoting its assumption, and much homosexuality occurred outside it. Nor was it designed for males who feared the warrior role or the male role in general. We suggest that while women could engage in high-prestige male activities, such as warfare, without changing their gender status, they insisted that males who entered the female occupational sphere assume an intermediate gender status.

Access this Resource:

Read the full text on JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2742448

Lanoue writes about the relationship between sibling and conjugal social relationships and responsibilities in Fort Good Hope.

Abstract: 

The Hare Indians of the NWT are characterized in terres of domestic groupe by two conflicting bases: those of the sibling groups which must co-operate, and those of conjugal units. The importance of both types of allegiances naturally creates a degree of tension and imposes care upon the negotiation of allegiances.

Access this Resource:

Access this resource from the University of Saskatchewan Indigenous Studies portal research tool. 

Lanoue, Guy. “Flexibility in Hare social organization.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 1 (1981): 259-276.