Who are the First Nations in the sub-Arctic regions?
The Canadian sub arctic is an area of low-lying evergreen forest edged to the north by treeless taiga and frozen tundra. First Nations people that occupied the sub-arctic lived highly mobile lifestyles and hunted the large game herds that traversed these areas. The vast majority of people who inhabited these lands are generally called Athapaskans; they call themselves Dene, meaning ‘the people’. Different Athapaskan groups stretch from interior Alaska, throughout the length of the Mackenzie River, into what is now northern British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and circling parts of Hudson and James Bays. Here, we will focus on the group most involved in the Hudson’s Bay fur trade, the Chipewyan. Another group who played a large part in this trade was the Western Woods Cree, an Algonquin-speaking group who moved into the area historically to take advantage of the growing fur trade. Chipewyan people are the most numerous and widely distributed of the Northern Athapaskans
