The Yellowknives, Yellow Knives, Copper Indians, Red Knives or T'atsaot'ine (Dogrib T’satsąot’ınę) are Aboriginal peoples of Canada, one of the five main groups of the Dene indigenous people who live in the Northwest Territories of Canada. The name, which is also the source for the later community of Yellowknife, derives from the colour of the tools made from copper deposits.
The historic Yellowknives lived north and northeast of the Great Slave Lake (Tinde'e - “Great Lake”) around the Yellowknife River and Yellowknife Bay (Weledeh Cho - “Inconnu River”) and northward along the Coppermine River, northeast to the Back River (Thlewechodyeth or Thlew-ee-choh-desseth - “Great Fish River”) and east to the Thelon River (or Akilinik). They used the major rivers of their traditional land as routes for travel and trade as far east as Hudson's Bay, where early European explorers such as Samuel Hearne encountered them in the 1770s.
The Yellowknives helped lead Hearne through the arctic tundra from Hudson's Bay to the Arctic Ocean in search of the legendary copper deposits that the Yellowknives, or 'Copper Indians', had a hand in mining and trading for tools. Later European explorers who encountered and traded with Copper Indians marked on their maps the 'Yellowknife River,' which drains into Great Slave Lake from headwaters originating near the headwaters of the Coppermine River, a traditional travel corridor. In the early 1800s and 1900s, the Yellowknives were the largest and most powerful tribe in the geographic area.
The Dene people (/ˈdɛneɪ/ DEN-ay) (Dené) are an aboriginal group of First Nations who inhabit the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada. The Dené speak Northern Athabaskan languages. Dene is the common Athabaskan word for "people" (Sapir 1915, p. 558). The term "Dene" has two usages. More commonly, it is used narrowly to refer to the Athabaskan speakers of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada, especially including the Chipewyan (Denesuline), Tlicho (Dogrib), Yellowknives (T'atsaot'ine), Slavey (Deh Gah Got'ine or Deh Cho), and Sahtu (the Eastern group in Jeff Leer's classification; part of the Northwestern Canada group in Keren Rice's classification). But it is sometimes also used to refer to all Northern Athabaskan speakers, who are spread in a wide range all across Alaska and northern Canada. Note that Dene never includes the Pacific Coast Athabaskan or Southern Athabaskan speakers in the continental U.S., despite the fact that the term is used to denote the Athabaskan languages as a whole (the Na-Dene language family). The Southern Athabaskan speakers do, however, refer to themselves with similar words: Diné (Navajo) and Indé (Apache).
A dene, derived from the Old English denu and frequently spelled dean, used to be a common name for a valley, in which sense it is frequently found as a component of English place-names, such as Rottingdean and Ovingdean.
In the English counties of Durham and Northumberland a dene is a steep-sided wooded valley through which a burn runs. Many of the incised valleys cut by small streams that flow off the Durham and Northumberland plateau into the North Sea are given the name Dene, as in Castle Eden Dene and Crimdon Dene in Durham and Jesmond Dene in Tyne and Wear.
The Dene are an aboriginal group of First Nations in northern Canada.
Dene may also refer to:
