Walking Dena'ina

This volume describes Telaquana Trail, an ancient pathway ascending from the shores of Qizhjeh Vena, Lake Clark, through tundra and timbered valleys, into a high-elevation expanse of rolling tundra and smaller interior lakes nearly 50 miles north of Lake Clark. The pathway is an ancestral corridor used by Native peoples since the beginning of remembered time. The name "Telaquana Trail" first appears in the written record by no later than 1921, when Colonel A.J. Macnab, one of the first...
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This volume describes Telaquana Trail, an ancient pathway ascending from the shores of Qizhjeh Vena, Lake Clark, through tundra and timbered valleys, into a high-elevation expanse of rolling tundra and smaller interior lakes nearly 50 miles north of Lake Clark. The pathway is an ancestral corridor used by Native peoples since the beginning of remembered time. The name "Telaquana Trail" first appears in the written record by no later than 1921, when Colonel A.J. Macnab, one of the first outsiders to visit the area for recreational big game hunting, mentioned taking a canoe to "go down the lake to look for the Telaquana Trail." Stephen Capps of the U.S. Geological Survey traveled and mapped the area in 1929. Producing the first detailed public map of the trail, Capps marks it as the "Native Route." As Dena'ina interviewees will attest, non-Native travel along the trail by this date was ample, but the corridor was still largely conceived of as Native space. Today, as the traces of significantly Anglo-American mining and trapping communities fade from the landscape, Dena'ina people still look to the trail corridor as a touchstone for their shared history and a cosmological axis of their own unique cultural geography. In the homes of Dena'ina people today, the landmarks of the Telaquana Trail are still remembered and the names of these places still spoken.