The Koyukon are a group of Athabaskan people living in northern Alaska. Their traditional home is along the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers where they subsisted by hunting and trapping for thousands of years. Many Koyukon live in a similar manner today.

The Koyukon language belongs to a widespread family called Athapaskan, spoken by native people scattered throughout northwestern North America and in pockets as far south as California and Arizona.

History

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The first Europeans to enter Koyukon territory were Russians, who came up the Yukon River to Nulato in 1838. When they arrived they found that items such as iron pots, glass beads, cloth apparel, and tobacco had already reached the people through trade with coastal Eskimos. An epidemic of smallpox had preceded them as well, and in subsequent years European diseases would drastically reduce the Koyukon population. Relative isolation persisted along the Koyukuk until 1888, when the Gold Rush brought more than a thousand men to the river. They found little gold, and most left the following winter.

Distant Time

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As the Koyukon reckon it, all things human and natural go back to a time so remote that no one can explain or understand how long ago it really was. However ancient this time may be, its events are recounted accurately and in great detail through a prodigious number of stories.

The stories constitute an oral history of the Koyukon people and their environment, beginning in an age before the present order of existence was established. During this age "the animals were human"–that is, they had human form, they lived in a human society, and they spoke human (Koyukon) language. At some point in the Distant Time certain humans died and were transformed into animal or plant beings, the species that inhabit Koyukon country today. These dreamlike metamorphoses left a residue of human qualities and personality traits in the north-woods creatures.

Taken together, the Distant Time stories describe a primordial world and its transfiguration into modern form. The scope of Distant Time stories ranges from the minute to the cosmological. The explain the beginnings of entities that inhabit the sky—the sun, moon, and aurora. They account for certain weather phenomena, such as thunderstorms, which are the transformed embodiment of a formerly human spirit.

At the end of Distant Time there was a great catastrophe. The entire earth was covered by a flood, and under the Raven's supervision a pair of each species went abroad a raft. These plants and animals survived, but when the flood ended they could no longer behave like people. All the Distant Time humans had been killed, and so Raven recreated people in their present form.

Alaska Native tribes | Native American tribes | Northern Athabaskan languages | Languages of the United States | Indigenous languages of the North American Subarctic

Koyukon | Koyukon | Koyukon