The people Velma Wallis has written about in Two Old Women are part of the Gwich’in band that roamed the area around what is now Fort Yukon and Chalkyitsik, one of eleven distinct Athabaskan groups in Alaska. The Gwich’in people are found in the western interior of the state along the Yukon, Porcupine and Tanana rivers.
While each group has its own dialect, many Alaskan Athabaskans not only are able to understand the language of other bands but also share language roots with the Navajo and Apache tribes. All are believed to have descended from Asians who crossed from eastern Siberia into Alaska during an early Ice Age.
The Athabaskans are distributed throughout interior Alaska, most of them living between the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range. Those living on the major river systems have relied on the annual salmon runs for subsistence, while tribes farther inland—such as the Gwich’in people—also depend heavily on large game such as moose and caribou and small animals such as rabbits and squirrels.
Historically, each of Alaska’s Athabaskan groups had a traditional territory. The hunters of each group were well familiar with their territory, in part because it was considered dangerous to travel through the territory of other groups. Each territory delineated the hunting and fishing domain of the group. Encroachment into another’s territory was rare, and when it did occur, it usually invited violence.
The mobility of the Athabaskans was naturally due to their lifestyle of following the resources. They could not afford to sit around and wait for the resources to come to them; such negligence invited hunger and starvation. So they moved around, establishing camps at places which predictably yielded good hunting or fishing according to the season.
Athabaskans sometimes faced times of starvation because the land was unable to produce enough for them. While not necessarily a daily threat to existence, the possibility of starvation was a well-known fact of life. People worked hard. The boreal forest was not an easy place to make a living. Life was comprised of many tasks and duties, which, if not performed, may have led to disaster.
By 1900, the Athabaskan people began to settle in more permanent camps or villages. This was a result of such factors as population declines brought on by disease, involvement in the fur trade, access to trading posts and later enforced school attendance. Even today, although many people work at wage labor and actively participate in the market economy, subsistence—living off the land—continues to be a vital component of life for most Alaskan Athabaskans.