Walking Dena’ina: A Cultural Landscape Report for the Telaquana Trail

• Main Authors: Deur, Douglas, Hebert, Jamie, Branson, John, Brown, Tricia
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: PDXScholar 2020
• Subjects: Archaeological Anthropology; Social and Cultural Anthropology; Tundra
• Online Access: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/anth_fac/293; https://works.bepress.com/douglas_deur/74/download/

The Telaquana Trail is 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. Though the archaeological record of the trail is still coming into focus, it lends us important clues about the trail and how it was used. For example, archaeological evidence at places like Twin Lakes and Snipe Lake suggests that ancestral Native communities occupied and traveled along what is today the Telaquana Trail soon after the glaciers retreated from the landscape, millennia ago.1 The depth of human association with the trail is thus considerable and profound. And as a pathway lined with places of ancestral importance, linking modern Native communities to one-another and to places of reliable substance harvests, it continues to be valued by Dena’ina people today.