1902-3.] The Nah-ane and their Language, 517 



THE NAHANE AND THEIR LANGUAGE. 

 By The Rev. Father A. G. Morice, O.M.I. 



{Read 41 h April, iQOj.) 



Of the twenty odd tribes which compose the great Dene family, 

 few, if any, are so little known as the Nah'ane. 



Many are the travellers who had passing references to them in the 

 course of their writings, but exceedingly few are those who had as much 

 as seen one of them. In fact, Dr. G. M. Dawson is the only author who 

 can be said to have introduced them to us, and his information, frag- 

 mentary, and at times inexact as it is, is confined to the limits of a few 

 pages. 



Writers are not even agreed as to their very name as a tribe. Thus 

 while Pilling in his valuable Bibliography of the Athapaskan Languages 

 has adopted the spelling Nehawni, Kenticott calls them Nahawney ; 

 Ross writes their name Nehawney ; Richardson changes this into 

 Noh'hanne ; MacKenzie dubs those he met Nathannas ; Campbell and 

 Dawson alternate between Nahanie and Nahaunie ; others prefer 

 Nahawnie, and Petitot himself never speaks of them but as the Na"anne, 

 his " being the equivalent of my upper dot, which stands for the hiatus. 



He derives that appellation from Nari'an-o'tine, " people of the 

 West," but does not state from which dialect the word is borrowed. All 

 the western Dene who know of that tribe, as well as its members them- 

 selves, pronounce it Nah'ane, and there can be no doubt that Petitot is 

 correct in the meaning he ascribes to that term, whatever may be said 

 of its derivation. For sunset or Occident, the Tsilkotin say nare'i^, the 

 Carriers naanai, the Tse'kehne naren'o'^, and the Nah'ane themselves 

 naean. The final e is expressive of personality and sometimes of 

 plurality or collectivity. 



On the other hand, Mr. J. W, MacKay^ repeatedly calls the tribe 

 Ku-na-na, the name given it by the Tlhinket, its neighbours in the 

 south-west. But that he is somewhat mixed as to the ethnographical 

 status of those Indians is shown by his remark that " the Ku-na-nas of 

 the Stickine valley are closely allied to the Tlinkeets of that section, 



1 B.A.A.S. Tenth Report on the North- Western Tribes of Canada, p.p., 38-39, 



