Maintaining Dane-zaa Identity : “Those Story I Remember, That's What I Live by Now”

In July of 1999, Billy Attachie and two other Dane-zaa2 elders drove me through some of the traditional lands used by the Doig River First Nation.The Doig River community is one of the Dane-zaa First Nations of the north Peace River area of British Columbia.The Dane-zaa are Athapaskan-speaking hunters of the subarctic.For each place we visited, Billy told a story.Stories continue to be central to Dane-zaa identity, as Billy acknowledged when he said, "those story I remember, that's what I live by now."His statement was strikingly similar to one Southern Tutchone elder Angela Sidney made to Julie Cruikshank; Sidney said that she tried to live her life "just like a story" (Cruikshank 1990).The convergence is not surprising or accidental.Both narrators are Athapaskans; both are from a hunting tradition in which stories are integral to technology; both felt comfortable explaining their traditions to anthropologists