Dene tribes to reunite

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More than half a million members of the Dene Nation are being invited to Calgary this fall for the International Dene Elders Gathering. It is hoped that there the Dene tribes of North America will be reunified.

Organizers are calling for each of the Dene tribes, spread over an area as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico, to send delegates to the gathering scheduled for Oct. 13 to 15. There they will meet and discuss the history of the Dene and will open lines of communication, some of which have been closed for thousands of years.

"There's about 700,000 of us and we're trying to gather the Dene people to talk about the history of the Dene people. We also want to talk about commerce and about a Dene expo in a couple years' time," said Bruce Starlight, band councillor with the Tsuu T'ina nation, located just outside of Calgary. "It's a gathering of Elders to see what direction we should take. But that's the ultimate goal, that we begin to reunite, but also to reunite for a purpose, 'cause we have the largest population."

Starlight hopes that each tribe will be able to send some dancers and drummers also, because he said the Dene tribes have a wide variety of cultures that comes from being so spread out in different areas.

"It's a pretty ambitious thing that we're undertaking. It's been in the minds of all the Dene. We come from Alaska to the Hudson Bay and all along the mountains in B.C., the Plains, into California, Oregon and onto the desert. There's even Dene people that live among the Aztec people in Mexico," said Starlight, who expects at least 200 people to attend.

"We have casinos, oil wells and what not. So we're trying to harness that commerce and try to create a trade route among the Dene people. We've got diamonds up in the territories and we've got the oil wells down in the south. So we're the wealthiest among all the tribes in North America so we're trying to create commerce among the Dene," said Starlight. "Up in the territories they have a very difficult time getting fresh produce, so we're hoping that we'll strike a deal up there. Maybe one of the southern communities can set up an airport, maybe one of the B.C. tribes, where there's a lot of fresh produce all the time and they can bring fresh produce up to the Dene up north. There's a lot of casino tribes among the people, so hopefully we can exchange ideas on how to help one another financially, and just to give advice to one another."

Starlight also hopes that at the conference the Elders will give them the go ahead to hold an even bigger conference in a few years that will unite even more of the Dene tribes.

"We're hoping that we get a positive response to go ahead with the expo in a couple years, maybe three years. It's going to take a lot of planning."

Raymond Yakelaya is one of the organizers of the conference and he hopes that at least most of the Elders of the tribes will be able to attend and share some of the history of the Dene, which goes back thousands of years.

"What they want to talk about is the history of the Dene from the earliest living memory. Like, our memory goes back to the last ice age. That's how much they remember. We also want to talk about our place on the North American continent, how we separated amongst each other and how we ended up in northern Mexico with the Apaches and Navajo," he said.

"What we see is the erosion of languages, the erosion of cultural stuff, and we realize that we are the ones that have to be able to do something about this," said Yakelaya. "We expect it's going to be a good gathering and it's the beginning of opening doors for all of our people in terms of communication and we think this is really important."