CHIPEWYAN

the most numerous Athabascan-speaking Indian people in northern Canada, inhabiting a large triangular area with a base along the 1,000-mile-long Churchill River and an apex some 700 miles to the north; the land comprises boreal forests divided by stretches of barren ground. Split into many independent bands, the Chipewyan were nomads following the seasonal movement of the caribou, their chief source of food and of skins for clothing, tents, nets, and lines. Also sought were bison, musk-oxen, moose, waterfowl, and fish. Chipewyan culture was noted for its rather ruthless pattern of survival of the fittest. Strong men in each band overlorded the weak, pilfering their goods and seizing their women. Females were extremely abased, being married off in adolescence and living lives virtually as beasts of burden, pulling toboggans or carrying packs on their backs, and suffering from numerous restrictions. The weak and aged who could not keep up were left to die on the trail. Murder, however, was considered abhorrent and was rare. There was a general belief in visions, dreams, and guardian spirits, in the powers of medicine men to cure or cause disease, and in deliverance to a happier place after death. When the Hudson's Bay Company established a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Churchill in 1717, the Chipewyan turned to hunting fur animals and acting as middlemen in the fur exchange with the Yellowknife and Dogrib farther west, often exacting huge profits. A smallpox epidemic in 1781, however, decimated the Chipewyan, and subsequent periods of disease and malnutrition and the decline of the fur trade have reduced their numbers to only about 5,000 in the late 20th century.