Kaska Personal Names: Continuity and Change

Abstract

Kaska personal names are important symbols of identity that draw on diverse cultural practices and beliefs, including an extensive history of interaction with Tlingits. Kaska personal names in the Hudson's Bay Company records reveal continuity between historical and contemporary naming practices and provide evidence that Kaskas were living in their present territories in the early 1840s. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, traders, miners, and missionaries imposed their own naming systems, but Kaskas have continued to maintain a separate Indigenous naming system.