American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Kiitl’it and Di’haii Gwich’in were once two distinct subgroups of the Gwich’in people. The Gwich’in people once occupied all the mountainous terrain and river valleys between the Arctic Red River and the MacKenzie River Delta westward to the Upper Noatak River valley in northwestern Alaska. The Kiitl’it and Di’haii were the westernmost bands and were gradually displaced through a series of raids and counter raids by the Inland Inupiat, or Nunamiut, as they will be called here. The situation was further exacerbated by internal feuding, famine, and disease. Weakened and reduced in numbers, the Kiitl’it and Di’haii merged and moved further to the east where they were absorbed by the Neets’aii, Vantee, and Draanjik Gwich’in and by the Koyukon Indians who moved into the middle Yukon River basin in the vicinity of Stevens Village. Although the Gwich’in have long been recognized as a discrete group in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, stories of the Kiitl’it and Di’haii Gwich’in have come to the attention of the academic community only in the last thirty years. The other subgroups-the Gwichah, Teed’it, Vantee, Dagoo, Hantee, Draanjik, Gwichyaa, Deenduu and Neets’ - were well known from the earliest records of the Hudson’s Bay Company traders and missionaries. The Kiitl’it were mentioned first on a map drawn by William Lucas Hardisty, the clerk in charge at the Fort Youcon (Yukon) trading post in 1853 (see fig. 1). William Hardisty called them the “Keetla Koochin”and had them clearly placed in the Upper Koyukuk River valley. The Kiitl’it were mentioned in the journals of the Anglican priest Reverend Robert McDonald, who called them the “Kitlikutchin.”In McDonald’sjournal entry for March 12, 1867, the Kiitl’it were already “enroute to their own country from the country formerly occupied by the Siffleux.” Here McDonald was referring to the Di’hqii who were called Siffleur or Siffleux at the time. The term Di’haii did not surface in academic literature until anthropologist Robert A. McKennan conducted his ethnographic field work of the Neets’aii Gwich’in in the summer of 1933. McKennan was the first to document the presence of the Di’haii.