What Indigenous Communities Say

Any complete discussion of the evidence for the first Americans must engage with the perspectives of Indigenous peoples — the nations whose ancestors are, in the broadest sense, the people being discussed, and who have their own accounts of their origins, their history, and their relationship to the land.

Indigenous nations of the Yukon and Alaska — including the First Nations of the southern Yukon and the Alaska Native peoples of interior and coastal Alaska — maintain oral traditions and cultural accounts of their ancestral connections to the land that often reach back to times well before any written record.

These traditions do not typically organize historical memory in terms of dates and genomic profiles, but they represent a different kind of knowledge about the same broad history that archaeology and genetics are trying to reconstruct.