Some amazing things happened today. We had a planning session at the Tanana Chiefs Conference to talk about the documentation of Alaska Native place names. I had the opportunity to meet Robert Charlie, who is an acknowledged expert on the Minto Flats area. He casually mentioned the name Dradlaya Bena', or 'round whitefish lake' in reference to a former lake covering part of the Minto Flats. This name has not been previously documented, but I have suspected for some time that something like it might exist. Here's why.
As I pointed out in a presentation I gave at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in January 2009, and in a forthcoming paper, the place where the Chatanika River breaks out of the mountains and pours onto the Minto Flats is known as Dradlaya Chaget, or 'round whitefish mouth'.
Now, as Jim Kari has often pointed out, Athabascan place names come in generative sets, whereby a single name is combined with standard generic terms such as nik'a 'stream', chaget 'mouth', tl'ot 'headwaters', and -- yes -- bena' 'lake'. Usually one expect to find the 'mouth' name where a stream meet another body of water, but in the case of Dradlaya Chaget there is no other water body: the Chatanika River just flows on. So why use the term chaget here? It only makes sense when one imagines that there must once have been a body of water there, such as a lake. And it is this suspicion which Robert Charlie so readily verified today. Mind you, he volunteered this freely, before I had mentioned anything about Dradlaya Chaget or even said anything whatsoever about Tanana place names.
Clearly this example shows that place names can hold information about the history of people, landscape, and peoples relationship to the land. And we still have much to learn from Native place names if we're willing to listen.
Note: my article referring to Dradlaya Chaget will appear as:
Holton, Gary. 2011. Differing conceptualizations of the same landscape: The Athabaskan and Eskimo language boundary in Alaska. Landscape in Language, ed. by D.M. Mark, A.G. Turk, N. Burenhult & D. Stea. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
I'll post a copy once it is available.