In Canada’s Yukon, a narrow lake threads for nearly six miles though boreal forest and granite hills. The southern shore is only fifty miles from the northern end of a deep Pacific Ocean fjord: a finger of saltwater reaching toward fresh, their touch thwarted by the Coast Mountains. Tlingit who made their homes near the sea made trails across this range, climbing nearly four thousand feet before descending to meet with inland Tagish peoples, along a lake known as Mén Chó in Tagish, Ch’akúx Anax Ðul.adi Yé in Tlingit. Their stories go back thousands of years, telling of a home that has always changed under the pressures of glaciers and volcanoes and alliances that sometimes broke.

Some of these stories tell of a year when a stream of people, pale and burdened, churned the Tlingit trade paths into mud on their way to Mén Chó. These newcomers, mostly men, called it Boat Lake or Lake Bennett.…