Tsilhqotʼin
indigenous people of North America
The Tsilhqotʼin or Chilcotin ("People of the river", chil-KOH-tin; also spelled Tsilhqutʼin, Tŝinlhqotʼin, Chilkhodin, Tsilkótin, Tsilkotin) are a North American tribal government of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group that live in what is now known as British Columbia, Canada. They are the most southern of the Athabaskan-speaking Indigenous peoples in British Columbia.
Their name, Tŝilhqotʼin, makes reference to the Chilko River, which means "red ochre river," from tŝi(lh) "rock" + -qu "river" + -t'in "people". Tsilhqot'in people also use another word to refer to themselves: Nenqayni, from: nen "land" + -qay "surface" + -ni "person/people", and their country is called Tŝilhqotʼin Nen.
For more information about the 2014 landmark court case that established Indigenous land title for the Tsilhqotʼin Nation and states that industry and governments must gain consent from the Tsilhqot'in Nation before any extractive industries or activities occur on the portion of Tsilhqot'in lands subject to the declaration of title, see Tsilhqotʼin Nation v British Columbia.
History
Pre-contact
The Tŝilhqotʼin Nation before contact with Europeans were a strong warrior nation with political influences from the Similkameen region in southern British Columbia, the Pacific coast in the west, and the Rocky Mountains in the east. They were part of an extensive trade network centred around the control and distribution of obsidian, the material of choice for arrowheads and other stone tools.
European trade
The Tsilhqotʼin first encountered European trading goods in the 1780s and 1790s when British and American ships arrived along the northwest coast seeking sea otter pelts. By 1808, a fur-trading company from Montreal called the North West Company had established posts in the Carrier (Dene) territory just north of the Tsilhqotʼin. They began trading directly and through Carrier intermediaries.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q495760. The Library of Congress control number is sh85138321. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014 and 1808.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tsilhqotʼin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.