Wetʼsuwetʼen
First Nations people of British Columbia, Canada
The Wetʼsuwetʼen are a First Nation who live on the Bulkley River and around Burns Lake, Broman Lake, and François Lake in the northwestern Central Interior of British Columbia.
The Wetʼsuwetʼen are a branch of the Dakelh or Carrier people, and in combination with the Babine people have been referred to as the Western Carrier. They speak Witsuwitʼen, a dialect of the Babine-Witsuwitʼen language which, like its sister language Carrier, is a member of the Athabaskan family.
Their oral history, called kungax, recounts that their ancestral village, Dizkle or Dzilke, once stood upstream from the Bulkley Canyon. This cluster of cedar houses on both sides of the river is said to have been abandoned because of an omen of impending disaster. The exact location of the village has been lost. The neighbouring Gitxsan people of the Hazelton area have a similar tale, though the village in their version is named Dimlahamid (Temlahan).
Name
The word Wetʼsuwetʼen (English: wet-SOH-ih-tin) is spelled in numerous ways. Witsuwitʼen is the correct spelling in the writing system in general use. In non-technical publications, it is usually misspelled as Witsʼuwitʼen, Witʼsuwitʼen, Wetsʼuwetʼen, or Wetʼsuwetʼen due to the difficulty of distinguishing ejective [ts] from plain [ts].
The public source identifies “Wetʼsuwetʼen” as first Nations people of British Columbia, Canada. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wetʼsuwetʼen, First and Nations.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7989949. The Library of Congress control number is sh93004426. Authority coordinates are 55.250, -127.667. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wetʼsuwetʼen” 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.