Deep in the wilderness of Northern
Canada lies a mysterious region around
which strange tales have swirled for
more than a hundred years. Located near
the junction of British Columbia, Yukon,
and the Northwest Territories, the Nahanni
Valley is a region replete with stories
of headless prospectors, hidden gold
mines, tropical oases, lost tribes, evil
spirits, Indian curses, prehistoric
monsters, and a mysterious 'White Queen'.
For about a year now, the legends of the
Nahanni have enjoyed a resurgence in
popularity. They have been mentioned in
many different YouTube videos and
podcasts. A group of filmmakers from
Calgary, Alberta, are currently in the
process of making a brilliant
documentary on them called 'Secrets of
Nahanni'. To learn more about this project,
please check out the link in the
description. Quite a few people have seen
my video 'Interview with a Cryptid Hunter',
in which I interviewed Frank Graves, an
adventurer who made an expedition to the
Nahanni region in 1965. By the way, if you
enjoyed that video, I have a feeling that
you'll love another of my videos
entitled 'Legends of the Nahanni Valley:
Northern Canada's Greatest Mysteries',
which also features and is narrated
entirely by the actress Kelsea Crowe. To
find that video, just type the word
"Nahanni" into the YouTube search bar.
The popularity of the Nahanni legends
seems to wax and wane over time, and to
change with every generation. Back in the
early 1900s, the most popular of the
Nahanni stories was the tale of the Lost
McLeod Mine, a golden bonanza and the
Mackenzie Mountains discovered and lost
by two brothers who were found headless
on the banks of the South Nahanni River.
In the 1940s, newspaper readers across
Canada and the United States were
captivated by tales of a tropical oasis
hidden away somewhere in the Nahanni
region where snow never fell and ice
never formed. In the 1970s, the stories of
all the trappers and prospectors who
have disappeared or turned up headless
in the Nahanni region turned the heads
of magazine readers across the North
American continent. Today, however, the
most popular of the Nahanni tales are
undoubtedly the stories of the many
strange animals which are said to
inhabit this secluded vale in the
Canadian subarctic.
In this video, we're going to focus on
one of those creatures, namely a
mysterious figure said to haunt the
frozen forests of northern Canada. Very
little known outside of the Canadian
territories and Alaska, this figure most
closely resembles the Sasquatch said to
roam the rainforests of the Pacific
Northwest. To the Dene people who have
inhabited the Athabascan wilderness
since time immemorial, however, these
creatures are known as Nakani. The
script for the following video is
essentially made up of excerpts from my
book 'Legends of the Nahanni Valley', edited
slightly for the sake of context and
continuity. If you haven't done so
already, please consider getting yourself
a copy of this book. It consists of thirteen
chapters detailing various stories and
legends endemic to the Nahanni region,
and is the first and only book to deal
exclusively with the topic. It would make
a great Christmas gift for anyone with
an interest in history, folklore,
mysteries,
cryptozoology, or the far-flung corners
of the globe. To get yourself a copy of
this book, please check out the link in
the description.
"That he had nowhere seen the slightest
Indian sign bore out the redskin reports
that the country was taboo and recalled
their superstitions that it was haunted
by a race of prehistoric Troglodytes, or
Nakanies, as they called them, with
repulsive gargoyle-like faces who lived
in caves cut from the living rock;
creatures reported to be twice the size
of ordinary humans, who never missed a
chance to carry off unwary hunters or
stray squaws and their powerful gorilla-
like arms." - Philip H. Godsell, 'The Curse of
Deadman's Valley', 1950. From the Yowie of
Australia to Yeren of China to the
Yeti of the Himalayas, huge hairy wildmen
feature in folklore around the world,
and Canada is no exception. Undoubtedly,
the Great White North's most famous
wildman is the Sasquatch- the shy,
reclusive giant said to roam the
rainforests of the Pacific Northwest;
often colloquially referred to as
'Bigfoot'. Less well-known are the
Sasquatch's coastal counterparts- the
emaciated long-haired Bukwus, or "Wild
Man of the Woods", said to haunt the
rivers and streams of Vancouver Island
and the Queen Charlotte Sound; and the
huge, dim-witted Dzunukwa of Kwakiutl
and Nootka legend- an old, black-skinned,
red-lipped ogress purported to snatch
up mischievous children and carry them
off in a basket to her forest lair. More
obscure wildmen have been reported in
other parts of the country, from the
Rocky Mountains of Western Alberta to
the rocky highlands of Labrador. Perhaps
most mysterious of all, however, are the
various subhuman hominids said to
inhabit the taiga, tundra, and alpine
areas of the Canadian North. Among the
most prominent of these are the Nakani. Long before 18th Century Scottish
explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie dipped
his paddle into the river which would
come to bear his name,
Dene tribes from all over the North,
from the eastern shores of the Mackenzie
River to the forests of Alaska, spoke of
a mysterious wildman who harassed them
at night, often lurking in the shadows
just beyond the light of the campfire.
The Dene were terrified of these
elusive creatures, who were as vividly
real to them as the wolf and the raven,
went to great lengths to avoid crossing
paths with them. One of the first
frontiersman to write about these wildmen
 was Father Emile Petitot, a 19th
Century Oblate missionary who lived
among the Slavey and the Sahtu Dene of
the North Country's two great lakes. In
1876,
Petitot wrote of a fear that spread among
the Indians each summer like an epidemic:
"They live at times in continual terror
of an imaginary and me who pursues them
without rest, and who they believe to
see everywhere, even though he doesn't
exist at all." According to ethnographer
Cornelius B. Osgood, belief in the Nanaki
was strong among the Slavey, Dogrib,
and Sahtu Dene a as late as 1929. When they
suspected that a Nakani was lurking
nearby, entire Dene bands would often
abandon their camps and seek shelter on
a nearby lake island, secure in the
belief that their pursuer, for one reason
or another, was unable to cross over to
the new campsite from the shore. On other
occasions, according to a Hudson's Bay
Company trader named John Firth, entire encampments would instead stand
their ground and fire their muskets "into
the forest at suppositious wanderers in
the night."
According to H.B.C. trader B.R. Ross in his
1879 report entitled 'Notes in the Tinneh
or Chipewyan Indians of British and
Russian America': "A strange footprint or
any unusual sound in the forest is quite
sufficient to cause great excitement in
the camp. At Fort Resolution I have, on
several occasions, caused all the natives
encamped around to flock for protection
into the fort during the night simply
by whistling, hidden in the bushes. My
train of hauling dogs also, of a large
breed of great hunters, would, in crashing
through the branches in pursuit of an
unfortunate hare, frighten some women
out gathering berries, who would rush in
a frantic haste to the tents and
fearfully relate a horrific account of
some strange painted Indians whom they
had seen. It was my custom in the spring,
during the wild foul
season, to sleep outside at some
distance from the fort. Numerous were
the cautions that I received from the
natives in my foolhardiness in doing
so." The names that the Indians applied to
their mysterious unseen enemies varied
from place to place and from tribe to
tribe. To the Slavey, Kaska, and Mountain
Indians of Mackenzie Country, they were
'Nakani'. The Gwich'in who lived further
to the north, in the frozen forest that
skirt the Arctic Circle, referred to them
as 'Mahoni'. The Koyukon Indians of the
Yukon River Valley called these
creatures "Nakentlia", or "Sneakers", while
the Tanaina of Southwest Alaska referred
to them as "Nantina", or "Hairy Men." Other
appellatives included "Bad Indian",
"Bellowing Man", and "Bushman". Although the
labels attached to these wildmen were
numerous, Indian descriptions of them
were eerily consistent across the
Northland. Most 19th and 20th Century
frontiersman who wrote about the Nakani
in their books and journals were under
the impression that the Dene regarded
them as hairy cannibalistic giants,
vaguely human in appearance, with red
eyes and long muscular arms. According to
English adventurer Michael H. Mason in
his 1924 book 'The Arctic Forests', the
Gwich'in of Peele River Country in the
Northern Yukon described the Nakani-
or the 'Mahoni', as they called them- as
"terrible wildmen with red eyes and of
enormous height, completely covered with
long hair". Their tremendous size was
attested to by the three-foot-long
human-like footprints that they left in
their wake, as well as their alleged
ability to tear entire birch trees from
the earth with their bare hands, roots
and all. Similarly, Philip Godsell, who
spent much time around the campfires of
the Slavey and Kaska during his years
as an inspector for the Hudson's Bay
Company, described the Nakani as
"troglodytes, twice the size of ordinary
humans, who went about naked save for a
coating of evil-smelling hair". In some
articles, he likened them to gorillas and
gargoyles, and commented upon the
superhuman strength and speed that was
said to possess. Many frontiersmen wrote
about the incredible size of these
creatures' footprints, which
they left behind in the snow and muskeg.
Their tracks were purportedly man-like
in appearance, yet much longer and
narrower. In some accounts, their big toe
stood out from the remaining four.
Although their footprints never bore any
nail marks, some said that the Nakani's
fingers were tipped with long nail-like
claws. By the mid 20th Century, the image
of the Nakani as an enormous hairy
monster was making its way into books and
popular magazines, often in dramatic
fashion. For example, an article entitled
'Cursed Treasure of Deadman's Valley',
published in the June 1968 issue of the
magazine 'Saga', maintained that the Nakani
were "hairy demons who stand as high as a
Kodiak bear, are as swift as a bird in
flight, and kill all things they can reach by
cutting off their heads. Their skin is so
tough that a bullet will not penetrate
it, and cutting it with a knife is more
difficult than cutting stone." The Kaska,
Slavey, and Mountain Indians of Mackenzie
Country long maintained that the Nahanni
Valley was the domain of the Nakani,
and that these fearsome monsters resided
within its foreboding caves and canyons.
This belief is attested to by the
region's toponymy. According to Dene
language expert Allen Adam, "Nahadee", an
old native word for the South Nahanni
River, means "River of Giants". The Nakani were by no means confined to these
remote mountain hideaways. Many of these
monsters tirelessly traversed the
subarctic forests in search of prey,
often traveling extraordinarily-long
distances without stopping for food or
rest, usually alone. Natives all over the
Northland, from the coastal regions of
Alaska to the forests of the Yukon, lived
in almost perpetual fear of them.
Nakani attacks occurred almost
exclusively during the spring, summer, and
early autumn. The subarctic winter, on the
other hand, though dark, miserable, and
bitterly cold, was mercifully devoid of
these dreaded encounters. Where the
Nakani retreated to during the winter
months was a mystery to the Dene. Some
said they retired to carefully
concealed burrows that they dug from the
permafrost, where they spent the winter
hibernating like bears. Others claimed that
they migrated south to a place where
their kind were more numerous.
Like the Nahanni Indians, the Nakani have
been blamed for the unusual number of
mysterious deaths and disappearances
that have plagued Nahanni country since
the days of Willie and Frank McLeod.
Legend has it that these monsters did
their grisly work at night, prowling
about the river valley in the dark and
quietly dispatching any campers they
happen to encounter, perhaps tearing,
twisting, or hacking their victims' heads
from their shoulders. Outside the
Mackenzie Mountains, the Nakani hunted
traveling Indians, stalking them from
concealment in the brush. Oftentimes, a Nakani's intended victims only became
aware of its presence when one of their
number, perhaps a scout on reconnaissance
duty, stumbled upon its strange tracks in
the forest, or caught a glimpse of its
dark figure out of the corner of his eye,
darting noiselessly into the bush. In
other instances, the uncanny feeling of
being watched might serve as sufficient
proof that a Nakani was somewhere nearby.
When a Nakani targeted a particular camp,
it took up residence in the trees just
beyond the light of the campfire and
waited. Sometimes it taunted its
intended victims by throwing rocks and
sticks at them. It also, on occasion,
emitted strange whistling sounds or
noises resembling human laughter. Often,
it would slip into camp in the middle of
the night and steal food, typically fish,
either from drying racks or smokehouses,
or destroy fish nets and other equipment.
Legend has it that the purpose of the
Nakani's visits were twofold. Its primary objective was
stealing women. Girls who strayed too far
from the camp, especially at dawn or dusk,
were in serious danger of being abducted
and dragged away into the woods, never to
be seen again. The other motivation that
drew these monsters to Dene camps was
sustenance.
If afforded the opportunity, Nakani would
snatch children and lone hunters and
carry them off into the woods, where it
would devour them. On rare occasions,
intended victims- most often young women-
narrowly escaped the Nakani's clutches and
returned to tell the tale. Those who
survived such encounters often described
a powerful, nauseating odor which
preceded the attack. Others reported
being beset by an overwhelming, almost
petrifying sense of dread,
as if the Nakani had exercised some sort
of hypnotic power over them. Frontiersmen
weren't the only white men to document
the Nakani phenomenon. Another category
of Caucasian to write about these
subarctic wildmen were ethnologists and
anthropologists- professional academics
who included the tale in their
peer-reviewed articles on Dene culture
and beliefs. Interestingly, the majority
of these scholars extracted an entirely
different version of the Nakani legend
from the Indians whom they interviewed.
In this version, the Nakani are not huge
hairy hominids, but rather a
strange-looking bedraggled Indians. Most
academics who wrote on the subject agreed that the Nakani, according to their
Dene informants, were Indians who became
wild after engaging in murder or
cannibalism. As a result of their hard
life in the bush and their separation
from society, they acquired a frightening,
grotesque appearance. Their faces were
gaunt and their bodies emaciated on
account of malnutrition. Their skin was
often caked with filth and grease, their
hair unkempt, and their clothing worn and
ragged. Oftentimes, their outfits were
strange or incomplete. One knife-wielding
Nakani,
for example, was said to have been seen
wearing nothing more than hard-soled
shoes made from untanned hides and a
headscarf. Others were purported to wear
strange boots which could not be
purchased at any trading post in the
region. Although the Nakani described by
academics were literally wild men bereft
of civilization, some of the attributes
with which they were ascribed were
distinctly inhuman. For example, although
Osgood described the Nakani as "a
human being, generally an Indian, dressed
either in the fashion of an Indian or a
white man," he also maintained
that it wore "tremendously large
boots which are noted by the tracks he
leaves in the mud"- tracks
evocative of the long, narrow footprints
left by the hairy giant of frontier
legend. In a similar vein, anthropologist
Richard K. Nelson wrote that the Koyukon
Indians of the Yukon River Valley
described the Nakani as being among the
"large animals"- a creature that was
neither Man nor Beast, but something in
between. Most
academics dismissed these inhuman
qualities as inevitable distortions
added by Dene storytellers who hoped to
make their tales more interesting to the
listener. The Nakani, they firmly
maintained, was nothing more than a man
(or, in rare occasions, a woman) who became
separated from society, either having
been banished for some crime he
committed or isolated through some
tragedy such as starvation or revenge
warfare which claimed the lives of
everyone else in his band. The Dene were
afraid of these wild Indians because
they considered them crazy and
unpredictable, well aware of the
deleterious effect of extreme isolation
on one's mental state. Many of those who
have written on the subject have
concluded that the Nakani was a
boogeyman who served to dissuade women,
children, and lone hunters from wandering
too far from the safety of the camp.
These people maintained that the Nakani
legend is probably a relic of bygone
times when the Dene tribes of the
Canadian North were in a state of total
warfare with one another. During those
days, Dene raiding parties would
stealthily approach their enemies' camps
during the night and, hiding in the brush,
would steal any women and children they
found alone on the outskirts. As Poole
Field put it in one of his letters, "In
trying to run the stories down, and by
careful investigation, I'd finally come
to the conclusion that it originated
from the old days when practically all
the Indians at one time or another used
to make raids on each other, and would
take anything of value found in the camp
conquered, killing the men and taking any
women or young girls or boys back to
their own camp. After Dawson was struck
and the civilized portion of the country
became policed, it was given up, but still,
some of the younger men, and also some of
the older ones, would take hunting trips
into the country that was claimed by
other tribes, and while doing this they
would hang around any Indian camp at
night in some case they would capture a
young girl that some of them had taken a
fancy to and take her back to their own
tribe. Each tribe, if the occasion just
came right, would give a foreign tribe a
good scare anyway, even if they didn't do
any worse. In the tribe that I was
traveling, with there was a grandmother
that
had been stolen as a girl from the
Pellies, and another from the [Loucheux]
tribe at Peele River, and I know several
on the Pelly at the time of which I
write." Some believed that the Nakani legend
specifically derived from warfare
between Dene tribes and the more
southerly Cree, who, equipped with HBC
muskets that were far superior to
traditional Dene weapons, invaded the
North Country in the late 1700s,
pressured by their fur trading rivals to
the south. One of the most intriguing
theories regarding the nature of the
Nakani
is that this figure is a 'cryptid' or
'hidden animal', specifically a species of
great ape endemic to North America. Some
cryptozoologists (as experts in the study
of hidden animals are known) suggest
that the Nakani might be the same
species as the Sasquatch, another
suspected North American hominid. Some
have theorized that it is a remnant
Neanderthal or Denisovan- archaic
humans generally believed to have gone
extinct about 40,000 years ago. Others
believe that it might be a relative of
Gigantopithecus, an enormous, possibly
bipedal ape that disappeared from the
jungles of Southeast Asia around
100,000 years ago. Others still
hypothesize that the Nakani is an
entirely new species of hominid which
has yet to be accepted by the scientific
community, Homo sapiens, or modern humans,
are the only species of great ape widely
believed to have migrated to the
Americas in ancient times.
If archaic humans or some other variety
of great ape really traveled to the
Americas in prehistoric times, how did
they do it? Most anthropologists believe
that the first humans to arrive in the
Americas traveled from Siberia to Alaska
via an ancient bridge of land and ice.
The first of these nomads are believed
to have followed large game herds across
the Bering Strait around 13,000 years
ago, near the end of the last Ice Age. At
that time, North America was dominated by
two great glaciers: the western
Cordilleran Ice Sheet and the
easterly Laurentian Ice Sheet, which met
at a point just east of the Rocky
Mountains. During an event known as the
Wisconsin Glacial Epoch, these glaciers
began to melt, opening up a longitudinal
passage that ran down the length of the
continent. Seeking greener pastures, many
of the nomads followed this passage south.
Their descendants multiplied and
scattered across North and South America,
forming the various nations whose
members are collectively known today as
Amerindians. Is it possible that other
less advanced hominids- perhaps the
ancestors of the Sasquatch or the Nakani-
also crossed from Siberia to the
Americas via Beringia? Fossil evidence
clearly indicates that both Neanderthals
and Denisovans inhabited Northeast Asia
around the same time as Homo sapiens. And,
intriguingly, Russian folklore contends
that the Altai mountains of Central Asia
and the boreal forests of Siberia are
home to hairy subhumans eerily evocative
of North American wildmen, known
respectively as the "Almas" and the "Chuchunya". Although most scientists believe
that human beings were the only hominids
to make their way to the New World prior
to the Age of Exploration, a tantalizing
archaeological discovery made near the
Gwich'in village of Old Crow, Yukon, in the
late 1970s indicates that the Canadian
North was occupied by intelligent tool-
wielding animals at least 12,000 years
before the first Paleo-Indian set foot
on Alaskan soil. In the Bluefish Caves,
located about 110 miles from the shores
of the Arctic Ocean,
anthropologist Jacques Cinq-Mars
discovered a mammoth bone which appeared
to have been fashioned into a caribou
fleshing tool around 20,000 BC. More
recently, some archaeologists have argued
that a mastodon bone unearthed near San
Diego, USA, during a routine highway
excavation in the early 1990s, coupled
with a handful of primitive stone tools
discovered nearby, constitutes proof that
some sort of intelligent hominid lived
in the Americas as early as 130,000
BC. The bone in
question bore spiral fractures which
indicated that someone, or something, had
smashed it with a rock when it was still
fresh, presumably in an attempt to gain
access to the nutritious marrow within.
Flat cobblestones and round stones
discovered nearby bore markings which
implied their employment as primitive
hammers and anvils. One of the most
intriguing pieces of evidence supporting
the notion that the Nakani are real
flesh-and-blood cryptids is the fact
that they share a number of peculiar
attributes with
supposed wildmen from all over the world.
For example, 19th Century Slavey
trappers, whose only connection with the
Outside was through a handful of
missionaries and the HBC traders with
whom they haggled, claimed that the
Nakani made whistling calls, left behind
huge footprints, had a penchant for stone
throwing, and emitted a putrid odor
somewhat akin to the smell of rotten
flesh- characteristics which the Coast
Salish of the Fraser Delta ascribed to
the Sasquatch, and Aborigines of the
Australian Outback to their own wildman,
the Yowie. Harrowing stories of
encounters with the Nakani have been a
staple of Dene campfire conversations
for countless generations. Unfortunately,
most of these tales have long since been
lost to history, as is so often the case
with oral lore. One old Dene story which
survived to the present day, recorded as
it was in 1964 by northern folklorist
Charles J. Keim, tells of a Nakani
which haunted the woods surrounding Old
Crow, Yukon, not far from the Bluefish
Caves. According to this narrative, a
young girl tasked with gathering spruce
branches for her bed wandered a little
too far from the camp. The Nakani, who had
been watching her from concealment in
the trees, "snatched the girl and
took her back to his cave". There,
he bound her hands with babiche and
tethered her to a tree stump situated
just outside the cave's mouth so that she
could not escape. After spending several
days outside the Nakani's lair, the
girl asked the wildman to give her some
privacy.
The monster obliged and turned his back
while she moved behind the tree stump,
contenting himself with holding one end
of her tether in his hand. Somehow, the
girl managed to free herself from her
bonds when the Nakani was not looking.
She stripped naked, dressed the stump
with her clothes and bonnet, tied her
tether to the stump, and stealthily
slipped away into the woods, homeward
bound. When some time had elapsed, the
Nakani, oblivious, called out to the
girl to see if she still required
privacy. When she failed to answer him, he
tugged on her tether and was surprised
to find that he could not move her. The
wildman began to sing a love song and
move towards what he thought was his
prisoner, dancing as he went.
"What a surprise he had," wrote Keim, "when
he leaped and hugged a stump!" In the 2007
book 'The History and Stories of the
Gwichya Gwich'in", Eliza Andre, a Gwich'in
elder from the settlement of Tsiigehtchic,
Northwest Territories, located at the
confluence of the Mackenzie and Arctic Red Rivers, related an old local story
involving a Nakani. Once, an old woman and
her grandson went out into the bush to
snare rabbits. One day, when they were
inspecting their traps, the grandson
stopped dead in his tracks. "Grandmother,"
he said. "I hear something." "What do you
hear?" the old woman asked. "Back past our
trail, someone is making noise". The old
woman listened very carefully until she,
too, heard the sound. Immediately, she
stuffed the rabbit she had snared into a
bundle, threw the bundle over her
shoulder, and set out for camp as fast as
she could, urging her grandson to follow
quickly. When the pair finally reached
their tent,
the old woman promptly built a fire,
hastily skinned the rabbits, and threw
their intestines onto the burning wood.
Slowly, the intestines began to sizzle. "By
this time," wrote Andre, "they could both
hear someone making noise inside their
camp. Someone was approaching their camp,
drawing nearer and nearer." In
preparation for their encounter with
what could only be a Nakani,
the old woman gathered the hot
intestines and crouched by the door of the
tent, waiting.
Sure enough, the intruder, who was indeed
a Nakani, poked his head through the tent
opening. His ravenous eyes fell upon the
old woman and her grandson. Immediately,
the old woman slapped the creature in
the face with the hot intestines. The
Nakani howled in pain and surprise and
reeled back from the tent, clutching his
scalded face. With a heavy thump, he
landed on the ground and lay still. "The
following morning," Andre continued. "they
went out to investigate the incident of
the previous night. They found a big
bushman stretched outside their camp.
They did not bother to do anything to
him but instead retired to their tent,
never to be bothered again for a long,
long time."
It is possible that the first white men
to have a brush with a Nakani were HBC
engage John McLeod and his crew during
their expedition up the West Branch of
the Liard River in the summer of 1831.
One night, while resting by the fire
after a long day of tracking and
portaging, the voyageurs were harassed by
an unseen assailant who hurled stones at
them from the shadows.
Although McLeod speculated that this
marauder was probably a Nahanni Indian,
native legend suggests that this stone
throwing provocateur, considering his
behavior, may have been a Nakani. In his
2002 book 'Mysterious Creatures: A Guide
to Cryptozoology", author George M.
Eberhardt related a Nakani encounter had
by a native named Paul Peters in August,
1960. While at his fishing camp, located
ten miles down the Yukon River from Ruby,
Alaska, Peters watched a Nakani make its
way along a rocky beach towards his
dogs, "which were whining and acting
strange". The creature was broad-
shouldered and very muscular, and walked
on two legs like a man. It was covered in
black hair and was about 6'6'' tall. Suddenly, perhaps frightened
by the dogs, the Nakani altered its
course, climbed a steep hill overlooking
the river, and disappeared into the bush.
Far from being an obsolete phenomenon
relegated to the 19th and 20th Centuries,
Nakani sightings still occur with
casual frequency in the wilderness of
Northern Canada in Alaska. On July 28,
2016, for example, the CBC published an
article describing a Nakani encounter
reported by Tony Williah, a Dogrib native
from the settlement of Whati, Northwest
Territories. Earlier that month, while
boating from his hometown to the
northern tip of Lac la Martre, Williah
spied a plastic bag bobbing in the
water. Hoping to retrieve the object, he
pulled his boat alongside it. While he
reached down to grab the bag, a rogue
wave tipped his boat over, and Williah found
himself immersed in freezing water. After
struggling in vain to right his vessel
and climb back inside, he decided to swim
for the nearest island. Hampered though
he was by his waterlogged clothing, he
managed to reach the island and crawl
onto its rocky shore, exhausted and
chilled to the bone. "All of a sudden,"
Williah told the CBC, "there was a big
man standing beside me. He must have
walked away, because they heard some
branches break through the bushes. I
packed up my clothes in a white bag and
readied myself to leave." And leave he did,
though not before spending a terrifying
48 hours alone on the beach, certain that
the isle's mysterious resident was
watching him from concealment. On July, 19,
2016, Williah was rescued by an RCMP and
Canadian military search party and taken
to the Stanton Territorial Hospital in
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where
he made a full recovery. He later claimed
that he never slept a wink throughout
the entire ordeal. One blogger who
commented upon Williah's experience
suggested that the Dogrib's Nakani
sighting may have been a case of what
has been called 'Third Man Syndrome"- a
phenomenon reported by explorers, outdoor
athletes, and disaster survivors in which
a mysterious guardian angel-like figure
appears in times of extreme difficulty
to offer comfort and assistance.
Intriguing though it may be,
this explanation cannot account for
another potential Nakani sighting
reported in the Fall of 2012 by two
Inuit women from Quebec's northern Nunavik
region. While picking berries near the
village of Akulivik, Maggie Cruikshank
Qingalik and her friend spotted a
strange creature out on the
tundra. Initially, the two ladies thought
that the figure was another berry picker.
As it got closer, however, they realized
that it was covered in long dark hair. "We
weren't sure what it was at first," said
Qingalik in an interview. "It is not a
human being. It was really tall and kept
coming towards our direction, and we
could tell it was not a human." Qingalik estimated that the creature was
around three meters, or 9'10'' tall. Its footprints were later
found to be 40 centimeters, or 15.7 inches, long. Over the years,
hundreds of wildman sightings have been
reported on the Pacific Coast of Alaska,
the historic homeland of the Tlingit
Indians. Although many of these
eyewitnesses referred to the figure they
encountered as a "bushman", evoking the
Nakani of Dene lore, some of the
descriptions they furnished correspond
more closely with the classic portrait
of a Sasquatch- a supposed ape-man whose
coastal range, some believe, extends from
California to as far north as
St. Michael, Alaska. Indeed, the Nakani is not
the only wildman said to inhabit the
North Country. As Pierre Berton put it in
his 1956 book 'The Mysterious North',
"the Mahoni who flit through the Peele River
country in the northern Yukon are
enormous hairy giants with red eyes who
eat human flesh and devour entire birch
trees at a gulp. The predatory
Sasquatches of British Columbia's
mountain caves are eight feet tall and
covered with black wooly hair from head
to foot. There are others all akin to
these: the terrible Brushman of the Loucheux
of the Upper Mackenzie with, his
black face and yellow eyes, preying on
women and children; the Weetigo of the
Barrens, that horrible naked cannibal, his
face black with frostbite, his lips
eaten away to expose his fang-like teeth;
the 8-foot head-hunting mountain men of
a Nahanni;
and these imaginary beings of Great
Slave Lake, whom the Dogrib Indians
simply call "the Enemy" and fears so
greatly that they must always build
their homes on islands, safe from the
shoreline where the Enemy roam. In my book
'Legends of the Nahanni Valley', I talk
about eight more wildman legends
endemic to northern Canada
and Alaska, including the Wendigo of Cree
and Algonquin folklore and the Kushtaka,
or "Land Otter Man", that the Tlingit say
haunt the Alaskan coastline. I also
offer a more thorough description of the
various ethnological theories regarding the
nature of the Nakani and include a few
more Nakani sightings that require more
context that I was prepared to give in
this video, including a fascinating
encounter that took place right inside
the Nahanni Valley itself. If you'd like
to get yourself or a special someone a
copy of this book, please check out the
link in the description.
