Lower Tanana

A people

Denali, the highest peak in North America, reflected in Wonder Lake at Mile 85 of the Denali Park Road.
Denali National Park and Preserve, NPS · Public Domain (NPS)

Background

Not the Upper Tanana: the Lower Tanana are a Northern Athabascan people, and NPS counts them with the Dena'ina, the Koyukon, the Upper Kuskokwim and the Western Ahtna among the five Athabascan peoples whose homeland includes Denali National Park and Preserve, a five-to-one-park grouping the park's article calls unique. The one Lower Tanana band it describes held a territory that included most of the drainages of the Nenana and Toklat rivers. The Tanana Chiefs Conference, an interior Alaska consortium of 42 members, divides its region into six subregions, two of them, Upper Tanana and Yukon Tanana, named for Tanana country, and none of them called Lower Tanana.

Parks on its homelands

Sources

Checked September 2026.