Where Happiness Dwells

Book excerpt: The Dane-zaa people have lived in BC’s Peace River area for thousands of years. Elders documented their peoples’ history and worldview, passing them on through storytelling. Language loss, however, threatens to break the bonds of knowledge transmission. At the request of the Doig River First Nations, anthropologists Robin and Jillian Ridington present a history of the Dane-zaa people based on oral histories collected over a half century of fieldwork. These powerful stories not only preserve traditional knowledge for future generations, they also tell the inspiring story of how the Dane-zaa learned to succeed and flourish in the modern world.