The Tsilhqotin or Chilcotin ("People of the river", ; also spelled Chilcotin, Tsilhqutin, Tŝinlhqotin, 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. For more information about the 2014 landmark court case that established Indigenous land title for the Tsilhqotʼin Nation and demanded that colonial provinces engage in meaningful and prior consultation before engaging in extractive industries on Tsilhqot'in lands, see Tsilhqotʼin Nation v British Columbia. History Pre-contact The Tŝilhqotin 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 Tsilhqotin 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 Tsilhqotin. They began trading directly and through Carrier intermediaries. In 1821, what was then the Hudson's Bay Company established a fur trade post at Fort Alexandria on the Fraser River, at the eastern limit of Tsilhqotin territory. This became the tribal people's major source for European goods. Disease Contact with Europeans and First Nations intermediaries led to the introduction of Eurasian diseases, which were endemic among the Europeans. As they had long been exposed, some had developed acquired immunity, but the First Nations peoples were devastated by epidemics of these new diseases. Infectious disease outbreaks with high fatalities for Tsilhqotʼin populations: Whooping cough, 1845 Measles, 1850 Smallpox, 1855 (from infected blankets from the Thompson River area) Smallpox, 1862–1863 (reduced BC aboriginal population by 62% – completely destroyed six Secwepemc bands, a total of 850 people; 2/3 of the Secwepemc population died; half of the 14 Fraser River bands became extinct) Spanish flu, 1919 – this epidemic affected European Canadians as well as First Nations, and millions of people died internationally The geographically isolated position of the Tsilhqotin may have protected them from the first of the smallpox epidemics, which