Carried in the Blood: A Mother's Life Among the Dene People

 

Ideogram. A Dene woman, 600 CE.

Somewhere in the boreal forests of the Pacific Northwest, a woman tends a fire. She knows the smell of woodsmoke, the weight of a child on her back, and the names of every edible plant within a days walk. 

The woman we might imagine from haplogroup A2a5b'd'e - a branch of the ancient and widespread haplogroup A lineage that has been carried through Indigenous North American populations for thousands of years - would have lived in a world centered on nature, her family's place in it, and deep relational knowledge to land. Her maternal line stretches back to the initial peopling of the Americas, her DNA a thread connecting her to women who crossed Beringia perhaps 15,000 years earlier. By 600 CE, her people had been home in the region of the Pacific Northwest, present day Canada and Alaska for a very long time.

She was almost certainly part of an Athabaskan-speaking community. They were the ancestors of peoples now known as the Dene, whose territories spread across a vast arc of subarctic and boreal Canada. In the region around modern-day British Columbia or the Yukon, her world was shaped by rivers teeming with salmon, forests thick with spruce and birch, and seasonal rhythms that demanded both intimate ecological knowledge and remarkable physical endurance.

The Shape of a Year

Her life as a mother would have been inseparable from the seasonable round. Spring meant movement - breaking winter camps, following the first runs of salmon up the rivers, gathering the tender shoots and roots that ended months of relative scarcity. She would have known precisely when the soapberries ripened and where the moose calved, knowledge passed down through her mother and her mother's mother, carried in the same mitochondrial line that geneticists would one day catalog.

Summer was the time of abundance and preservation. Salmon were gutted, split, and hung on drying racks. This was the foundation of winter survival, and the work of processing fish was enormous. She would have done much of this work alongside other women, her children nearby, the older ones already learning the techniques that would sustain them. The social world of camp was largely a world of women and children during these busy seasons, with men ranging further for large game.

Autumn brought the urgency of preparation. Meat from caribou and moose had to be dried and cached. Hides needed tanning. This was a laborious process involving brain, water, and hours of working the skin until it was soft and waterproof. From those hides she would fashion clothing for the cold months ahead: tailored garments with sinew thread, shaped to fit her children's growing bodies. A child improperly dressed in the subarctic interior did not survive a bad winter. Her needlework was life-giving.

Winter drew the community inward. Camps clustered near cached food supplies and reliable fuel. Storytelling flourished in the long darkness. Oral traditions encoded knowledge of the land, the spirit world, and the proper relationships between people and animals. These stories were not merely entertainment. They were curriculum, and she was one of their transmitters.

What the DNA remembers

Haplogroup A2a5b is a quiet witness. It carries no memory of names or stories, only the record of maternal inheritance - mothers passing to daughters and sons, and the daughters continuing the line generation after generation, across a continent. When geneticists identify this haplogroup in a living person today, or in ancient remains, they are tracing a line of women that runs unbroken from the ice-age world to the present.

The woman by the fire in 600 CE did not think of herself as a link in a chain. She thought of her children, the state of the salmon cache, the weather coming in from the mountains. But she passed something forward nonetheless - not just her mitochondria, but her knowledge, her language, her ways of being in a particular landscape.

That, too, is a kind of inheritance that travels across time.

An update on the mitotree

 

FTDNA.

Back in September 2025, cousin Catherine received her initial mtDNA result and a place on the mitotree. This gave us a haplogroup for our shared maternal line ancestor Maria Jesus Vasquez. At the time, FTDNA's results showed a most recent common ancestor for this line was 850 BCE. The haplogroup recently updated, and now shows a most recent common maternal line ancestor dating to around 600 CE. 

The haplogroup should update again once the mtDNA kit for our cousin Joe is processed. He is also a descendant of Maria Jesus Vasquez from her daughter Maria Jesus Campuzano.

According to the discover report, this haplogroup migrated from the Athabaskan-speaking lands of Pacific Northwest Canada into northern Mexico.

Year of the Horse

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Mural, Downtown LA. 24 Sep 2016.

Here's another image to celebrate Year of the Horse for Lunar New Year. This was taken on a street art walk in Downtown LA back in 2016.

Happy Lunar New Year

 

Smithsonian. Year of the Horse stamp. 2002.

Life in Saxony, 1817

 

Magdeburg, 1795-1800.

When Dorothea Sophia Gagelmann lived in the Province of Saxony, she was living in a region still finding its footing after a period of upheaval. The province had been created in 1816, cobbled together from territories ceded following the Congress of Vienna and conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The map of Europe had been redrawn, and families like Dorothea's were learning to navigate a new political reality under Prussian rule.

The province stretched across central Germany with its capital at Magdeburg, south of the towns of Gardelegen and the village of Roxförde where Dorothea Sophia appears in records. The region was among Prussia's most fertile, particularly the rich soils of the Magdeburger Börde near the base of the Harz Mountains and the valleys of the Saale and Unstrut rivers. Dorothea's family would have witnessed golden waves of wheat and rye rippling across the landscape, crops that made this province the breadbasket of Prussia.

Sugar beet cultivation was beginning to transform the countryside, grown especially in districts north of the Harz mountains and along the Saale. Market gardens flourished in towns around Magdeburg. Yet alongside this prosperity, sandy plains in the Altmark to the north yielded only meager harvests, reminding farmers that the land's bounty was unevenly distributed.

In 1817, most families still centered their lives around the village. These functioned as corporate bodies where peasant leaders supervised the fields, ditches, and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported village courts that handled minor offenses. Within families, the patriarch made all decisions and worked to arrange advantageous marriages for his children.

Yet change was in the air. The old feudal bonds were beginning to loosen. Agricultural reforms launched after the Napoleonic Wars aimed to free peasants from feudal obligations and allow them to become landowners. While reforms had some success - Prussia's cultivated land would expand significantly in the following decades - many minor peasants lost their means of subsistence and became agricultural workers.

The Napoleonic Wars had ended just two years earlier, and their effects still echoed through daily life. At the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, the greater part of Saxon troops had deserted to allied forces when Napoleon was defeated. Families had lived through occupation, shifting loyalties. Prussia's economy remained under stress from funding occupation forces and war indemnities.

Much of village communal life centered around church services and holy days. The majority of residents were Protestant, following church traditions that would be formalized into the Prussian Union. The region is noted as having the highest density of churches in Germany today.

At this time, Prussia still had complex and inefficient customs laws, with different tariffs on goods passing between western territories and the Prussian heartland. Trade moved along the Elbe River and the network of roads connecting outlying regions to the center. 

Dorothea's ancestors in this region of Saxony lived in a place poised between the medieval past and the industrial future. They likely farmed fertile fields using methods her grandparents would have recognized, worshipped in village churches, and raised their families under the watchful eyes of both tradition and an expanding Prussian state. The railways, factories, and rapid changes that would transform Germany in the coming decades were still just over the horizon. For now, the rhythm of life followed the seasons, the church calendar, and the ancient patterns of village agriculture that had sustained generations before them.