Phoebe Nahanni

Phoebe Rose Nahanni (January 17, 1947 – May 14, 2001) was a Slavey-Dene geographer and cartographer. She played a central role in the Dene Nation mapping project, which constructed a map of how the Dene Nation actively used about 450,000 square miles of land. This information was one of the factors in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry's recommendation not to construct a pipeline through the Mackenzie River Valley. Nahanni was also active in the social scientific study of arctic and subarctic communities, and is thought to have been the first Slavey-Dene woman to hold a master's degree.

Life and career Nahanni was born on January 17, 1947, near Jean Marie River in the Northwest Territories. She attended the University of Western Ontario, making her one of the first Dene people to attend university, and she graduated with a degree in geography in 1972. Nahanni and a group of students worked with members of the Computer Science Department at the University of Western Ontario to experiment with developing a microwave communications network to create a "university of the air" that could be accessed from the Arctic. To that end, Nahanni was an original signer of the Dene Declaration of self-determination, and she led a team of 20 Dene researchers to interview 546 people about their practices on the land. Her thesis was entitled Dene women in the traditional and modern northern economy in Denendeh, Northwest Territories, Canada. She continued to research and publish her work, and remained connected to the community of social scientists studying arctic and subarctic regions. For example, she contributed a chapter to the 1990 book Gossip: A Spoken History of Women in the North, Nahanni was also the first keynote speaker invited to the First International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences, at Université Laval in 1992.

Nahanni was married to Ronald Pokrupa, and had 3 children. on May 14, 2001, though her place of death has also been given as Montreal.

After Nahanni's death, the Dehcho First Nations endowed the Phoebe Nahanni Memorial Scholarship, which, as of 2020, awards $12,000 annually to "Dehcho Dene descendants pursuing a doctorate, masters or undergraduate degree in the natural sciences, law or political science".

Selected work Towards a Developmental Land Settlement in the N.W.T. (1974) "Women in the Workplace: Dene Women and Work", in Gossip : A Spoken History of Women in the North (1990) Social Sciences in the North, coauthor (1993)