WHERE WE ARE

“Nulato is beautiful and has an amazing culture.”

About Nulato

The native name of Nulato is Noolaaghedoh, ‘before the dog salmon’. It was called this because it was the place where people gathered on the Yukon and made camp before the dog salmon run. Nulato is also called Tlaakeyeet, ‘in the shelter of rocks’, because the village is located next to a bluff, which juts out into the river. There are two townsites, the original (‘downtown’) site and the new site on the hillside two miles back from the river. It is located 310 air miles west of Fairbanks.

A few of the 240 people now living in Nulato came from up the Koyukuk River, but the majority came from the Kaiyuh region (spelled Kkaayeh in the Koyukon orthography). The people of Nulato speak the lower dialect of Koyukon. The village is well known for its Stick Dance, which is held only there and at Kaltag.

Father Loyens says of Nulato that it was “the last trading post to be founded by the Russian-American Company in the interior Alaska (1838).” And at the same time it was their furthest upriver venture in the competition for the interior fur trade. The location of the Russian trading post and its American successor in Koyukon territory influenced the Catholic missionaries in their choice of Nulato as the first mission on the Yukon (1887).