The Tsilhqotʼin or Chilcotin ("People of the river", /tʃɪlˈkoʊtɪn/ chil-KOH-tin;[3] also spelled Tsilhqutʼin, Tŝinlhqotʼin, 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 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.

The Tsilhqotʼin first encountered European trading goods in the 1780s and 1790s when British and American ships arrived along the northwest coast seeking sea otter pelts.

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 Tsilhqotʼin territory.

Furniss in The Burden of History states that "there is no direct evidence that these smallpox epidemics reached the central interior of British Columbia or the Secwepemc, Carrier, or Tsilhqotʼin".

Throughout that period, Indian agents were empowered to remove children from homes to attend St. Joseph's Mission School in Williams Lake, British Columbia.

[5] Aside from the indigenous communities, there are only two small unincorporated towns in the whole region: Alexis Creek and Anahim Lake, the largest, with 522 people.

Highway 20 westbound from Williams Lake crosses the Fraser River at Sheep Creek - thereby entering Tsilhqotʼin traditional territory.

The highway passes over the Chilcotin Plateau, characterized by undulating grasslands, expansive forests of lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, a scattering of lakes, rivers, creeks and ponds, volcanic and glaciated landforms, and a magnificent backdrop of snow-covered peaks.