Kenai Alaska

Kenai overview

Kenai (/ˈkiːnaɪ/, KEE-ny) (Dena’ina: Shk’ituk’t; Russian: Кенай Kenay) is a city in the Kenai Peninsula Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska.[4][6] It is one hundred and eighty-seven miles south from Anchorage. The population was 7,100 as of the 2010 census,[4] up from 6,942 in 2000.

The city of Kenai is named after the local Dena’ina (Tanaina) word ‘ken’ or ‘kena’, which means ‘flat, meadow, open area with few trees; base, low ridge’, according to the Dena’ina Topical Dictionary by James Kari, Ph.D., published in 2007. This describes the area along the mouth and portion of the Kenai River near the City of Kenai. Archaeological evidence suggests that the area was first occupied by the Kachemak people from 1000 B.C., until they were displaced by the Dena’ina Athabaskan people around 1000 A.D. Before the arrival of the Russians, Kenai was a Dena’ina village called Shk’ituk’t, meaning “where we slide down.” When Russian fur traders first arrived in 1741, about 1,000 Dena’ina lived in the village. The traders called the people “Kenaitze”, which is a Russian term for “people of the flats”, or “Kenai people”. This name was later adopted when they were incorporated as the Kenaitze Alaskan Natives in the early 1970s.