The study area of the traditional land use and occupancy study profiled in this booklet is broadly speaking northeast Alberta, south of the Clearwater River, west of the Alberta/Saskatchewan border, north of the Cold Lake air weapons range and east of the Athabasca River. In this region Athapaskan, Cree, and Métis people have mixed with Euro-Canadians engaged in the fur trade since the arrival of Peter Pond in 1780. The area generally opened up to settlement with steamboats on the Athabasca, the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway and the impetus created by World War II to construct roads into the region. By the 1950s the industrial economy was becoming more and more established and Aboriginal participation in wage work began to increase. Through the 1960s and 1970s with the establishment of new tar sands plants with state of the art technology, Fort McMurray became a Canadian boom town, and there was less and less incentive for Aboriginal people to maintain a full-time presence in the bush economy. Trapping, hunting, fishing and gathering became part-time activities for most, and thousands of outsiders also began to hunt and fish in the Aboriginal homelands with the assistance of seismic access roads, four-wheel-drive vehicles and float planes. Life for regional residents continues to change at a fast pace as the Alberta-Pacific pulp mill comes on stream and tar sands projects are expanded. These factors provided the incentive for the Athabasca Native Development Corporation to undertake the traditional land use and occupancy study described in this booklet.