What is "auke"

n. A lake in Alaska.

The Auke are an Alaskan Native people, a subgroup of the Tlingit whose name for themselves Aakʼw Ḵwáan means "Small Lake People". The Auke lived along the northwestern coast of North America, in the area that is now the Alexander Archipelago and adjoining mainland of the Alaska Panhandle around Juneau.

The Auke had a village on the bay just east of Point Louisa, about 13 miles northwest of Juneau. The site, now adjacent to Glacier Highway, has been reserved by the U.S. Forest Service as a recreation area.

In 1880, after Joe Juneau and Richard Harris were led to gold in the Silver Bow Basin, U.S. naval officers encouraged the Auke to move from the area to avoid conflict with miners and prospectors. The census of Alaska at the time listed the Auke population as 640, of whom 300 were on Admiralty Island, 50 on Douglas Island, and 290 on Stephens Passage, the latter presumably including those at the Point Louisa village.

The Auke are an Alaskan Native people. Auke may also refer to:

• Auke Mountain, named after the Auke people
• Auke Bay, Alaska, a bay in Juneau
• Auke Lake in Auke Bay
• Auke (name), a Dutch masculine given name

Auke, pron. [ˈaukə], is a quite common West Frisian masculine given name. It seems to have been a diminutive foarm orgininally (-ke is one of the most common diminutive suffices in West Frisian), which developed from the historic form Auwe or Auwen. According to onomatologist Rienk de Haan, Auwe was a very reduced form of certain Germanic names, possibly starting with Alf- (meaning "supernatural" of "nature spirit").

In West Frisian, masculine given names can usually be adapted to equivalent feminine given names. In the case of Auke, this is accomplished by dropping the voiceless final syllable and adding a diminutive suffix in its place (in this case -je), resulting in Aukje. This is a very common feminine given name in Friesland. __NOTOC__