Yukon and Indigenous Self-Government
December 9th, 2020 | By Dia Martinez Gracey
Content Warning: colonialism, residential schools, 60s scoop
Tucked away in the northwest corner of Canada, bordering Alaska and just below the Arctic circle, lies the town of Dawson City, Yukon. This town is famous worldwide as the hub of the Klondike gold rush. However, during the 4 months I lived there in summer 2019, I learned that while the gold-rush era buildings and paraphernalia still stand, what permeates the spirit of the town is the Tr’ondek Hwech’in (TH) government and culture. As a thriving self-governing Indigenous nation, and one not often discussed outside the Territory, I wanted to share some of what I learned about the history of TH - Canada relations, their process of self-government, and the benefits of this self-governance to the entire Dawson community.
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After arriving in Whitehorse, I spent a week driving around the Yukon with my mum, doing some sightseeing before heading up to Dawson to work on an off-the-grid research and market garden. Touring around the Southern Yukon, each town we entered was marked by a beautiful, uniquely designed, wooden building. We quickly discovered that these stunning buildings were cultural centres. Run by members of the local First nation, they are places where community events are held, as well as where visitors can go to learn about the history and culture of that First Nation. Even towns as small as Carcross, with a population of 301 people, have a cultural centre.
Further, the museums in Whitehorse also had a heavy Indigenous focus. There were displays on the pre-contact lifestyles of various Yukon First Nations, showcasing traditional dress, hunting, and cultural practices. There were exhibits detailing influential chiefs and events, including contact with colonizers, explaining how Indigenous people helped and were harmed by the newcomers. Even in exhibits focused on the Gold Rush, it was recognized that gold was first discovered by Skookim Jim Mason, an Indigenous man, though his white relative took the credit due to the dismissal of Indigenous people in mining claims.
Coming from Ontario, where the first time many people hear about the specific nations whose territory we are on is through a school land acknowledgement, and there are few places to get more information on the history, culture, and language of these specific nations, the difference was staggering. Not only was this information ingrained into mainstream museums, but there were centres where the history of these nations was actively being made, and the present culture was being upheld and shared with visitors. I could feel that the settler-Indigenous relationship was different here, and I was curious to learn more.
When I arrived in Dawson, I was again struck by the beauty of their Danoja Zho cultural centre on the banks of the Klondike river. However, what was even more striking was the block-long two story TH government building and town hall across the street.
View of Dawson City and the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers summer 2019.
Carcross Learning Centre https://kza.yk.ca/project/carcross-learning-centre/
Tr’ondek Hwech’in Government Building, Dawson City Yukon.
At the Visitor’s Centre, I was told that the TH were a self-governing First Nation, as were most across the Yukon, but I wasn’t really sure what that entailed. As I continued to discover the town, I learned more about the TH government. I saw there was a TH teaching and learning farm off the highway where young TH citizens learned to cultivate food for their community (no small feat when they are trying to grow food on permafrost). I learned that part of Dawson was owned by the TH government, and that the TH government controlled some mining rights. I was told that the TH language was taught in schools. And many people I met worked for the TH government, one woman I housesat for worked in their mining office, reviewing proposed mining operations on their traditional territory. Each thing I learned helped to build the picture that here, the TH were an established government having power and influence like any other, and I became more and more curious about how this came to be.
A couple months into my stay, I signed up for a course called TH 101, which is a two day intensive on the history, culture, and government of the TH people. It is mandatory for all TH employees, students of Yukon University, and free for anyone in the town who wants to take it. This course was delivered by three women: a TH elder and former chief, and two senior government officials, one Indigenous and one not. There I learned many key things, which I have strung together in story-format below. I want to note that this is my visitor interpretation and will thus be flawed, but that I am basing it off of information I learned directly from the mouths of members and representatives of the TH people.
Since time immemorial, the Tr’ondek Hwech’in people have lived in what is now parts of the Yukon and Alaska. They used many seasonal camps, and one at the current site of Dawson city (Tr’ochek) was quite popular due to the abundance of salmon that could be harvested in the warm months. The TH travelled by foot, or on the river using canoes with long poles instead of paddles to move themselves along the riverbed. The TH had a complex family and community structure, and while much of the year was spent hunting and living with a single family unit, this was interspersed with large scale community events such as potlatches.
Chief Isaac in canoe on the Yukon River near Dawson City, 1898 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chief_Isaac_of_the_Han_in_canoe_near_Dawson,_ca_1898_(CURTIS_2000).jpeg
Until the late 1800s, contact between colonizers and the TH was relatively limited, consisting mostly of the fur trade, and the occasional geological surveyor; Yukon had not even been established as a territory yet, and was still part of Northwest Territories which included present day NWT and Nunavut. However, even this level of interaction was harmful to the Indigenous peoples, and Jim Boss, the Chief of the Ta’an Kwach’an in Southern Yukon wrote to the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs saying “tell the King very hard, we want something for our Indians because they take our land and game” [1].
The Klondike gold rush from 1896-1899 changed the course of contact forever. In just three years it is estimated that 100,000 prospectors came to TH territory searching for gold, and with them came disease, missionaries, environmental destruction, resource extraction, and racism. During this time period the TH were led by Chief Isaac. This revered chief had immense foresight, and sought to protect his people by moving them down river to another site called Moosehide. In addition to moving his people, Chief Isaac also met with relatives and community members on the other side of the border in Alaska and taught them TH songs and dances and asked them to hold onto them for safekeeping, since he predicted the loss of culture imposed by the white people.
Though the gold rush evicted Indigenous people from one of their important camps, and conducted irreversible damage on the local environment through deforestation, mass landfills, and mining, these initial changes were only the beginning. Once the prospectors had moved on to the next gold rush, a permanent settlement had been established as Dawson City, and with it came the church, the police, and general occupation by the Canadian government.
Dawson city during the gold rush, many houses going up the hill, massive deforestation.
https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/the-gold-rush-in-british-columbia-and-the-yukon
Initially, a catholic day school was set up in Moosehide, and many TH children were able to stay with their family, though they were still discouraged from speaking their native language or participating in other aspects of their culture. But over time, many TH children were taken to the residential school in Carcross, where all experienced unfit living conditions, a lack of culture, and an imposition of self-hatred, and many experienced physical and sexual assault, and some even died. This school operated for Indigenous children across the Yukon from 1911 to 1969.
Concurrent to residential schools, the TH people also experienced what has been referred to across Canada as the “60s Scoop”, however this issue describes the ongoing process in which children are taken away from Indigenous families into the foster care system. This happens due to a multitude of factors, including foster care workers having bias against Indigenous parents, intergenerational trauma from colonization creating less safe homes, and the amount of money given to white foster care parents being much higher than the amount of financial and social support Indigenous parents receive, incentivizing parents to put their children into the system in order to give them more support in their childhood.
With the complete disruption of their traditional lifestyle, eviction from many traditional sites, and active attack on their children and culture, throughout the 20th century many TH people suffered from poverty, trauma, alcoholism, suicide, and other struggles.
That said, there was still a strong community leadership and voice among the TH. As part of a coalition of First Nations known as the Yukon Native Brotherhood, TH leaders went to Ottawa in 1973 to present Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau with a proposal called Together Today for our Children Tomorrow. This document outlined the hardships Indigenous Yukoners faced, a vision for a better future, and it laid the foundation for the land claims in the Yukon. Because there had never been any treaties in the Yukon, all its land legally belonged to the First Nations under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This gave these nations a unique position to fight for their rights, when so much had been taken from them without even a pretense of proper procedure or treaties, such as in Eastern Canada.
It took 20 years of negotiations before an agreement was reached between the federal government and the TH. In this time, the issues of discrimination, poverty, alcoholism, and other trauma responses continued to exist in Dawson. As one of my TH 101 leaders told me, in the 90s there was a divide in Dawson between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous parts of town, there was rampant homelessness, visible alcoholism in the streets, and suicide running through the community.
The Umbrella Final Agreement was signed in 1993. This document outlines the basic land claim process and set the stage for the individual Self-Governance agreements that are specific to each nation. It was in 1998 that the TH signed their self-government agreement. While the TH Final Agreement is a detailed document over 500 pages long, two of the key implementations it accomplishes are to set aside settlement land, which is land owned and operated by the TH nation, and establish an autonomous elected government with the authority and responsibility of both territorial and municipal governments. This gives the TH jurisdiction over their land, resources, wildlife, and the ability to create laws that apply on their land and to their citizens.
Image showing the traditional territory and settlement lands for the Tr’ondek Hwech’in.https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-the-Trondek-Hwechin-TH-Traditional-Territory-illustrates-the-spatial_fig1_331992700
Today, what agreement’s implementation looks like is an established government that is the largest employer in Dawson City. It looks like affordable housing programs for TH citizens on settlement land. It looks like an income taxation structure that goes to the TH government for people who live on settlement land (which includes half of Dawson City), meaning the government has sustained revenue. It looks like Han, the TH language, being taught to all students at Dawson’s elementary school. It looks like the government owning investment and infrastructure corporations. It looks like the TH getting a commission for the resources being extracted on their land, and the authority to block the development of projects that they deem to be harmful.
At the same time as legal power was gained by the TH, a cultural power and identity was also being returned. Their relatives from Alaska who had been safeguarding songs and dances began to teach them to the TH at community events, such as the biannual Moosehide gathering. There has also been a movement to return to traditional routes, with elders in the community taking on the roles of running “First Hunt” and “First Fish” events teaching youth and anyone else how to find and properly prepare traditional foods. In the same spirit, there have been events attempting to recover traditional knowledge on recreating and operating their traditional birch canoes.
When visiting the Danoja Zho cultural centre, my interpretive guide, a 20 year old TH citizen, explained that he loved his life as a TH citizen, loved and took pride in his community, his government, and his Indigenous identity. He went on to say that it truly blew his mind to hear about the plights of other Indigenous nations across Canada since he had “never known anything else”.
The situation in Dawson is not perfect. There has still been a devastating loss of culture and traditional knowledge, as my interpretive guide told me “it used to take three women a day to make one birch bark canoe but when we tried it took over 17 people over a week to make our kayak, and it didn’t end up working in the end as it wasn’t fully waterproofed”. There are still scars of intergenerational trauma, families have been disrupted and barriers imposed. There is still discrimination against Indigenous people and a housing crisis across the Yukon. Twenty years of self government cannot undo over a hundred years of colonization, but it has certainly made gigantic strides towards improving the lives of TH people today.
In just two decades, the TH people went from widespread homelessness to having affordable housing for their citizens. From suffering rampant unemployment to being the largest employer in the town, who train their own citizens for these roles. From feeling a loss of cultural identity to heading down the path of cultural rediscovery and cultural exchange, sharing their history and values with visitors from around the world. From being looked down upon and mistreated by the settlers in Dawson to being respected and cherished by them.
The TH government is not a blueprint for Indigenous self-government in general. It would be easy to see this story as an inspirational “where there’s a will there’s a way” tale of a community coming together and fighting for their rights. And while it is an incredible story, Indigenous nations everywhere have been fighting for sovereignty since first contact; there is always the will, the trouble is finding the way, since each Indigenous nation across Canada and beyond is living in a different legal and historical context.
The Han people in Alaska who safeguarded the TH songs and dances have in recent years looked to their relatives success and asked the TH for help establishing their own government. But the TH people unfortunately cannot help much, since their relatives live across a colonizer-drawn border and therefore exist under an entirely different structure and cannot make the same legal land claim that began the self-government process for the TH. Further, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities across Canada all have different histories and legal contexts.
Yes, the TH self government process as well as the other dozen self-governing nations in Yukon is a testament to their resolve, negotiation skills, and hard work, but that has always been present in Indigenous nations. What is needed is a listening ear on the part of the government, and a genuine commitment to working together. Yukon is a small territory population wise, with only 40,000 people. In addition, often referred to as the “last frontier”, the Yukon has few roads, few towns, and relatively little development, meaning that the agreement of settlement lands did not disturb any large populations or government institutions. Further, while mining continues to be a part of the Yukon’s economy, it is not a place that the rest of the country depends on for any key resources. It is for these reasons that the Canadian government was more willing to negotiate.
Considering the above, we can see that when the government denies First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples self-governance elsewhere, it is because Canada wants to use their land for settlements and/or resource extraction. Viewed in through this perspective, these decisions become apparent as modern colonialism.
Before arriving in Dawson, I had never heard of the TH people, or any of the other Yukon First Nations. I considered myself quite educated on Indigenous issues, especially the laws such as the Indian Act and some land claims proceedings, and yet I had never heard of these monumental land claims processes. Before I saw it for myself, I honestly did not think that a completely autonomous self-governing First Nation would be accepted by the Canadian government at this point in history, let alone that they had existed since before I was born.
I think it is incredibly important that all Canadians are taught not only about colonization, residential schools, and the systemic racism against Indigenous peoples by our country, but also about the success and self-determination of Indigenous people across the country as well. Everyone should learn about the TH and the other Yukon First Nations. We should learn about the land claims in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.
I believe this is valuable not only because these are important events in Canada’s history, but also because they are a tremendous source of inspiration to Indigneous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike, providing a vision for a more just and peaceful future. Sometimes the impacts of colonialism can be overwhelming, and the mistreatment of Indigenous people a problem so multifaceted it seems hard to know where to start. Knowing the incredible benefits and precedent of recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, of finally peeling back the colonial structure by returning power to Indigenous nations, it gives us something tangible, tried and true, to work towards.