As a former English teacher, long time library patron, book reviewer, informal Berton House liaison, and editor of The Klondike Sun, it often falls to me to make the introductions when an author comes to do a public reading at the Dawson Community Library.
Palma Berger and Eleanor Millard had a long chat at the Dawson Daycare Bazaar. Photo: Dan Davidson
It’s a community library because it contains the collections for both the public and school libraries, is jointly run by a public and a teacher librarian, plus a clerk, and so serves the entire community.
Eleanor Millard needed hardly any introduction when she came to promote her latest book in November. Most of the dozen or so folks in attendance knew her already; she lived here for more than a decade in the 1960s and 70s.
In her time here, during part of which she owned the iconic little log cabin that Henry Reinick now lives in on 8th Avenue, she was a social worker, building custodian, adult educator and even a Member of the Legislative Assembly, in the days when the North End of Dawson all the way to Old Crow was designated as the Ogilvie Riding.
For part of 1978 she was the Minister of Education, in the decade before party politics would have made it impossible for an NDP sympathizer to serve with a batch of Tories.
Since then, she’s worked as a government researcher (she used to write up the daily tributes you can read in Hansard). For almost two decades she has lived in Carcross, from which she commutes a day or two a week to work part time for Yukon Learn, a natural extension of the years she spent running Project Northern Tutor in Dawson.
Millard read a little from all three of her books, beginning with the memoir, Journeys Outside
and In, which deals a lot with her time in Dawson. There’s lots of amusing tales about airplane rides.
Her first book was actually a series of interconnected short stories, also inspired largely by her Dawson life, called Riverchild. The stories feature the same characters at various times in their lives, mostly First Nations people whose lives and community have been affected by Residential School.
Her most recent book is a novel, Summer Snow. Its theme, she told her audience, is about coping with the chronic problem of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Her adopted daughter, now 47 years-old, has had to live with this problem, and while she was growing up, there wasn’t a great deal of information or advice about how to deal with it.
The book is set during the period when the authorities, either in government or education, did not want to acknowledge or deal with FASD, ostensibly because to do so would involve labeling the children so afflicted. Millard considers this a serious mistake and says that part of the reason she wrote the book, which should not be taken as autobiographical, was to write about the problem and put some useful information out in the public in a digestible form.
Millard stayed with and reconnected with a number of old friends while in town and participated in the Dawson Daycare’s Christmas Bazaar as well as doing her reading.
Journeys Outside and In
River Child
Summer Snow