Yann Herry is drawn to true stories of daring. Ask him about his favourite characters in the Yukon’s Francophone history and he’ll tell you about the people who took chances, cut their own trails and lived their dreams. “It’s the French-Canadian spirit, going back to the voyageurs,” he said. “We’ve always been pulled toward big …
When Paul Gowdie first learned about the hundreds of Black soldiers who worked on constructing the Alaska Highway in the 1940s, he was surprised. “I’m in a mostly white town, in a mostly white territory, and I attend this presentation and find out that 30 percent of the soldiers who built the highway were Black,” …
On an evening in early November, Teri-Lee Isaac and her family butchered a caribou that was given to them by family in Fort McPherson. While the practice gives the family a freezer full of wild meat for the upcoming winter, it also connects them to the land, and to Northern Tutchone cultural practices that have been passed down through the generations.
In 1898, Ione Christensen’s great-grandfather and his four sons hiked the Chilkoot Trail on their way to find fortune in the Klondike gold fields. Over her lifetime, Christensen, who recently turned 86, has spent a lot of time on the historic trail herself.
North Yukon is honeycombed with routes. It’s an intricate network of trails and waterways that the Gwich’in people have used to move through the area for thousands of years.
In the early 1900s, when she was a teenager, Bobbi Rose Koe’s great-great-grandmother and her friend paddled a moose skin boat through the dangerous stretch of fast-flowing high water at Peel Canyon. More than 100 years later, Koe joined a group of five youth from First Nations in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories on an 18-day canoe trip. Along the way they passed through the treacherous Peel Canyon.
Her name is Wolf Mother, Ghoóch Tlâ in Tlingit, and Colleen James in English. She grew up in Cowley, about halfway between Whitehorse and Carcross. Her mother was Tlingit and her father was English.
McNaughton had rescued boxes of photographs showing the southern Yukon town in its heyday, and with that newly acquired collection, the Watson Lake Historical Society was born.
Sometimes when Joella Hogan returns home after a long day, she’ll find a bag of fresh rose petals on her doorstep. And once in a while, neighbourhood kids will knock on her door with fists full of wild flowers and plants. “People always want to help me; they see this little business and they see …
Sharing Northern Tutchone stories, culture and heritage—one bar at a time Read More »
The Hamlet of Elsa—a collection of homes and industrial buildings nestled into the Silver Trail at kilometre 97—transformed from a booming mining town in the 1960s to a ghost town in the 1990s. Today, it faces an uncertain future. But to Mike Mancini, it was the first home he knew as a child. It was …
As Elsa moves towards an uncertain future, a former resident reflects on its past Read More »
Doug Davidge finds lost things. Over the course of more than three decades in the Yukon, Davidge has been known to find things that people know are missing–such as the A.J. Goddard, a steamboat that vanished in Lake Laberge in 1901–and things that people might not even realize are lost. For example, a few years ago …
Erin Dixon is interested in how other people live. “I have been interested in other people’s houses, since I was a little kid,” she said. “Trick-or-treating was always my favourite because you got to go to other people’s houses and peek inside. Now, I love it when you drive down a dark street and everyone …
