Panning the rush: Yukon First Nations and images of the Klondike gold rush in contemporary Yukon society.
Northern Review › Nbr. 1998, June 1998
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Panning the rush: Yukon First Nations and images of the Klondike gold rush in contemporary Yukon society.
The Northern Review #19 (Summer 1998): 238-257. Speaking at the opening of the World Gold Panning Championships in Dawson City on August 16, 1996, the 100th Anniversary of the discovery of gold, Tr'ondek Hwech'in chief, Steve Taylor, in responding to the previous speaker's summary of the history of Dawson, noted that the person failed even to mention the existence of Natives or the role they played in the development of the Yukon. "As you know," he said, "my people have occupied this land for tens of thousands of years. And sometimes when we hear the so-called history of this place, we never get mentioned. It's as if we don't exist. But I assure you, we do exist." (1) Chief Taylor's blunt comments succinctly describe what has been a long-standing problem for First Nation people in the territory: they are invisible, as invisible as the central character in Ralph Ellison's searing indictment of American attitudes toward black people. As Ellison wrote: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me. (2) Ellison's observation is relevant to Yukon history for the greater part of the one hundred years since the discovery of gold on Rabbit Creek in August 1896. Ken Coates has demonstrated, for example, that the gold rush was, in all ways, a decidedly non-Native phenomenon. Although the gold rush produced a vast quantity of written material, from diaries to autobiographies to travelogues, there was little mention of the Native people. (3) In her study of Yukon newspapers between the Klondike Gold Rush and the 1960s, Amanda Graham also has demonstrated that aboriginal people were largely invisible, rarely registering with the various editors or reporters of the period. In the past 15 years, a few scholars, such as Catherine McClellan, Julie Cruikshank and Ken Coates have begun to change that situation, studying and publishing material that is either directly related to First Nations or incorporates them into their broader work. Their work can be set alongside that of the publications of non-academic institutions, such as the Yukon Historical and Museums Association (YHMA) and the Council of Yukon First Nations, and historian-researchers such as Helen Dobrowolsky and David Neufeld. Still, the field of historians publishing on Yukon First Nations is relatively small and the volume of production remains slim. Also notable is the relative invisibility of Fir...
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