The Nature of Stories

Frontier life

“You’re still caught in the myth of the empty land, Bronwyn,” David Neufeld told me over tea, one autumn afternoon in Whitehorse.

I’d been explaining why I wanted to do this project, and talk about the stories surrounding the stunning engineering feat through uncharted territory.

Over my years as a museum worker, I’d given the spiel many times before.

“Against great odds, the Americans fought their way through the wilderness, and in eight months, we had a road,” I’d tell wide-eyed tourists, fresh off seeing their first bear.

Yukon can be intoxicating in its grandeur, and I would get swept up in the awe of visitors, I wanted to enhance their love of a territory so close to my own heart.

But beyond that, the stories of hardship and glory, from the gold rush and the highway, are so engrained in local identity –a gold panner is on our license plates –that we become convinced of their truth. We become convinced that Yukon is truly a magical, mystical, glorious place.

Neufeld, a distinguished territorial historian, and my long-time family friend, was trying to nudge me out of the trope that captures many an unsuspecting consumer of Yukon history and tourism: the frontier myth.

First Nations oral histories say that they have always been in what we now call Yukon. Within the bounds of Yukon Territory alone, there were eight distinct languages and people would be necessarily multilingual, speaking perhaps not only Tagish, but Southern Tutchone and Tlingit, in order to maintain trade and kinship ties (often formed and solidified through marriages). Long before settlers made their way inland, Tlingit trade routes and kinship ties connected the northwest corner of North America with world markets.

Yet, despite oral histories that can trace peoples over centuries, popular histories of Yukon begin with the gold rush. In other words, popular histories begin when white people arrived.

“Beginning in the mid-1950s the tourist and public promotion of a Canadian history of the Yukon erased Aboriginal people from time,” Neufeld wrote in a recent journal article.

The idea that land was unoccupied or unused pre-settler, not only gives a terra nullis right to territory, but it means the impacts of development projects, or settler presence, goes unexamined, because apparently, there was no one there.

This erasure of First Nations history extends to the highway construction.

“We were in wilderness, that’s where the road was, wilderness, uncharted, nobody had been there before,” said Hayward Oubre, one of the imported army engineers who built the highway.

Oubre was talking in a widely seen 2005 PBS documentary about the highway’s construction, where U.S. filmmakers tell the story of the highway punching its way through the wilderness, from the perspective of the soldiers.

But, people had been before. They were the guides who brought surveyors through the best routes, they were the people employed to do laundry in the villages, they were the people who had cabins, caches and camps erased with the grind of caterpillar tracks and the crash of trees.

Even among respected academics, the idea of a land ripe for the taking persists.

“The far northwest is one of the most romantic and magical places on the continent, mythologized as a land where humans can test the limits of their endurance and determine nature as it was and ought still to be. It is, put simply, North America’s last frontier,” writes Ken Coates in North to Alaska.

Coates is the Canada Research Chair in Innovation at University of Saskatchewan, and has written four books on the highway. While Coates is well-acquainted with the First Nations in Yukon, having spent much of his childhood in the territory, his accounts tend to focus on broader geopolitical forces that caused the highway to come through.

“It’s an American story on Canadian soil,” Coates told me in a recent conversation. He has long argued that the highway was a propaganda tactic by the U.S. government, ostensibly to protect the Pacific Coast, but really to rally a terrified American population.

“They needed a high profile, high energy, big dynamic project that said, ‘we’ll do anything we have to do to defend North America,’” Coates said in the 2005 PBS documentary.

Essentially, the highway was built for the sake of a story.

In her paper, Pitkanen also highlighted the role of tourists in continuing the mythology, “Highway travellers have ceaselessly disseminated tales of adventure, hardship, and challenge among the general public,” she said.

And it has worked, in July 2017, Yukon had 32,000 visitors from the U.S., at least 10,000 of those over the highway.

After the war was over, maintenance of the highway passed from military to civilian control.

Many of the former construction camps and maintenance camps were taken over by lodges, which provided shelter and entertainment for those making the trip North.

There were the trekkers, the commuters, and the tourists, all on this road through wilderness, and all with the potential to hit a sharp rock and pop a flat tire, or have cars come down with some other ailment. For every disaster or inconvenience, the lodge owners were there, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because the gravel road was windy and long, travellers would have to stay at a few lodges before reaching their destination.

The highway underwent nearly constant maintenance, but by 1992 the entire road was paved. Though the highway’s dangerous reputation persisted, it was no longer necessary to stop every hundred kilometres or so, and the roadhouses began to die off.

Lily Gontard is a writer in Yukon. With photographer Mark Kelly, she wrote a book called Beyond Mile Zero about the disappearing Alaska Highway lodges, which was released last year.

Gontard says that the response from the book was overwhelming, “A lot of people have been waiting for this book,” she says, “It seems there’s always an emotional connection.”

“People miss the old windy road,” she says, “And it’s mind-numbingly straight in some sections, for hours and hours and hours.”

[Audio clip of Gontard talking about people’s connection to the road and photo]

The emotional connection to the windy road, but also the community it created, reinforce the survival and frontier stereotypes that local tourism has so carefully cultivated. There’s palpable nostalgia for a time when the road was something to be survived, for when it was more frontier-esque.

So what’s the truth?

Popular narratives of the highway aren’t so much false, as incomplete. Though, they could be considered errors of omission.

Popular history has adopted the narratives of soldiers, and later highway travellers (some of them reporters for publications like the New York Times) braving the wilderness. The highway is a journey: people coming and going.

“If you’re a gold miner or one of the architects of government highway construction or a ‘settler’, you’ll most likely focus on grandiose or romantic themes (‘man against the wilderness’,  ‘opening the North’, ‘poor man’s goldrush’, etc.). Indigenous narrators talked about those experiences from a very different perspective,” Julie Cruikshank told me in an email.

The anthropologist spent more than a decade working with First Nations in southern Yukon, and collected testimony for the Alaska Highway Pipeline Inquiry in the 1970s, which, in deciding if a pipeline should go in parallel the highway, examined the effects of the 1942 endeavour.

“Remembered accounts of Alaska Highway construction show that no single narrative captures the experience aboriginal people living through it,” Cruikshank wrote in The Social Life of Stories.

“For Kaska people, the highway also offered a new form of transportation and they could move about more readily,” said Linda McDonald, “it really changed their lives.”

“The road meant better access to more hunting grounds,” said Coates, which in the first few years was a good thing for some nations, but for others, it meant the decimation of local stocks.

“Aboriginal oral histories from the same period, transmitted in narratives, songs, place-names and genealogies reflect an understanding of place by people who saw this land as the centre of the world, rather than its margin,” said Cruikshank in The Social Life of Stories.

These are the stories that are unglamorous and unromantic, of bureaucracy seeping into the territory, regulating the wilderness, and most horrifically, taking children to residential schools.

The nature of minority narratives

These aren’t the only narratives that don’t quite fit into the romantic veneer of the Alaska Highway. One third of the original 10,000 troops sent to Whitehorse in the Spring of 1942, to start building the Canadian portion of the road, were African American.

In the still segregated army, white officers treated African American soldiers as inferior.

“Initially, Secretary Stimson declared that no black troops be sent to the northern territory because it was believed that the troops were incapable of functioning in the bitter cold climate,” wrote E. Valerie Smith, in a 1993 paper chronicling the exploits of African American soldiers on the highway.

But, because the global demand of soldiers was high, and they didn’t have enough to supply everywhere, the powers that be had to acquiesce, and the soldiers headed North. The bigotry, however, followed them.  “In fact, when the white regiments were short of supplies and equipment, those of black regiments were reallocated to white regiments,” wrote Smith.

Lawrence Hill, a former journalist and author of The Book of Negroes, spent this past winter in Yukon, researching a new novel about the black soldiers who built the highway.

“I had no idea,” he told me, “and I’ve been studying black history in Canada, pretty much all my life.”

That this narrative is not one of the popular themes in highway mythology doesn’t surprise Hill.

“We’re happily oblivious to black history in what is now Canada,” said Hill.

In light of the controversies of Canada 150, and the erasure of First Nations history, lack of attention to minority history is a sad theme that pervades Canadian society.

Whitewashing history

“There is no history of colonialism and systemic racism that informs the modern view of Indigenous peoples, because that problem was supposedly solved some point in the past,” writes Metis scholar Chelsea Vowel in her book Indigenous Writes, in referring to Canadians’ knowledge of Indigenous history.

And this is where the damage of narratives emerges. First Nations in Yukon are still dealing with the legacies of the Alaska Highway. Sometimes in positive means, like partnering with Parks Canada for tourism endeavours, and sometimes not, like the very high alcoholism rate in the territory.

Chelsea Vowel connects colonial myths to building national identity, which at a smaller scale, could be extended to building a Yukon brand.

“The violence that national myths commit is to delegitimize the very real pain that is the legacy of abuse and oppression,” she wrote.

“How can we possibly learn from the past when this country is so invested in whitewashing it?” She said.