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\u201cI look for, as a historian, cultural narratives, which are stories. And these are ideas about how the world works,\u201d David Neufeld told a group I was with last summer, in an informal lecture.<\/p>\n
We were sitting on the banks of the original Yukon highway, having just canoed from downtown Whitehorse, to a nearby camp.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are highly processed cultural constructions that we make up, with things that we think are important and valuable. Unless we can see ourselves in these narratives and recognize what they are, we can\u2019t do anything about reconciliation,\u201d he told us.<\/p>\n
Cultural narratives have popped up recently, with Canada 150, and nation-building myths that ignore millennia of Indigenous history, and centuries of oppression, and resistance.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve also come to light with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission\u2019s final report, published in December 2015, which examined Canada\u2019s Residential school system. It highlighted the need for truth, before healing and eventually reconciliation, to the commission, a mutual respectful relationship, can come.<\/p>\n
Looking for the truth, or for deeper, hidden, alternative narratives, can be difficult work, or they might be right there, in plain sight, if you\u2019re willing to look.<\/p>\n
Despite knowing some details of the colonial history of Yukon, residential schools, policies that alienated people from their traditional territories, an Indigenous incarceration rate higher than that of settlers, I fell for the romantic story of the Alaska Highway, and of Yukon.<\/p>\n
If I can, as a well-educated Yukoner, then tourists likely receive a rather one-dimensional story.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t to say we can\u2019t change.<\/p>\n
Cultural centres in Yukon are gaining prominence, and often in them, you will find narratives that problematize the popular. But these are still the stories of \u201cthe other.\u201d<\/p>\n
This cannot be an \u201calternative narrative\u201d to a fa\u00e7ade concocted by a war department 76 years ago, and perpetuated by ignorance.<\/p>\n
Truth is hard, but we must aspire to find it, and to tell it. Museums and memory institutions must look for points of narrative oppression and work to raise perspectives that challenge the popular story. Consumers, especially settler consumers must ask questions when a story glosses over local impacts. Question history.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy for anyone to get swept up in the romance of Yukon. The mountains are young, jagged, and snow-capped. The waters are unencumbered by pollution and people. And the people, the people are genuinely kind. It\u2019s what happens when you live thousands of kilometres away from another major city. The history is straight out of a movie (or rather, some movies come straight out of Yukon).<\/p>\n
But, it\u2019s a story.<\/p>\n
What story are you going to choose to hear? To look for? To share?<\/p>\n
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