[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”on” specialty=”off” next_background_color=”#000000″][et_pb_fullwidth_header _builder_version=”3.0.106″ title=”The Nature of Stories” subhead=”Stories shape how we understand the world. Which means we must examine what we say and how we say it.” text_orientation=”center” header_fullscreen=”on” header_scroll_down=”off” image_orientation=”center” background_layout=”light” content_orientation=”center” custom_button_one=”off” button_one_icon_placement=”right” custom_button_two=”off” button_two_icon_placement=”right” title_font=”Georgia||||||||” \/][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ prev_background_color=”#000000″ next_background_color=”#000000″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.0.106″ background_layout=”light” text_font_size=”19px”]<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re still caught in the myth of the empty land, Bronwyn,\u201d David Neufeld told me over tea, one autumn afternoon in Whitehorse.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d been explaining why I wanted to do this project, and talk about the stories surrounding the stunning engineering feat through uncharted territory.<\/p>\n
Over my years as a museum worker, I\u2019d given the spiel many times before.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgainst great odds, the Americans fought their way through the wilderness, and in eight months, we had a road,\u201d I\u2019d tell wide-eyed tourists, fresh off seeing their first bear.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But beyond that, the stories of hardship and glory, from the gold rush and the highway, are so engrained in local identity \u2013a gold panner is on our license plates \u2013that we become convinced of their truth. We become convinced that Yukon is truly a magical, mystical, glorious place.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeginning in the mid-1950s the tourist and public promotion of a Canadian history of the Yukon erased Aboriginal people from time,\u201d Neufeld wrote in a recent journal article.<\/p>\n
The idea that land was unoccupied or unused pre-settler, not only gives a terra nullis<\/em> right to territory, but it means the impacts of development projects, or settler presence, goes unexamined, because apparently, there was no one there.<\/p>\n This erasure of First Nations history extends to the highway construction.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were in wilderness, that\u2019s where the road was, wilderness, uncharted, nobody had been there before,\u201d said Hayward Oubre, one of the imported army engineers who built the highway.<\/p>\n Oubre was talking in a widely seen 2005 PBS documentary about the highway\u2019s construction, where U.S. filmmakers tell the story of the highway punching its way through the wilderness, from the perspective of the soldiers.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Even among respected academics, the idea of a land ripe for the taking persists.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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\u2019s last frontier,\u201d writes Ken Coates in North to Alaska.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an American story on Canadian soil,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThey needed a high profile, high energy, big dynamic project that said, \u2018we\u2019ll do anything we have to do to defend North America,\u2019\u201d Coates said in the 2005 PBS documentary.<\/p>\n Essentially, the highway was built for the sake of a story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”on” specialty=”off” prev_background_color=”#000000″ next_background_color=”#000000″ _builder_version=”3.0.106″ background_image=”https:\/\/cusjc.ca\/mrp\/alaskahighway\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2018\/04\/Drone-for-computer.jpg” parallax=”on”][et_pb_fullwidth_header _builder_version=”3.0.106″ header_fullscreen=”off” header_scroll_down=”off” image_orientation=”center” background_layout=”light” content_orientation=”center” custom_button_one=”off” button_one_icon_placement=”right” custom_button_two=”off” button_two_icon_placement=”right”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_fullwidth_header][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”off” specialty=”off” prev_background_color=”#000000″ next_background_color=”#000000″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”1_2″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.0.106″ background_layout=”light” text_font_size=”19px”]<\/p>\n Yukon has not strayed from the frontier image, deliberately marketing itself as a pioneer destination and the last true wilderness.<\/p>\n The Dawson City storefronts are designed in turn-of-the-century facades. Whitehorse attempts a similar aesthetic on Main Street, but as a more industrial centre, and the territorial capital, the effect is restricted to a few blocks.<\/p>\n Whitehorse proclaims itself to be the \u201cWilderness City.\u201d<\/p>\n Tourism Yukon campaigns invite people to \u201cdiscover\u201d the territory\u2019s natural beauty.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.0.106″ background_layout=”light”]<\/p>\n Entwined in this mystique of adventure is that the Alaska Highway was once quite dangerous.<\/p>\n Famous for steep grades and sheer cliff drops, the highway itself was an adventure destination. Bumper stickers proclaimed, \u201cI survived the Alaska Highway\u201d and entrepreneurs went so far as to sell canned Alaska Highway dust.<\/p>\n Laura Pitkanen, a geographer then working on a PhD at University of Toronto, wrote a paper on the persisting mythology of the highway in 2010.<\/p>\n “Alaska Highway mythology was built upon these images of the North, as the hardship mythology from early construction and tourism accounts combines with pristine wilderness images to create the stereotype of the Alaska Highway as a rugged landscape to be survived,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Publications such as The Milepost<\/em>, which has been published since 1949, the year after the highway opened to civilian traffic, have milked its reputation as an adventure destination. Year after year they highlight so-called \u201cmust-see\u201d parts of the highway and potential hazards, while showing lone RVs putting down an empty road.<\/p>\n Graduating from soldiers publishing their war stories of the road, early travellers published their survival stories of the highway, rife with stereotypes of the North, and the highway.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″][et_pb_tabs _builder_version=”3.0.106″ custom_css_main_element=”Width: 520px;”][et_pb_tab _builder_version=”3.0.106″ use_background_color_gradient=”off” background_color_gradient_start=”#2b87da” background_color_gradient_end=”#29c4a9″ background_color_gradient_type=”linear” background_color_gradient_direction=”180deg” background_color_gradient_direction_radial=”center” background_color_gradient_start_position=”0%” background_color_gradient_end_position=”100%” background_color_gradient_overlays_image=”off” parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on” background_size=”cover” background_position=”center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_blend=”normal” allow_player_pause=”off” background_video_pause_outside_viewport=”on” tab_text_shadow_style=”none” body_text_shadow_style=”none” title=”There are old cabins” tab_text_shadow_horizontal_length=”0em” tab_text_shadow_vertical_length=”0em” tab_text_shadow_blur_strength=”0em” body_text_shadow_horizontal_length=”0em” body_text_shadow_vertical_length=”0em” body_text_shadow_blur_strength=”0em”]<\/p>\n Perhaps playing into the myth of the empty land, this picture could also suggest that if there were once people, they’re now gone.
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\n <\/p>\nRomancing the Road<\/h3>\n