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Linda McDonald\u2019s story is entwined with the highway, but it doesn\u2019t start with her.<\/p>\n
[Paralax of section of 1942 map they\u2019re talking about, with the various areas mentioned]<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got to just south of Steamboat Mountain and they needed to know the best way to get through the mountains\u201d Linda said at a 1992 community conference about the highway, \u201cso people said they needed to go talk to the McDonalds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linda\u2019s father\u2019s family, Kaska like her mother\u2019s, had long lived in the northern Canadian Rockies. In 1942, Tucker McDonald\u2019s health was failing, but he had two sons who could help the engineers.<\/p>\n
Charlie McDonald, Linda\u2019s uncle, and Peter McDonald, her father, had had horses and knew the traversable terrain well.<\/p>\n
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\u201cCharlie helped the army through that difficult area north of Fort Nelson all the way to Watson Lake,\u201d said Linda, \u201cAnd dad was 15 years younger than Uncle Charlie, so dad helped out as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Charlie guided the men from southeast of the Rockies, to the Yukon border, where Linda\u2019s mother\u2019s family was from. Peter had moved to the Watson Lake area a few years earlier to look after Linda\u2019s mother\u2019s family after they were married, as was the tradition.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t get the sense that they were treated really particularly well\u201d said Linda, \u201cThat’s how the relationships were there then, even though Charlie and Dad were providing the horses and the knowledge and the expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUncle Charlie, he was a really wise man,\u201d Linda told me, \u201cin Kaska tradition, you had to help people, you had to share, so that\u2019s how they treated people when they went through.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he was unprepared for the scene that would follow him.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfterwards came hundreds of cats [bulldozers],\u201d said Linda, \u201cit was really overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Charlie McDonald \/Photo courtesy of Linda McDonald<\/p>\n
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With the highway came waves of diseases, which particularly affected local First Nations because they hadn\u2019t been exposed foreign antibodies. Charlie and Peter\u2019s younger brother were struck and brought to Whitehorse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were guards guarding the highway, and so Mom and Dad [in Watson Lake] went and asked if they could catch a ride to Whitehorse,\u201d said<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn’t have the permit. Now we’re were going to get the permit from? They didn’t have a letter [authorizing travel on the still military highway].\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUncle Art died there and then nobody from the family was able to tend to him, to his body, to bury him. Nothing.\u201d She said, \u201cThey just got word back that he died and was buried.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey couldn’t even use the highway that they helped build.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Charlie and Nellie McDonald\/Photo courtesy of Linda McDonald<\/p>\n
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Nearly 50 years later, to the day, Linda would name her own son for her long-deceased uncle.<\/p>\n
Linda didn\u2019t see the highway built, she was born in 1957 in Watson Lake, which is on today\u2019s road, about five hours south of Whitehorse on the Alaska Highway.<\/p>\n
She grew up hearing vague stories about the highway, but she hadn\u2019t talked about it much with her parents.<\/p>\n
\u201cElders don\u2019t tend to speak of the negative things readily. They just tend to carry on,\u201d said Linda at a 1992 community conference about the highway. \u201cLife goes on, and they speak about the positives.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Linda, this meant she didn\u2019t quite understand what it was like for her relatives in 1942, until she was a grad student in Ottawa.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo my master’s thesis was going to be on the building of the Alaska Highway, and I was at the National Archives,\u201d said Linda.<\/p>\n
She was looking through boxes with the designation RG-10, documents relating Indian and Northern Affairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just picked a random box because there’s a zillion,\u201d she said, \u201cand it says RCMP report.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis soldier assaulted three women.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen I looked at their names and it was my mother my aunt and my grandmother.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linda went home for Christmas, and spoke to her mother. \u201c I didn’t want to talk about stuff like that, her mother told her.<\/p>\n
The assault, the nature of which Linda never determined, was only reported because a white family friend had heard of it and contacted the authorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t think they would have even done that on their own,\u201d said Linda. \u201cThey just felt so helpless you know in that society. My Mum grew up like that. She just grew up not having any sense of herself in any kind of worthy way, because society was like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linda decided not to do her thesis on the highway, \u201cI just didn’t want to connect with the reality of it,\u201d she said. \u201cI ended up doing just a very sort of dry paper on how to do research with First Nations people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Linda is working on another masters, this one in linguistics. She\u2019s living in Watson Lake, not far from the road.<\/p>\n
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Linda McDonald at Moose Lake.\/Photo Courtesy of Linda McDonald<\/p>\n
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