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To understand the importance of the cultural upswing amongst Indigenous communities, it is important to review the timeline of their journey to this day.<\/p>\n
In the 17th and 18th centuries, contact with non-Indigenous people was sporadic. Impacts on Indigenous communities were swift and incisive: when arriving Europeans established communities, many Indigenous Peoples abandoned their traditional land-based lifestyles in favour of a Euro-centric economic agenda.<\/p>\n
From the beaver fur trade up to the mid-nineteenth century, to the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century, to the construction of the Alaska Highway, short-term commercial gain dug into Yukon\u2019s natural resources, undisturbed since around 11,000 years ago when the Indigenous population\u2019s ancestors are considered to have arrived in the area. The attention of Canadian politicians came and went with economic demand, and soon enough First Nations were regarded as dispensable commodities<\/p>\n
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In the immediate wake of the gold rush, the population of Yukon was 27,000 in 1900, of which there were 3,000 Indigenous Peoples; by 1912, that had petered out to 6,000 total inhabitants. The highly-mobile settler population had left the premises once the mining economy had been depleted, leaving an unstable landscape for the Indigenous population who had to fumble with getting back to the land.<\/p>\n
Previously remote regions were suddenly teeming with prospectors, miners, loggers, construction workers (for roads and hydroelectric projects), and others in step with the vast Canadian resource boom. Authors Poelzer and Coates write, \u201c[with the postwar boom,] Aboriginal communities found themselves caught in the maelstrom of an expansionist and culturally insensitive new economic order.”<\/p>\n
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