Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 7 (January 2025): 1-41
https://doi.org/10.32920/28271525.v1
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In December 1973, the headline “Yukon Whites Alarmed” appeared on page 14 of the Regina Leader-Post. The article detailed public hearings of the House of Commons Northern Affairs Committee, which had just been held in Whitehorse, Yukon. At the hearing, a young Yukon-born man named Dan Lang presented the concerns of some of the Yukon’s settler population regarding a proposed land claims settlement between the federal government and the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon. Lang expressed misgivings regarding the lack of publicity surrounding the negotiations and the Yukon settler population not being sufficiently represented at the negotiating table. Reading from a brief that he had submitted to the committee, Lang asserted that some settler Yukoners were “watching with alarm, some of the results of the pending settlement—Indian hierarchy being created, segregation introduced and ill-feeling engendered.”[1] Lang had submitted this brief on behalf of the Society for Northern Land Research (SNLR), an organization of 600 members who sought to oppose land claims and, failing that, achieve representation at the negotiating table.[2] While it is difficult to get a sense of just how many settler Yukoners’ views aligned with those of Lang and the members of the SNLR, his brief is representative of a forceful settler backlash against the settlement of land claims.
Ten months prior, on 14 February 1973, the federal government had agreed to negotiate land claims with the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon territory.[3] The Yukon Native Brotherhood (YNB), under the leadership of Tämbey (Elijah Smith), had recently submitted their land claims brief, entitled Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow, to the federal government.[4] The brief aired historical grievances against the federal government and the broader processes of colonialism that had encircled the Indigenous population of the region. It then proceeded to make the case for the settlement of land claims.[5] The federal government was under new pressure to address such claims. Just two weeks prior, the Supreme Court of Canada had handed down the Calder decision, which resulted in the recognition of Aboriginal title in British Columbia and carried with it an important precedent for other parts of Canada, including the Yukon, where the federal government had not entered into treaties with the Indigenous peoples. In this new landscape, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Liberal government agreed to negotiate with the YNB.
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News that the long-outstanding land claims were finally to be negotiated resulted in a great outcry amongst the Yukon’s settler population. The pages of the Whitehorse Star and the Yukon News soon filled with letters to the editors and editorials as numerous settlers expressed their concerns over the consequences of a land claim agreement for the Territory.[6] Sometimes these debates extended beyond the Yukon, appearing in national newspapers, such as the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. Local residents also wrote to politicians, such as the Yukon’s Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament Erik Nielsen, to outline their concerns. These debates ranged from concerns over the effects that land claims would have on the natural resource industry, to fears that a generous financial agreement with the YNB would place a heavy tax burden on the settler population, to an insistence that Yukon settlers should also be represented at the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples—who represented a quarter of the territorial population—and settler allies offered their own moral imperatives for reaching a settlement. The result was a rich archive of records that captures some of the tensions around the developing practice of land claims settlement in a country with a long history of resource extraction.
Patterns of land use and natural resource development emerged as a central theme in these debates. As land claim negotiations progressed, many settlers launched a negative and sometimes racist campaign against the process. Fearing what was at stake, they deployed a range of narratives about the environment, Indigenous peoples, work, and the northern economy. Indigenous peoples and allies also recognized the stakes, articulating their own narratives. What emerged from these debates were competing colonial and Indigenous notions of land use and resource development.[7]
Settler Colonialism, Extractivism, and the North
Settler colonialism describes processes in which a non-Indigenous population seeks to eliminate and replace an Indigenous population. As Patrick Wolfe has stated, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.”[8] Extractivism is the system of natural resource exploitation wherein more is taken from the earth than is returned to it. Moreover, it is “an organizing concept and a way to comprehend the overarching processes that drive our current world-system, which is a capitalist world-ecology.”[9] In “Settler Colonialism and Beyond,” historian Allan Greer has advocated for more attention to extractivism in Canadian history, suggesting that “suddenly, we see the term ‘settler colonial/ism’ everywhere.”[10] Greer argued that extractivism is currently the primary source of colonialism, while acknowledging that various phases of colonialism overlap. Greer further contended that the North generally escaped the effects of settler colonialism due to its lack of agricultural potential.[11] The case of the Yukon, however, shows that while the dynamics of settler colonialism in the North differ from those in southern regions, it is not altogether absent. Many northern settlers saw the extraction of natural resources as the key to the Territory’s future. It was through resource extraction that a settler community could be maintained in the North.[12]
Various scholars have discussed the interconnections between settler colonialism and extractivism. As environmental historian Lianne C. Leddy has noted in her study of uranium mining at Elliot Lake, “understanding the dynamics of settler colonialism is especially important in a country where economic development has historically been dependent on resource exploitation.”[13] Geographers and anthropologists have made similar connections. In their introduction to Extracting Home in the Oil Sands, anthropologists Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, and Lena Gross discussed the entanglement of settler colonialism with the structures of capitalism and the state. Moreover, they noted that settler colonialism and extractivism engage in the same process of territorial acquisition.[14] Cognizant of the transient nature of many northern settlers, they also acknowledged that the dynamics of settler colonialism and extractivism in the region are unique in that many settlers (or, perhaps more appropriately, sojourners) in the North have no intention of remaining.[15] In their research on extractive industries in Canada, geographers Jonathan Peyton and Arn Keeling have shown how extractivism “precipitated waves of settler invasion.”[16] This article examines how these entwined interests of extraction and settler presence were expressed in debates over land claims in the Yukon.
Foundational to my analysis is political scientist Jerald Sabin’s concept of “contested colonialism.”[17] In his examination of settler colonial efforts to secure responsible government in the Yukon Territory, Sabin noted that settlers themselves were trying to shake their colonial relationship with the federal government. The push for responsible government in the 1970s was also part of an effort on the part of settler Yukoners to secure their political rights in advance of a land claim settlement.[18] These various processes of colonization sparked resistance on the part of Indigenous people in the Yukon. As Leddy has stated, “the lasting legacy of the new colonialism was not only environmental injustice, but also resurgence.”[19]
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, public attention to northern Canada was focused on a series of high-profile debates over resource development, on the one hand, and Indigenous territory, on the other. In addition to the Calder decision, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (also known as the Berger Inquiry) in the Northwest Territories and the Québec government’s plans to harness the hydroelectric potential of the rivers flowing into James Bay garnered national attention. Each of these developments have received a significant amount of scholarly attention within the field of environmental history. Paul Sabin has written about the Berger Inquiry, analysing the interaction between First Nation, Métis, and settler testimony before the commission as each group tried to secure local political control over the North and its environment.[20] Andrew Stuhl considered the Berger Inquiry and the settlement of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, particularly in the context of the emerging Environmental Impact Assessment framework, which developed alongside the settlement of land claims.[21] While Stuhl’s work makes a significant contribution in recognizing the role of scientists in shaping land claims negotiations in the North, this article draws attention to how northern residents, Indigenous peoples and settlers alike, also shaped the course of land claims.
In another instance, geographer Caroline Desbiens and historian Hans Carlson have examined the hydroelectric developments in the James Bay watershed.[22] Both of these works provide important insights into resource development, Indigenous rights, and environmental narratives. As Desbiens noted, “analysis of hydro development demonstrates that a similar process of resettlement – in the form of a cultural rewriting of the region – has occurred in the last fifty years in Northern Quebec.”[23] In a similar vein, Carlson has observed that “while we have integrated the Cree people into our resource use, we have only partially integrated the Cree people into our narrative geography. We do not think of them when we use the electricity generated up here [in James Bay], or the timber that was cut on their lands, and there is something fundamentally problematic about that.”[24] Both Carlson and Desbiens demonstrate the cultural hegemony surrounding narratives of resource developments on Indigenous lands. However, their works tend to consider the incorporation of Cree narratives from their northern homelands within those of a southern settler population. Within the Yukon Territory, Indigenous narratives commingled with those of a relatively sizeable local settler population, larger than in the rest of the North.
There is a growing amount of scholarship on land claims in the Yukon from historians, anthropologists, and political scientists. Anthropologist Paul Nadasdy, for example, has drawn attention to the asymmetrical power dynamics surrounding resource co-management as well as how land claim agreements have imposed upon Indigenous communities settler conceptions of territoriality and sovereignty.[25] In Negotiating the Deal, political scientist Christopher Alcantara provided detailed analysis of the negotiation of land claims in an attempt to understand why some negotiations succeed while others fail.[26] While studying the negotiations is crucial for understanding the agreements that were reached (or not reached), it is also important to understand how the Yukon public responded to the development of land claims. Historians Ken Coates and William Morrison have briefly discussed public opposition to land claims.[27] However, they do not provide an in-depth analysis of the settler reaction. As noted above, much of the settler population was apprehensive about the settlement of land claims. Consequently, both settler and Indigenous positions on land claims were reflected in the newspapers and public forums, on the radio, and in letters to influential politicians such as Erik Nielsen. These voices are the subject of this article.
The Yukon Native Brotherhood, the Yukon Association for Non-Status Indians, and the Land Claim
As writer Thomas King has noted, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”[28] As different individuals and groups advanced different historical narratives to debate land claims in the Yukon, they revealed something about themselves and their views about history, natural resource development, and colonialism in the Canadian North. Summing up the importance of stories to conflicts over nature and human values, environmental historian William Cronon wrote: “Human interests and conflicts create values in nature that in turn provide the moral center for our stories. We want to know whether environmental change is good or bad, and that question can only be answered by referring to our own sense of right and wrong.”[29] In similar ways, the historical narratives of the Yukon that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s provided ‘moral centres’ to the positions on land claims.
The YNB and Yukon Association for Non-Status Indians (YANSI) led the argument for the settlement of land claims. Led by Tämbey (Elijah Smith), YNB was formed in 1968 within the context of proposed changes to the federal Indian Act, though the organization only represented status-Indians (and not Indigenous peoples who had lost their Indian status under the Indian Act) of the Yukon.[30] Its primary goal quickly became the negotiation of a land claims settlement, with their position articulated in Together Today five years later. Over the next several months, segments of Together Today appeared through numerous installments in the Whitehorse Star. These installments represented an effort on the part of YNB to publicize the contents of their land claims submission. The first section of the brief—and the first installment in the newspaper, appearing on 30 March 1973—offered an alternative historical narrative to that which many Yukon (and Canadian) settlers would have been familiar. Previous historical narratives, such as those focused on the Klondike Gold Rush, typically highlighted humanity’s triumph over nature.[31] These Yukon-centred narratives tied in to broader contested narratives relating to the recognition of Aboriginal rights.[32] The drive among Yukon settlers to incorporate the territory into Canada and exploit its natural resources for national purposes resulted in versions of history that, as historian David Neufeld observed, “effectively removed First Nations from the Yukon landscape and compromised their ability to make their interests known.” Neufeld noted that in the late 1960s in particular “a totalizing narrative… denied any other stories of presence.”[33]This was the context to which the YNB would respond, arguing instead that there had once been an environment sustainably maintained by the Indigenous population of the Yukon:
We had our own God and our own Religion which taught us how to live together in peace. This Religion also taught us how to live as a part of the Land. We learned how to practice what is now called multiple land use, conservation, and resource management. We have much to teach the Whiteman about these things when he is ready to listen.[34]
The YNB brief contended that Indigenous groups had exerted control over their hunting territories and cared for community needs in ways that were customary to their cultures. This narrative proceeded to discuss the arrival of the first Europeans during the fur trade, which altered Indigenous values through the introduction of commercial trapping and led to Indigenous reliance on European foodstuffs. As for the Klondike Gold Rush, the narrative noted the myriad effects that the influx of miners had on the Indigenous populations, such as disease. The YNB narrative proceeded through the construction of the Alaska Highway during the Second World War and culminated with the intensification of industrial mining and oil and gas exploration in the Yukon during the latter half of the twentieth century.[35] Describing the consequences of the Cyprus Anvil Mine in Faro, the brief stated:
Now there is a mine with an all-White payroll, and the Village of Ross River is made up of former trappers many [sic] of whom have to depend on Indian Affairs and Welfare handouts. That was only seven years ago, but the Whiteman has not learned to help the Indian benefit from the development of his own land.[36]
Significantly, the YNB’s narrative did not conclude that resource development like the Cyprus Anvil Mine had resulted in the production of a polluted industrial wasteland. Rather, the YNB lamented the fact that the resource development that had occurred in the Yukon had not benefited the Indigenous population. This desire not to be sidelined as the Territory’s resources were developed reflected a question prevalent in the debates surrounding land claims: how did Indigenous peoples fit into the non-renewable resource society in the North and, by extension, how did they fit into Canadian society? This question was present in the positions advanced by those supporting the settlement of land claims as well as those who objected to the concept of Aboriginal title, and numerous viewpoints in between.
A further example of this theme was provided by YANSI, which was formed in 1971 with George Asp as interim president to represent non-status Indians. Like the YNB, YANSI did not represent a single First Nation; rather, it was a representative organization for all non-status Indians in the Yukon. Initially non-Status Indians were not included in the land claim negotiations.[37] Following YNB’s submission of Together Today, YANSI sought representation at the negotiating table. In November 1973, the Council for Yukon Indians (CYI) was formed for the purposes of negotiating land claims. The new organization had representatives from both the YNB and YANSI. The three organizations amalgamated under the CYI in 1980.[38]
While YANSI was unhappy with their initial lack of representation in negotiations, they agreed with some of the YNB’s portrayal of history and resource development.[39] YANSI noted that the historical processes of extraction that had played out in the Yukon had resulted in a scarred landscape:
We are people of the land. We have come from the land, and we love the land, but the land is no longer as it was. The land is now part of the whiteman’s new economy. It is tracked over, marked off, sold and scarred for the minerals and oils that lay beneath it. The land can no longer be used the way our ancestors, the way our parents, used it.[40]
Like the YNB, YANSI “accept[ed] that the land is no longer usable in the old way. From fur traders, to gold miners, to armies, to mines, to oil, we have seen the land changed. We have allowed this change, and now we must seek a way to live in the new economy for which our land is being used,” adding: “This is a challenge to all Canadians to prove that the multi-cultural experiment which is Canada, is workable. Let us not forget that only through equal participation can [we] have a balanced society.”[41] Even as the landscape had changed, YANSI contended that this industrialized landscape did not negate their continued relationship with the land: “We are not seeking a way to sell our land. We are seeking a way to use it in the new way. Our culture does not allow us to sell our land. The land is a part of us, and we are a part of the land.”[42] Here, too, there was common ground with the YNB. In a report for the Boston Globe, Peter Ward described the opening of negotiations as holding “the promise of being the greatest victory for native people in North American history,” with the position of the YNB as one of involvement:“The closing plea of the Yukon Indians underlined the fact that they want to take part in the development of the Yukon, and of Canada – not oppose it. ‘But we can only participate as Indians,’ said Chief [Elijah] Smith. ‘We will not sell our heritage for a quick buck or a temporary job.’”[43] By acknowledging the altered landscape while continuing to assert their rights to the land as Indigenous peoples, the YNB and YANSI implicitly rejected any notions that they were excised from modernity. In this, the organizations were pushing back against elements of settler popular culture, including the environmental movement, that had stereotyped Indigenous peoples as markers and guardians of “wilderness.”[44]
While the first installment of the land claim brief that appeared in the Whitehorse Star emphasized the importance of including Indigenous peoples in resource development, the next excerpt spoke direly of a wasteland created by settler greed and resource extraction. “Many Indians look at [what] the Whiteman has done to destroy and pollute lakes and rivers and wonder what will happen to the birds, fish and game,” wrote the YNB.[45] Neither the YNB nor YANSI expressed opposition to resource development, but the YNB’s brief argued that traditional extraction had been unduly harmful and suggested that there was a more sustainable approach to industry predicated on Indigenous involvement. In short, the two organizations had more similarities than differences when it came to the industry’s future.
Settler Reactions to Land Claims
Meanwhile, many settler Yukoners were apprehensive about the implications of land claims and presented their own narratives of Yukon history in response. In April 1973, the SNLR was formed with the goal of carrying out their own research on the YNB land claim and to make a counter proposal regarding land usage in the North. While the society’s spokesman, Bob McCowan, acknowledged that the YNB brief “may have valid points,” the SNLR was not prepared to incorporate those points into its own version of Yukon history.[46] Soon after the Society’s founding, Dan Lang (who was elected as representative on the Council of the Yukon Territory in 1974 and served as president of the SNLR) wrote an editorial, provocatively entitled “And Then the White Man Came,” that offered a counter-narrative to that of the YNB. Although Lang was married to an Indigenous woman, he was not particularly sympathetic to the cause of Indigenous peoples.[47] Unsurprisingly, he offered a more positive account of contact and settler arrival. Lang insisted “Civilization BEGINS with trade and commerce,” by which he meant European trade and commerce: there was no mention of the long history of trade and commerce among Indigenous peoples in the region.[48] As Allan Greer has shown, Lang’s rationale relied on an established trope of land “improvement” as a justification for colonization, in that the land was “wasted” if not developed and made profitable for export.[49] Lang further stated that the first Europeans who arrived in North America encountered “a people who could not properly be termed savage, but were primitive”[50] – a land and people evidently in need of such civilization as only European settlers could supply. Lang’s narrative then moved chronologically through different stages of the Territory’s development including the fur trade, the Klondike Gold Rush, the construction of the Alaska Highway, and the introduction and intensification of government administration. As he addressed the YNB’s account of colonial disruption, Lang would conclude with the rhetorical question: “Is this a grievance?” For instance, in discussing the effects of missionaries on the Territory’s Indigenous peoples, Lang wrote: “The church could provide dedicated people who worked for no pay. This was an honest and sincere attempt to bring the Indian into the 20th century. If this was less than perfect, there was no alternative provided [by] the Indian people. Is this a grievance?”[51] Elsewhere, he dismissed the effects of epidemic diseases that had disproportionately affected northern Indigenous communities and remained within living memory for many.[52] His suggestion that “[n]o particular peoples are free of disease,” obscured the fact that the diseases that many of the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon succumbed to during the early twentieth century had been foreign to them. Nor did Lang give any attention to the emotional toll of these epidemics on Indigenous communities.[53] Instead, Lang’s presentation of pre-contact Indigenous society reflected one devoid of emotional connections among kin. Lang concluded this editorial with a series of platitudes about Indigenous peoples’ need to modernize: “The Indian himself must make some effort to enter into the prosperity of the Yukon and not by being a charge on the hard working tax-payers of Canada.”[54]
In correspondence with the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Jean Chrétien, Lang also invoked history in order to challenge the idea of Aboriginal title. “Many of us are 5th generation Canadian who went through our Canadian education system with the idea that we were natives,” he wrote.[55] Lang was not alone in suggesting that settlers in the Yukon should be considered native. In the spring of 1973, Erik Nielsen and member of the Yukon Executive Committee Norman Chamberlist appeared on a local call-in radio show in Whitehorse called Talkback to debate Yukon politics. While the theme of the debate focused more broadly on the roles and responsibilities of various governmental institutions, the issue of land claims loomed large. From the outset of the debate Chamberlist was critical of Nielsen’s support of the YNB, suggesting that he was playing racial politics. At one point, following a listener’s question about the YNB and YANSI “asking for the moon,” Chamberlist first suggested that Nielsen was “partisan in favour of the Indian people,” then said, “that we must consider all people, whether they be native or non-native, whether they be Indian or non-Indian. Because I say native or non-native because there are many people that are born in the Yukon who are native to Yukon.”[56] Even with his distinction between “Indian” and “native,” Chamberlist’s contention that people born in the Yukon were “native” served as an attempt to indigenize a portion of Yukon settlers.[57] Such strategies aimed to legitimize settler claims to the land and diminish those of Indigenous peoples.
Sound Recording 1. Norm Chamberlist debates land claims with Erik Nielson. Source: Yukon Archives, Rolf and Margaret Hougen fonds, CKRW Talkback – Erik Nielsen and Norman Chamberlist Debate, [April or May] 1973, SR 282 (19) (2012/2), 37:12-38:53. Icon attribution: Link
Yukon Land Claims in the National Media
Editorials defending settlers’ rights in northern Canada were not limited to the pages of the Whitehorse Star and Yukon News. Two days after the federal government agreed to negotiate land claims, an editorial written by journalist George Bain appeared in the Globe and Mail titled “Things Can’t Be All Bad.” Focusing on the funding that the federal government would provide to the YNB in order to research land claims, Bain contended that the Indigenous peoples had been enfolded into a benevolent relationship with the federal government.[58] At the same time, though, some media outlets in southern Canada noted rising racial tensions with the emergence of land claim negotiations. In 1975 Frank Jones, a reporter for the Toronto Star, wrote an article entitled “Indian Land Claims Stir Racism in the Yukon.” Dan Lang, described as “[t]he Yukon’s brash 27-year-old education minister,”[59] was a central figure in Jones’ article. According to Jones, Lang had suggested that if a land claim agreement proceeded without considering the white residents of the Yukon, “someone will get killed.”[60] Jones also interviewed other Yukoners who expressed even stronger views. Fred Metcalfe, an engineering inspector, advocated a genocidal response to land claims. After briefly describing the extermination of the Beothuk in Newfoundland, Metcalfe stated: “Well, I don’t think that’s such a bad idea. Up in Mayo (a Yukon mining community), guys were saying, ‘if those Indians get $100,000 apiece (under the land-claims settlement), I’m going out to shoot me an Indian.’”[61] Jones attributed the racial tensions to the Yukon’s historical legacy. In particular, he hinted that the frontier mentality stemming from the Klondike Gold Rush continued to exert an influence on the Territory: “The mood in the Yukon, a land still clouded in most minds by the legends of the 1896 Klondike gold rush, is truly ugly.”[62]
This story was picked up by other media outlets. On October 24, 1975, the Edmonton Journal ran the headline “Yukon Official Mum on ‘Blood-Spill’ Story.” The article, pulled from the Canadian Press, recapitulated some of the more shocking details from the Toronto Star article, and described Lang as “visibly shaken,” perhaps due to the national attention he had received, when announcing his plans to hold a news conference later in the day.[63] A longer version of the same article ran the same day in the Calgary Herald. In this article, CYI lawyer Allan Lueck referred to a meeting with Lang in which Lang had claimed that “he would not implement any policy which favors Indians because everyone in the territory is treated equally and the government does not discriminate.”[64] The lawyer noted that this view of equality appeared “very high-minded” but did not hold up to analysis. Arguments of ‘equality for all’ cast the campaign for Indigenous rights as “divisive, inegalitarian, and even racist,” while obscuring the structural inequities that enhanced opportunities for some at the expense of others.[65] More immediately, it was “obvious,” Lueck contended, “that Mr. Lang meant an Indian was going to get killed.”[66]
Not surprisingly, Jones’ article had reverberations in the Yukon. The Whitehorse Star featured a series of articles and editorials expressing positions ranging from shame at the racism that the article exposed to suggestions that accusations of racism were overblown. The range of responses represented the diversity of viewpoints amongst settler Yukoners when it came to the topic of land claims. One editorial in the Whitehorse Star expressed “disgust at the spectacle of racism stirring in Canada’s North today” and in particular at some of Lang’s rhetoric.[67] In the original Toronto Star article, Jones had quoted Lang saying, “When you give away the land, you are giving away our economy and birth and blood right.”[68] The Whitehorse Star questioned Lang’s invocation of the term “birth and blood right,” suggesting that settlers’ connections to the land were “but the roots of grass to the Indians’ roots of oak.”[69] The Indigenous peoples of the Yukon held a much deeper temporal relationship to the land than the relatively nascent settler population. The editorial concluded that the management of the Yukon’s natural resources would be a difficult task if Yukoners were “divided by racism and ignorance.”[70] Meanwhile, Whitehorse Star reporter Max Fraser questioned the accuracy of Jones’ reporting. While acknowledging the existence of “small amounts of true hatred between races,” Fraser attributed the ‘racism’ reported upon in the Toronto Star as “unfounded jealousy, and fear.”[71] Fraser had in a sense identified the emotional landscape of settler colonialism and extractivism lying across the rights of access to the land and its resources.
Roughly a month and a half after Jones’ article appeared in the Toronto Star, Heather McFarlane wrote a reply which was published in the Whitehorse Star. McFarlane contended that the article had been unfair to Dan Lang and Fred Metcalfe and suggested instead that the land claims process had exposed the colonial position between the Yukon and the rest of Canada. In her view, the position of the Yukon in the federation was worse than not only that of the other provinces, but that of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. The territorial Legislative Council had only an advisory role with the Commissioner appointed by the federal government.[72] McFarlane’s position in this editorial reflects Sabin’s concept of “contested colonialism,” in which settler efforts to transform their colonial relationship with the federal government came into conflict with Indigenous efforts to secure their land rights.[73] McFarlane concluded by acknowledging the existence of racism in the Yukon, but minimized the issue by stating that “there is racism in the rest of Canada.”[74] Significantly, while locals questioned the extent of Jones’ findings, no one wholly denied the existence of racism.[75]
Land Claims, Modernity, and the Place of Indigenous Peoples
At the centre of racial tensions in the Territory was control over the Yukon’s land and resources. The Cyprus Anvil lead-zinc mine in Faro had begun operating in 1969, a development that historians Ken Coates and William Morrison described as “the backbone of the Yukon economy” by the middle of the 1970s.[76] The early 1970s also saw a mining boom in Mayo due to increases in zinc and gold prices.[77] Meanwhile, work had commenced on a hydroelectric dam on the Aishihik River.[78] Amidst this renewed extractive activity, the SNLR continued to raise concerns over the settlement of Indigenous land claims. After Lang’s editorial “And Then the White Man Came,” the organization wrote their own brief outlining their position with respect to land claims and shared it with Erik Nielsen. Entitled Together Today for all Our Children Tomorrow, in an obvious allusion to the YNB brief, the SNLR position paper suggested that land claims were irreconcilable with liberal democracy, and that the YNB’s brief contained points which “contradict[ed] the concept of equality.”[79] Here again, the SNLR employed the idea of equality to combat recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples and thus protect settler access to property and natural resources.[80]
Moreover, the SNLR took issue with the YNB’s portrayal of early settlement and natural resource development in the Yukon. They were particularly concerned with the maligning of early ‘pioneers’ to the Yukon: “succeeding generations will be appalled by our… acceptance of the accusations that our forefathers were directly responsible for the Indian problems as stated in their brief.”[81] Those “forefathers” who, for example, had flocked north during the gold rush, represented settler rights to extraction.[82] Finally, the SNLR paper argued that the adoption of modern technologies by a younger generation of Indigenous peoples indicated they had abandoned traditional Indigenous practices and assimilated into settler society. Assistance with this assimilation, the SNLR paper suggested, presented an alternative approach to pursuing land claims.[83] This claim reinforced assertions, such as the one made in Lang’s editorial, that Indigenous peoples needed to modernize in the vein of mainstream settler Canada. The way to do this was not through the protection of Aboriginal rights or the settlement of land claims, but through Indigenous participation in the settler economy which, in the North, was dominated by extractive industries.
By linking the adoption of modern technology with incorporation into mainstream society, or assimilation, the SNLR tried to establish a dichotomy between the validity of Indigenous claims and the reality of modernity. Indigenous land claims were invalid, the reasoning went, because Indigenous society as it had once existed was no more; Indigenous peoples were part of, not exceptional to, the rest of Canada. As Lang had written rather glibly in his Whitehorse Star editorial, “The Indian never polluted because they did not have a plastic bag. Today, everybody pollutes because everybody has plastic bags.”[84] This position also exploited an important feature of Indigenous stereotypes by conflating authenticity with anti-modernity. As Leddy and other scholars have noted, aspects of the “ecological Indian” could be used to undermine land claims; an authentic Indigenous relationship with the natural world could only be one uncontaminated by settler presence, and thus lost to a past devoid of plastic bags.[85] This impossible position meant that Indigenous peoples could be subject to scrutiny and criticism by both environmentalists (who held them to an unrealistic standard) and opponents of land claims (who felt that such claims had been made irrelevant by Indigenous participation in modern Canadian society). According to historian Paige Raibmon, colonizers collaborated in establishing a binary framework to define Indigenous authenticity. In establishing this framework, certain elements were deemed to reflect this image, such as timelessness, stasis, and past. These characteristics were counterposed against inauthentic elements, such as historical, dynamic, and future, generally associated with the settler population.[86]
In 1977, David Joe, the legal advisor for the CYI and citizen of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations,[87] challenged such dichotomies while participating in a land claims forum in Whitehorse. In this forum, Joe argued that a land claim agreement must be oriented towards the preservation of Indigenous ways of life while also ensuring that the Indigenous children of the Yukon could adapt to different ways of life. An Indigenous Yukoner, he argued, should be able to enter into modern institutions without having to abandon participation in traditional ways of life. Joe illustrated his point by discussing the experiences of his father, a trapper who had experienced increased pressure from expanding industrial operations. Summing up the importance of land to self-determination, Joe said:
And this is why the self-determination is very strongly tied to the issue of land. It is the belief of the Indian people in the Yukon that it is their right to decide whether they wish to move completely into the white society and live under its government rules and regulations, or whether they wish to remain on Indian lands under local Indian laws. It’s essential that they have a choice.[88]
Sound Recording 2. David Joe discusses CYI’s vision of land claims. Source: Yukon Archives, Public Information Forum on Yukon Native Land Claims, 1977, 81/141, SR 76 (1), [Putting Land Claims into Context, 6 November 1977], 52:58-57:53. Icon attribution: Link
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While the SNLR cast land claims as a potential obstacle to both northern resource development and the integration of Indigenous peoples into settler society, others saw land claims as being the means to that end. In a letter to the SNLR, Nielsen laid out how land claims would incorporate Indigenous peoples into the Yukon’s natural resource economy:
I am sure that you are aware that literally billions and billions of dollars have been poured into the support of Indian welfare and other hand-out systems since Confederation in 1867. It is contemplated that once the claims of the Indian people have been settled that all of the largess will cease and be replaced by industrial and economic enterprises which will have been set up by the Indian people themselves (with expert assistance) which will provide those economic opportunities to the Indian which will result in a self sustaining economic base for the future.[89]
In a similar vein, Nielsen wrote to Ron Granger, the president of the Yukon Chamber of Mines, that “It was my hope, and still is, that once a settlement was achieved it would eliminate all special rights and Yukon land and its use would be open to all Canadians on an equal basis.”[90] Settling land claims could accomplish what Trudeau’s assimilationist White Paper, which similarly sought to remove special status, had failed to do.[91] Assimilation would be achieved and the northern settler-extractivist economy restrengthened.
Nielsen elaborated on his views in his 1989 memoir The House Is Not a Home. He drew upon established tropes in evaluating Indigenous communities in the Yukon based on their “industry”: on a spectrum from what he perceived to be more primitive communities to those he considered to be more advanced by virtue of being more industrious and entrepreneurial. For example, regarding the Tlingit community in Teslin, Nielsen wrote:
They are a handsome people, and much more advanced than the people of Upper Liard. They built sturdy wooden homes for themselves and were, for the most part, industrious, their main pursuits being fishing, hunting, and trapping. They did not rely on government handouts to exist; they survived by their own initiative and efforts. Some were entrepreneurs, who made and sold snowshoes and canoes.[92]
Like other settler commentators of the period, Nielson held a more positive view of Indigenous communities who had more successfully adapted to the capitalist system.
Federal officials who were involved in land claim processes also invoked narratives around land use and land tenure, attempting as they did to strike a balance between critiquing colonialism and defending settler interests in the land. In a speech to the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce in February 1975, Commissioner on Indian Claims for Canada Lloyd Barber defended the federal government’s much-belated decision to settle land claims in the Yukon. In doing so, Barber invoked historical sovereignty as the roots of Aboriginal title: “The concept of native title stems from a basic fact of North American history – native peoples were the original sovereign inhabitants of this country until European colonial powers usurped their supremacy.”[93] Barber also criticized the solutions proposed by individuals such as Dan Lang and the members of the SNLR stating, “We all tend to see the solutions in terms of our own experiences and values. Thus, non-Indians see the answer in the growth of our kind of economic self-sufficiency. We tend to see the problem solely in economic terms, and the solution in terms of conventional economic activity.”[94] Non-Indigenous solutions to the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples, he suggested, were steeped in ethnocentrism.
But Barber’s critique of the Whiggish narrative of colonial resource development was offset by his acknowledgement of its material benefits. He invoked the narrative trope of a land “improved” by settler activity for a greater good:
On the Indian side, I think there must be, and probably is, a recognition that non-Indians have come to have a great psychological and economic and legal interest in the country, and that the energy, ingenuity and technology of the newcomers has produced great benefits. … Government will obviously need to take this into account and will not be anxious to adopt a position which has a serious adverse impact on other Canadians, or one which erodes governmental authority in vital areas.[95]
Barber likely made this statement in order to allay the fears of the members of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce that the land claims process would negatively affect them and their business interests. To further pacify any concerns that they might have had regarding the land claims process, Barber concluded, “I would suggest to you that the negotiations on land claims provide an unprecedented opportunity to get at some of the important, deeply rooted problems and differences between Indians and non-Indians, and work out a basis for a more productive and harmonious future.”[96]
Barber’s speech may have persuaded some members of the Chamber of Commerce that a land claim settlement did not spell an end to their business interests. However, his point that settlers needed to conceive of solutions outside of the familiar colonial-extractive framework appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Two years later (at the same land claims forum where David Joe spoke), Iain MacKay, the president of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce, presented the business community’s perspective on land claims. While suggesting that the business community was generally in support of land claims as a way of removing uncertainty surrounding land ownership, MacKay felt that for the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon to have a future, they needed to look to the land base as a way of growing their economy – within the framework of resource extraction. As MacKay bluntly put, they needed to conform to the “terms of white society.”[97] While acknowledging that hunting and trapping would likely continue, MacKay downplayed its importance. Rather, the land base was to be used to derive economic growth within the settler society through the extraction of minerals and other natural resources.
Sound Recording 3. Iain MacKay discusses the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce’s perspective on land claims. Source: Yukon Archives, Public Information Forum on Yukon Native Land Claims, 1977, 81/141, [Future Projections – Post Settlement, Land and Economics, 20 Nov 1977], SR 76(5) to SR 76(6), 28:34-29:01. Icon attribution: Link
The YNB’s portrayal of Yukon history was also challenged by various Indigenous groups. Not all communities felt the YNB brief had captured the nuances of development in their territory. For instance, the YNB brief generally portrayed the discovery and development of the Cyprus-Anvil Mine near Faro as exclusionary to the Indigenous people of the region, the Ross River Indian Band (now Ross River Dena Council). However, when the YNB’s land claim team toured the Yukon, community members such as Mabel Risbey highlighted the cooperative relationship that had existed between the prospector Al Kulan and the Ross River Dena. Driving the point home, Risbey stated: “Why should we knock our next door neighbours. We work with white people here.”[98] At the same time, the Ross River community members also articulated a number of grievances against settlers, such as the wastage of meat by non-Indigenous hunters, and expressed concern about game depletion and the encroachment of mining activities on their traplines.[99] This balance between highlighting their engagement in the mining industry and airing their grievances against its effects demonstrates a desire on the part of Ross River community members to engage with industrial development on their own terms. In contrast to narratives advanced by critics of land claims—who viewed the adoption of modern technology as evidence of acculturation—the Ross River community members did not present resource development as antithetical to Indigenous pursuits.
Moreover, their perspective of the Cyprus-Anvil Mine changed with time as the region experienced increasing environmental degradation.[100] Four years later, for example, when the Alaska Highway Pipeline Inquiry passed through Ross River, band member Helen Etzel testified on the effects of the mine on Ross River Dena fishing practices. Etzel pointed to “two spills by Anvil Mines in the Rose Creek area,” a creek that “runs into the Pelly River, the river which we depend on for our supply of fish.”[101] Concepts like ecology, environment, and sustainability have lived meanings, and it is through specific human experience that “these concepts receive validation and meaning.”[102] Changing views of the Cyprus-Anvil Mine reflected changing “lived meanings” of the ecology, environment, and sustainability of the mine.[103] Settler arguments left little room for these “lived meanings” as they were experienced by Indigenous peoples during the 1970s, following the encroachment of settler colonialism and extractivism on Indigenous lands.
Conclusion
As the prospect of a land claims settlement became a reality in the Yukon, narratives around history and natural resource development emerged as a point of contestation. Such narratives were used to do more than support or undermine land claims: they were also used to articulate divergent relationships between Indigenous peoples, settlers, natural resource development, and the environment. Historically, settlers had been the beneficiaries of natural resource development while Indigenous peoples were marginalized. As natural resources were extracted from Indigenous homelands, the ecologies of these regions changed, rendering the pursuit of hunting and trapping activities more challenging, but not impossible. These experiences in turn shaped people’s perceptions of history and the land. Through these narratives, both Indigenous peoples and settlers were able to articulate their views of how Indigenous peoples fit into the Canadian state and the natural resource economy.
Critics of land claims tried to establish a dichotomy between Indigenous societies and the modern extractive economy, presenting the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into settler society and the settler economy as the only path forward. Some settlers who supported land claims similarly viewed assimilation into the settler economy as necessary for the success of Indigenous communities.[104] In establishing these dichotomies, some land claim critics invoked concepts of the “authentic Indian,” which was frequently coloured by the stereotype of the “ecological Indian” and which supplied a convenient straw man in the argument by locating Indigenous peoples outside the modern natural resource economy.
Led by the YANSI, the YNB, and the CYI, many Indigenous peoples and organizations rejected these dichotomies. While seeking benefits from resource extraction within their traditional territories, they also sought to protect and maintain their traditional activities on the land. These more nuanced perspectives were articulated to the general public through the media as well as land claims forums. As land claims encouraged these debates, narratives around land use and resource development became a means of determining the Yukon’s future.
Questions relating to Indigenous involvement in natural resource development continue to be unresolved. In the Yellowed Institute’s 2023 report on the status of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, the authors noted certain rhetorical shifts around the language of reconciliation. In particular, the Yellowhead Institute observed the emergence of the concept of economic reconciliation, stating: “[t]he concept is fast becoming a new tool for getting pipelines, strip mines, fracking wells, nuclear waste disposal sites, and tar sands tailing ponds approved through ‘partnerships’ and ‘resource sharing agreements’ with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities.”[105] Economic reconciliation is framed within the language of reconciliation and tempered by the legal duty to consult Indigenous nations on any developments which might adversely affect their Aboriginal or Treaty Rights.[106] However, the discourse is reminiscent of the 1970s, when many settlers believed the way forward for Indigenous peoples was through participation in extractive industries.
Indigenous peoples also continue to experience settler backlash against the recognition of their rights. Recently, The Globe and Mail reported that the British Columbian government had “scrapped” plans to amend the province’s Land Act. As reported by journalist Justine Hunter, the amended legislation would have “allow[ed] British Columbia and First Nations to establish joint statutory authority over new projects on public land.”[107] Hunter noted certain procedural issues regarding the public consultation process which led to the abandonment of the plans. However, Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Nathan Cullen highlighted the emergence of anti-Indigenous rhetoric in the campaign against the legislation. In particular, he identified the BC United Leader Kevin Falcon as using “dog-whistle politics” by suggesting that Indigenous peoples would have a veto over 95 percent of the provincial land base.[108] Towards the end of the column, Hunter wrote, “[t]he quiet introduction of the public consultation sparked alarm among industry and the outdoor recreation sector about what the changes could mean.”[109] The rhetoric surrounding the opposition to the land legislation is evocative of that of the 1970s when the CYI was commencing land claim negotiations with the federal government.
Even as most First Nations in the Yukon Territory have settled land claim and self-government agreements with the federal and territorial governments, there continue to be threats to their land base in the interests of resource extraction. In 2014, the federal government introduced amendments to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act (YESAA). The proposed amendment would shorten the timeline on environmental assessments and eliminate the need for assessments on licence or permit renewals. The planned YESAA amendments were opposed by the Council of Yukon First Nations, the successor organization to the CYI. The amendment passed under the federal Conservative government. However, following the election of the Liberals, the amendment was rescinded.[110] These more recent developments reveal the ongoing tensions between northern extractivism and the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights.
Acknowledgements: This article has benefitted from the insightful feedback of many scholars. I would like to thank the PiCHE editorial team, Jennifer Bonnell, Claire Campbell, and Sean Kheraj, the anonymous reviewers, and copy-editor Stacey Berquist for their comments and assistance in seeing this article through to completion. I would also like to thank the participants of the Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium (CHESS) for their thoughtful feedback during the 2018 workshop in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I would also like to thank Tina Adcock for her insightful comments on a very early draft.