Visiting Julienne The’dahcha: A Reflection on Memory, Land, and Dinjii Zhuh Knowledge

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This is the seventh post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.

In March of 1976, my dìduu (great-grandmother), Julienne The’dahcha testified before the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI) in the Gwichyà Gwich’in community of Arctic Red River, now known as Tsiigehtchic.1 She introduces herself as “the oldest in this Arctic Red River settlement. There’s nobody older than me.”2 Her words, interpreted by her son, Noel Andre, and transcribed into English, echoed across the community hall and across time. Almost fifty years later, I return to her testimony—not just as a historian and an Indigenous Studies scholar—but as her great-granddaughter. I knew her. I remember her. She was a strong presence when I was a young child. And now I encounter her again, not at our fish camp or by the fire, but in the pages of the MVPI transcripts. 

An old woman sits outside in the sun. The photograph is black and white, but it is clear the surroundings are mainly grasses. A few cups and bowls sit on the ground next to the woman.
Figure 1. My maternal great grandmother, age 91, at our fish camp, Dachan Choo Gę̀hnjik. NWT Archives/James Jerome fonds/N-1987-017: 0864

Julienne’s testimony is more than a record—it is a living expression of Dinjii Zhuh sovereignty, knowledge, and love for the Land. 

Julienne lived from 1887 to 1983 and was the daughter of Amy and Jerome The’dahcha. She was born at Ddhahzhit Gwitsal, the headwaters of the Cranswick River. She lived her life on our Land, travelling to the mountains in the winter to harvest caribou and spending summers at her fish camp on the Nagwichoonjik.3 She lived a long and rich life, and witnessed profound changes over the course of nearly a century. Around the same time as the Tsiigehtchic pipeline hearings, Julienne wrote, “I am old enough to say that I saw people make fire with flint… I could work and hunt just as good as a man.”4 

My dìduu has long made contributions to the histories of our people through her storytelling. Her words have also been recorded across many other formats: the 1976 film, Summer of the Loucheux; various community publications by the Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute (now the Department of Culture and Heritage, Gwich’in Tribal Council); and in scholarly literature, such as Gerald Friesen’s introductory chapter in Citizens and Nation and Liza Piper’s When Disease Came to This Country.5 Julienne’s teachings live on.

Sitting with Julienne in the archive is not a neutral act. It’s complicated, but beautiful; it is filled with remembrance, confrontation, and ceremony. She offers her testimony to Justice Thomas Berger, but her words and stories are acts of love and resistance. She speaks not only for herself, but for a whole community and nation—the Gwich’in Nation. In our language, Dinjii Zhuh Ginjìk, Julienne said, “You see all these people here, they’re all behind me.”6 She speaks for me, my children, and those of us yet to come. 

Her testimony was about a pipeline, but Julienne, and many of the other witnesses, speak about relationships with the Land, kinship, and change in the North: “I don’t want that pipeline to come through our country, especially close to my town… I don’t want it around.”7 This is not a statement of simple opposition. It’s a plea, one shaped by experiences of travelling the Land, harvesting, and engaging in our traditional ways of life. Julienne does not speculate about environmental risks; she has already seen the impacts of industry on our fish, animals, water, and Land.

Two women sit at a table. A young woman with long dark hair holds a hand to her mouth, listening. An older woman sits in front of a microphone watching and listening across the room.
Figure 2. My dìduu, Julienne The’dahcha, with my cousin Alestine Andre, testifying at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry community hearing in Tsiigehtchic, March 1976. Photo by Michael Jackson, provided by Drew Wake.  

In one of the most moving parts of her testimony, Julienne says: “My children are going to be hungry… I’ve got four children of my own right now, and they’ve got children too… I don’t want them to be hungry.”8 Her concerns are intergenerational—her children, their children—but also intimately connected to the Land that sustains us all. Her ecological and traditional Dinjii Zhuh knowledge is grounded in generations of close observation. She notes, with what seems like quiet anger, “There’s no fish ever since they start cutting up ground […] Even out in the Fish Lakes […] even out in the bush […] everything is all waste, washes through the creeks and onto the lake and kills the fish.”9 This is empirical science observed by a lifetime on the Land. 

Julienne’s words and observations were not limited to the pipeline hearings. In a 1972 edition of the newspaper, The Inuvik Drum, Julienne writes with authority: “I know there is only one good fish lake, and I am living at Travaillant Lake [Khaii luk] now for the last four years […] The fish there are nothing but heads, skin, bones.”10 Julienne describes how “cutting up the ground, and whatever work was around out in the country,” led to a reduction in fish populations: “fish are supposed to run from one lake to another through creeks, that’s the only way fish is good all the time […] But now since they work around there, they block up some creeks and that’s where the fish dies.”11 She points directly to the cause: “The oil companies have been building roads over this land. There are no caribou, it’s because of this company tearing up the ground.”12 Julienne describes the loss of lynx, martens, rabbits, ptarmigan—and with them, a way of life: “It used to be one of the richest countries for hunting and trapping, but not any more.”13

Julienne roots herself and our people through her descriptions of Land and place. “Travaillant Lake, that’s my lake […] I was thinking of my land,” she said, “and ever since my husband [John Tsal] died my family stayed at the same places, that’s around Tree River [Dachan Choo Gę̀hnjik]. I think they’re going to stay there a long time.” She said, “That’s my land around where I’m living now,” she says. “Even you try to chase me away from there […] I wouldn’t go […] this land is ours.”14 

The ways Indigenous Peoples describe Land is an act of sovereignty. Julienne is asserting an ancestral and persistent relationship to a place that has sustained her and her family for generations: “I was born in it and God gave it to us […] We didn’t buy it […] Why they want to buy it from us? […] We don’t need your money […] Even though we got no money we still don’t need your money.”15 She rejects settler colonial frameworks of property, compensation, and extraction. The Land was her relative, as it is mine today. 

Our inherent connection to our Land is tangible, but also epistemological. Julienne likens the devastation of our Land to the downfall of future generations of our family: “If we give our land away we wouldn’t be smiling […] we’ll be crying just to see our children hungry and that will make us cry.”16 If the pipeline were to go ahead, she was anticipating both environmental and cultural loss—the erosion of knowledge systems, language, and living well in the bush. She warns that our people, “All they know is how to hunt, and if the pipeline come through, what we going to do? […] Nothing.”17

Julienne’s experience was firsthand. She explains, “I live in the bush all the time […] I come to town only Christmas and Easter, therefore I know what I’m talking about.”18 This sentence holds significant authority: “I know what I’m talking about.” For Julienne, knowledge is earned through life on the Land, through hunting, trapping, walking, observing, speaking Dinjii Zhuh Ginjìk. Her authority does not come from books or institutions—it comes from a life lived in the bush. 

Julienne stepped into this government process to offer her truth, rooted in experience, observation, and kinship. Justice Thomas Berger listened. Now, it is up to us to listen. Archival or government documents—like the MVPI transcripts—are just one way to listen. Another is to be on and with the Land. There are other ways, too. So much of this knowledge and living memory continues to be rooted in community. 

Despite her conviction, Julienne also notes that, “I might be talking for nothing.”19 I think about all the times our Elders have spoken and not been heard, the ways their testimonies were archived, boxed up, and forgotten, or ‘discovered’ by some southern settler academics and appropriated. And I think about the responsibility I carry—not just as a historian, but as her great-granddaughter—to bring her words back into the present.

This essay is one attempt to do that. To visit Julienne in the archive is to sit with her memory, to listen closely, to take her seriously as a thinker, an observer, a political actor. It is also to reckon with the ongoing legacies of colonialism in the North—the ways development was imposed, the ways consultation often meant little—and the ways Indigenous knowledge are and were dismissed and silenced. 

Notes

  1. Julienne The’dahcha also sometimes used the surnames Andre and Jerome. Tsiigehtchic is also spelled as Tsiigehtshik. For more on Dinjii Zhuh place names, see: Gwich’in Tribal Council Department of Cultural Heritage, Gwich’in Place Name Atlas, accessed June 6, 2025, https://atlas.gwichin.ca/index.html?module=gwichin.module.main. ↩︎
  2. Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI), “Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Arctic Red River, N.W.T., March 13, 1976, Vol. 47,” in Transcripts of Public Hearings: Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (The Inquiry, 1975–77), 4537. ↩︎
  3. The English name for Nagwichoonjik is the Mackenzie River.  ↩︎
  4. MVPI, 4574. ↩︎
  5. Hugh Brody, Summer of the Loucheux (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1976), film; Michael Heine et. al., Gwichya Gwich’in Googwandak: The History and Stories of the Gwichya Gwich’in as Told by the Elders of Tsiigehtshik (Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute, 2007); Leslie McCartney and the Gwich’in Tribal Council, Our Whole Gwich’in Way of Life Has Changed/Gwich’in K’yuu Gwiidandài’ Tthak Ejuk Gòonlih: Stories from the People of the Land (University of Alberta Press, 2020); Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2000); Liza Piper, When Disease Came to This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2023). ↩︎
  6. MVPI, 4537. ↩︎
  7. Ibid. ↩︎
  8. MVPI, 4538. ↩︎
  9. Ibid. ↩︎
  10. MVPI, 4572-73. ↩︎
  11. MVPI, 4538-39. ↩︎
  12. MVPI, 4573. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. MVPI, 4539. ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. MVPI, 4540. ↩︎
  17. Ibid. ↩︎
  18. MVPI, 4573. ↩︎
  19. MVPI, 4574. ↩︎
Featured image: James Jerome, Julienne Andre, Jim Norbert and Alestine Andre sit together to eat around a cooking tripod. Various pieces of wood and fish net are on the hill above them, a canoe is at left. They are at the Andre/Bullock fish camp at Tree River. NWT Archives/James Jerome/N-1987-017-0864

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Crystal Gail Fraser

CRYSTAL GAIL FRASER is Gwichyà Gwich’in from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, and an associate professor of history and Native studies at the University of Alberta. A community-engaged scholar of Indian residential schools, she is the author of By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, which won prizes from the Canadian Historical Association (Best Scholarly Book and Clio Prize for the North) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (Best First Book).

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