Kluane National Park Reserve, 1923–1974: Modernity and Pluralism
Introduction
An aggressive and extensive transformation of Canadian heritage protected areas took place from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Jean Chrétien, the minister responsible for much of this activity, later wrote about his proudest moment, 22 February 1972:
when I was able to announce the expansion of Canada’s national park system to northern Canada and the creation of the first three national parks north of the 60th parallel – Kluane in the Yukon, and Nahanni and Baffin Island (Auyuittuq) in the Northwest Territories. It was at this moment, as Minister responsible for National Parks, that I was able to ensure that thousands of square kilometres of unique Canadian wilderness will be preserved in their natural state in perpetuity for the enjoyment of future generations of Canadians and indeed for all mankind.… [O]ne of my greatest satisfactions comes from the creation of 10 new national parks, the expansion of the area dedicated to national parks by almost 50 percent, and the extension of the National Parks system to every province and both territories.[478]
Fig. 1. The mountain vastness of Kluane National Park and Reserve. [D. Neufeld, June 2002, #023.]
However, achieving such a monumental set of national parks was neither quick nor easy. The idea for a protected area in the southwest Yukon dates back to the 1920s, and, through the course of its establishment as Kluane National Park Reserve (Kluane NPR) in 1974, it was fraught with difficulties.
In 1978, John Theberge described the complicated and generally confrontational pathway to protection that led to the establishment of “Kluane National Park.”[479] He outlined the interests and interactions of the prominent players who promoted or resisted state protection for Kluane over a span of nearly three decades. He also noted how a scientific definition of national park values and roles, consultation with interest groups, and internal coherence amongst the responsible government departments affected Parks Canada’s understanding of the meaning of a national park, and how the agency’s changing definition assisted, or limited, the development of the park. There is, however, an assumption in Theberge’s account that the different participating groups shared a commensurate knowledge base and that, within a rational planning framework, all perspectives and interests could be accommodated. If we reconsider the establishment of Kluane NPR now, thirty-five years on, we may question the efficacy of such a process of consultation and accommodation. Can Western modernist thought,[480] with its assumption of shared knowledge, with the implication of culture as unimportant, realistically address a culturally pluralistic situation? Will such an analysis meaningfully present interests forwarded from a Yukon Athapaskan cultural perspective? Can it even imagine their existence?[481]
The challenges of presenting the history of northern national parks such as Kluane National Park and Reserve are perhaps best addressed by stepping away from the usual contest between development and preservation. In his statement above, Chrétien went on to identify himself with the Canadian mainstream, as “a strong believer in the philosophy of balanced development. Northern Canada is large enough to accommodate both the resource development that is essential for the economic well-being of all Canadians and the need for conservation of our natural heritage, which is just as essential for the quality of life of a society.”[482] Describing the establishment of Kluane NPR as a confrontation between different facets of Western culture – between the betterment of the human condition through the conquest of nature for greater wealth and preserved areas illustrating a romantic idyll of God’s handiwork or the base line of the continent which their civilization has successfully transformed from wilderness – holds limited value for gaining an understanding of the Aboriginal interests and connections to place within this debate.
In considering the national purposing of a part of the southwest Yukon between 1923 and 1974, this chapter sets aside the Western national discourse of protection or development, already identified as flip sides of the same coin in John Sandlos’s chapter. Instead, this purposing process is viewed through the late twentieth century lens of northern cultural contact. This approach highlights the consequences of a Western rational vision of a highest or best use determined through universalistic scientific principles and considers how an engagement with Aboriginal people, using local contextually set knowledge, might be possible. Against such a backdrop, it examines the changing conceptions of a national park and the responsibilities it has, both to the nation and to the community hosting it.
Meeting Newcomers in the Southwest Yukon
The Southern Tutchone of the southwest Yukon[483] did not live in an isolated mountain Arcadia. Extensive trade and travel networks connected them to peoples both near and far away. Tanned hides and finished clothing were exchanged for fish oil and shells with the Tlingit on the nearby Pacific coast, while the precious obsidian in the mountains was traded into Alaska and south and east far into the interior. The long presence of the Southern Tutchone generated a detailed experiential knowledge of the local geography, seasons, and resources, allowing both a rich subsistence lifeway and a civilized discourse between peoples.[484] In the nineteenth century, though, newcomers with quite different appetites and values arrived. Russian, and later British, Canadian, and American traders probed the Pacific coast seeking furs to feed into their global trade networks. During the Klondike rush, miners moved through the region looking for gold and introducing new trade goods and animals. Although the southwest Yukon was isolated from much of the new traffic, some trading posts, prospectors, and game-hunting outfits moved into the area.[485] While these early developments had only limited effects on the Southern Tutchone, the newcomers anticipated more significant changes to the land and its residents. J.D. McLean, the assistant deputy and secretary of Indian Affairs, instructing the Yukon’s first Indian Agent on his duties in the spring of 1914, wrote:
… you should endeavour by all means to gain the confidence of the Indians, who should be treated with considerate patience and who should learn that they have in yourself as an official of this department, an officer whose sole interest it is to protect them in the enjoyment of their rights, to improve their condition and to assist them in their progress towards civilization.[486]
In addition to civilizing Indians, the newcomers also grappled with the task of civilizing the land: making its resources more tractable to the creation of wealth in their vision of the world. The transformation of wild, unknown lands required the restructuring of human relationships with it. For the expanding and impatient Euro-Canadian state, this precluded any detailed study of place. Rather it applied an abstract, universalistic, scientific system of management to impose a more easily understood and administered order, an order reflecting their cultural values and interests. In the gold fields, the introduction of the Free Entry system of mining law addressed investment risks, limited the friction of speculation, and promoted the efficient exploitation of a targeted resource. The success of this approach, as in the amount of gold extracted, is evidenced by the rapid replacement of haphazard hand mining by well-organized corporate entities capable of fielding industrial scale dredges powered by centralized power plants and directing their activities through a scientific prospect drilling program.
Fig. 2. Jacquot trading post on Kluane Lake, 1922. [Yukon Archives, Claude and Mary Tidd fonds, #7206.]
Fig. 3. Village of Burwash Landing, 1942. [Yukon Archives, R.A. Cartter fonds, #1515.]
After two decades of intensive gold production, however, the conditions supporting this infrastructure had changed and the Yukon mining industry was moribund by the 1920s. In response, the federally appointed administration of the Yukon Territory, directed to make the territory fiscally self-sufficient, was forced to consider new strategies for economic development. Up to this point wildlife had been largely unregulated; Aboriginal peoples enjoyed unconstrained hunting and fishing opportunities, only rarely subjected to local restrictions.[487] There was an implicit recognition of Aboriginal interests and the capacity of their traditional management practices.[488] However, the collapse of the mining industry led the territorial administration to reconsider this approach. In the early 1920s game regulations were revised, resulting in the commodification of animals as an economic resource. Rather than acknowledging Aboriginal social and subsistence reliance upon hunting, regulations now considered their harvest as an administrative method of reducing the cash costs of relief. This change in attitude allowed the expansion of trapping, big game outfitting, and the development of a fur farming industry, each taking a growing piece out of subsistence hunting by the 1940s. With the revival of mining in the 1930s, Aboriginal subsistence lifeways were further limited.
The Canadian state carried a broad vision of what constituted development. While economic exploitation was generally the first consideration, rational thinking on best use sometimes suggested improvements to place.[489] In the early 1920s, federal wildlife scientists proposed game reserves to ensure the future of wildlife populations both endemic and imported, including an Indian trapping area in the Peel River area – a proposal opposed by the Yukon Council – and a national park buffalo reserve to be operated by the Canadian Parks Branch, akin to those prairie parks noted by Sandlos but in the southwestern Yukon.[490] However, as game appeared abundant and importing buffalo proved costly, no action followed. H.A. Jeckell, Comptroller and head of the Yukon administration, was adamant about the importance of economic development and argued against any land withdrawals: “I would not recommend the creation of special reserves in this territory for the Indians for hunting and trapping,” he wrote, “as such action would greatly hamper the exploration and development of the mineral resources of the Territory.”[491] The industrial strategy of purposing lands and resources was comprehensive and intrusive. Its totalizing, modernist narrative denied the existence of both local knowledge and regional interests, assuming as universal its own, imposed, knowledge and values. But over the next half century it generated a powerful response from Yukon Aboriginal people who felt they were being shouldered out of their own country.
Visions of a Northern National Park
Despite the early interest in a Yukon national park, nothing further happened until the Alaska Highway arrived in the Yukon in 1942. The presence of large numbers of foreign soldiers and construction workers in the previously isolated region appeared to threaten wildlife populations. The presence of the road also opened up new areas for prospecting and prompted thoughts of an expanded post-war tourism industry. The United States government moved quickly in Alaska, slapping down a twenty-mile-wide restrictive corridor on both sides of the highway in July 1942. Harold Ickes, the American Secretary of the Interior, noting the wilderness area between Kluane Lake and the Alaska boundary, suggested Canada consider similar restrictions to protect its interests.[492] Five months later, the Canadian government withdrew all unalienated lands within one mile on either side of the highway corridor, and set aside “an area of 10,130 square miles in the south western part of the Territory in order that it may be available in its present condition for establishment as a national park.”[493]
Federal officials, having earlier and unsuccessfully pressured the Territorial Council for game preserves, moved quickly. Already fearing major losses in wildlife populations, R.A. Gibson, Director of Lands for the Canadian Department of Mines and Resources, noted the need “to save the game [in the Kluane area] from serious depletion and to provide breeding stock which, if protected adequately, would restore the game to its former numbers.” He acknowledged that this “would deprive the Indians of some of their former hunting ground but it was considered that if a game sanctuary had not been created and sound conservation practices started there soon would have been little game for the Indians or hunters.”[494] In the spring of 1943, the Territorial Council agreed and created the Kluane Game Preserve, where all hunting would be forbidden. But while game animals were temporarily protected, their habitat remained vulnerable. In response to pressure from mining interests, the sanctuary was opened for prospecting, staking, and mining in December 1944. Prospectors were also allowed to hunt without restriction.[495]
Meanwhile, the Northern Administration Branch dispatched several teams of biologists to the Yukon “to inquire into the existence of [scenic and recreational areas] … in their primeval condition.”[496] C.H.D. Clark, assigned to the “Kluane Reserve” in 1943, reported:
There can be no question that it is of superlative quality. It contains the highest mountains in Canada, the most extensive glaciers on the Canadian mainland, and scenery of remarkable grandeur. In so far as wildlife is concerned, it contains an excellent representation of the species of the region. Some, such as martin and beaver, are extremely rare, and the park can make a great contribution towards the rehabilitation of these and other fur-bearers.
The proposed park would protect game animals, such as Dall’s sheep and Osborn’s caribou, which have never previously enjoyed the protection of a permanent reserve in Canada.… [N]umbers will be such (under protection) as to arouse the enthusiasm of tourists.
In addition to endorsing its “grandeur” as befitting a national park, Clark also recommended the introduction of both buffalo and mule deer as valuable resources. He noted that “The area of the Yukon suitable for buffalo is much more vast than any potential farm or stock land, and it would be desirable to have it producing something.” Aboriginal settlements on the fringes of the reserve were deemed “unnecessary and undesirable to interfere with” if they were outside the boundary, like Klukshu; or if unfortunately within, as was Dalton Post, then destined to disappear, as the activities sustaining them, “hunting, fishing, and trapping,” were now excluded by the sanctuary regulations.[497] Clark noted other disadvantages suffered by Aboriginal trappers: although no method existed to grant exclusive trapping rights (thereby keeping newcomer trappers from entering areas trapped by Aboriginal families), regulations did allow a trapper to sell a trapline – something only white trappers did. As the natives were unlikely to adopt a practice they considered anti-social, Clark recommended the registration of traplines, bringing trappers within the state’s model of order.[498]
The popular understanding of national parks in the middle part of the twentieth century centred on three main expectations.[499] Scenic beauty was paramount. Public perceptions focused upon mountains and waterfalls as icons of the untrammelled character of the natural world. In his report on Kluane, Clark differentiated between Kathleen Lake, with its mountainous viewscape, and nearby “bush lakes,” with limited tourist appeal. With the soul-restoring beauty came opportunities for recreation. Camping in the forest, surrounded by an abundance of large mammals, national parks provided a tourist “playground,” a playground that made money. Many stories, especially those anticipating the boom of the post-war economy, included promises of employment coming with a national park and the tourist horde that would migrate up the Alaska Highway. In the summer of 1941, the Dawson News reminded Yukoners that “The wisdom of … a system of national playgrounds dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment has never been more apparent.”[500] Finally, and in Kluane the original spark for action, there was the necessity of preserving wildlife, both as a tourist attraction[501] and as a sanctuary to breed animals for hunting in surrounding areas.[502] To fulfill this multiplicity of tasks, national parks needed an ordered regime following scientific principles of management and people on the ground to enforce such a regime. Aboriginal peoples, who would not get the vote until 1960, were not yet fully Canadians.
High Modernism Arrives in the Yukon
To be Canadian in the post-war period was to be modern, and federal policy in the north reflected the belief that the North needed help to catch up with the rest of Canada. This period accordingly saw huge changes in the Canadian north. The completion of the Alaska Highway in 1943, followed by the CANOL [Canadian Oil] Road and the expansion of the road network after the war – to Dawson in 1955 and the start of the Dempster Highway a few years later – connected the Yukon to the outside world, and opportunities for more intensive mineral prospecting and other forms of resource development grew exponentially. In addition to huge investments in northern access, the federal government greatly expanded the social safety net for Canadians. The state’s position on the North was summed up by Gordon Robertson, deputy minister of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, in 1960: “We own the north.… It belongs to us. Canadians for this reason, must look to the north to see what it is good for, to see how to use it.”[503] Such attitudes would have important effects upon the planning and development of Kluane National Park, and on the Aboriginal people living around it.
Mining activity in the Yukon accelerated through the 1950s. Production of copper restarted at the Whitehorse mines after World War II, a large asbestos mine opened near Dawson, and the short-lived Johobo copper mine began operations within the Kluane Game Sanctuary in 1959. In the mid-1960s, the huge Cyprus Anvil lead/zinc open pit mine started operation, resulting in the new town of Faro. Even grander visions were spawned by the almost unimaginably large hydro-electric power generation opportunities in the Yukon. As early as 1946, the Aluminum Company of America proposed a large hydro project in the upper Yukon basin to support aluminum production in southeast Alaska. Variations on this idea continue to the present, the most extensive suggesting the reversal of the entire upper watershed of the Yukon River to flow though hydro-electric plants on the Taku and Alsek rivers: the latter in the heart of the land reserved for the national park. In 1949 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suggested the scale of such a project might require the town of Whitehorse to be moved and while “local residents … would resist such a move … [this] should not influence the planning of the project for the national good of both Canada and the United States.”[504] The sense of excitement and national prosperity generated by the mining industry was celebrated and reinforced by the Government of Canada. Under the direction of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s “Northern Vision” of development and progress, the National Parks Branch planned a network of national historic sites commemorating the Klondike gold rush. The sites spoke to their time: the nation glowed in the fulfillment of history.[505] Kluane National Park would reflect the same spirit of accomplishment.
These new developments also affected the relationship between Aboriginal people and the natural world. Demands for wildlife as part of the Territory’s economic development and the extension of both government regulation and services had catastrophic effects upon Yukon First Nations people.[506] The Territorial Council made a major revision to the Yukon Game Ordinance in 1947 to address the interests of the recently established Yukon Fish and Game Association (1945),[507] and to broaden access to wildlife for both tourism development and big game outfitters. The desire to maximize the economic value of wildlife resulted in much stricter controls on access to the land – though the new regulations applied to all hunters and trappers, both native and newcomer. Percy Henry, a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elder in Dawson, described this separation from their land as, “Regulation, regulation, regulation, halfway to Heaven.”[508] Meanwhile, the Yukon Council believed that, with the expansion of the federal social safety net, subsistence needs were now part of the past.[509] Waged jobs were available for the progressive, while welfare was provided for the reluctant. Them Kjar, the first director of the Yukon’s Game and Publicity Department, wrote with satisfaction about these changes in 1954:
If we look back only five or six years we find the times in the Yukon have changed greatly due to the many new mining, prospecting, and building enterprises which suddenly have been established, as well as improved road and air transportation, thereby enabling trappers (Indian and White) to occupy themselves elsewhere at a much higher profit than trapping or hunting could give, leaving obsolete the old way of living off the country as well as nullifying the use of dogs.[510]
But not everything was quite as neat and tidy on the fringes of the future national park. In the original boundaries of the game sanctuary, a ten-mile set-back had been allowed along the Alaska Highway near Burwash Landing for an outfitting business and as a local hunting and trapping area for the Burwash Indian Band. The Yukon Fish and Game Association and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police requested the boundary be brought up to the road to enhance the recovery of wildlife populations and facilitate the enforcement of game laws, and the Yukon Council obliged in April 1946. Having been denied access to their former ground, “most abundant in game,”[511] by the establishment of the sanctuary in 1943, the Burwash people were outraged by the closure of this last piece of their hunting ground south of Kluane Lake. Before the start of the summer, the community wrote to J.E. Gibbon, the Yukon Indian Agent, noting the worsening of their situation due to:
Fig. 4. RCMP officer at Kluane Lake detachment, 1943. [Yukon Archives, James Phillips fonds, 93/93, #80.]
... game laws in the great part of our territory called “Proposed Kluane Park” or again the “Kluane Sanctuary.”
As you are aware, those who have proposed this park or sanctuary have taken with its limits all of our village as well as the part of our territory more easily reached and where the game is more abundant.… Up to the last spring we were given a certain freedom around our village and in the above mentioned territory. But we are now prohibited by federal and territorial laws, to hunt or trap there – fishing only is allowed, and that for how long?
We most firmly protest against these conditions forced upon us. For we are thus deprived of our means of subsistence and development; we, the natives of this country, are being driven away like a pack of useless dogs.
In the portion of our territory not included in the limits of the park or sanctuary, it may be possible to live for a time without starving; but on considering the difficulty of transportation in some seasons, the scarcity of game in that district, and also the distance from the village, the store, the mission and the school for our children, one must admit that such a solution would be disastrous for us.
It is not the Indians that are a threat to the game and fur trade of the country, but it is them that are punished. Before the whites came into this country, game and fur were abundant although the Indians were in much greater numbers than they are today. Hunting and trapping are our only resources – the whites have a thousand ways of earning money for a living.…
Now prospectors arrive in great numbers each year, and they are allowed to hunt anywhere, even in the park, for their meat when they are “in dire condition.” The government even makes them roads to make their work easier. We all know that they hardly bring any meat with them and can always easily claim to be “in dire condition.” Having thus a sort of exclusive right on the game, they are in abundance, while we who cannot make money like they do, are prohibited this meat of which we have more need to live than the whites do.
We beseech you therefore to help us, to protect us in these conditions in which we have been placed by the development of the country and the new invasion of the whites [who] can work on the highway, look for gold and earn money in a thousand ways, why should we not be reserved, we the natives of this country, the exclusive right to hunt and trap in our territory either in the park or out.
We are not asking a favor, but the right to live and develop. The whites are always favored to our detriment. We are simply forgotten and set aside. After all we are human beings like they and in this country we have a right prior to theirs.
We have no objection to the development of the country, on the condition however that we be left free to live and develop ourselves also.[512]
The letter stirred up a hornet’s nest. Government officials moved quickly to defend their programs and explain away the Burwash complaints. F.H.R. Jackson, the National Parks Branch superintendent in Whitehorse, reported in September 1946 that “no direct complaint has been [previously] received … from any Indian regarding the curtailment of their hunting activities in their favoured hunting area [now well within the Sanctuary].”[513] Two months later, Hugh Bostock, a geologist with the Department of Mines and Resources, submitted a frank appraisal of the situation based on his conversations with Eugene Jacquot, one of the two brothers who had established the trading post at Burwash Landing in 1910. According to Bostock, “before Jacquot came Indians seldom hunted in the park area south of the Highway so that its establishment does not deprive them of a main hunting ground,” and that the area “is not particularly good game country, particularly now.”[514] Subsequent investigations by the Fur Supervisor and the Indian Agent agreed that it was the arrival of the Jacquot brothers that had spoiled the Indians by luring them across the lake from their “ancestral home.” They asserted the Indians had plenty of “good game country” on the north side of the lake, and, besides, other alternatives had been available to them: the Jacquots had offered the Indians boats to go fishing, which met with little interest, and there were no signs of any gardening in the village “despite the fact that sufficient seed has been sent annually to this group to satisfy their needs.” The two men felt that “the close association of whites and Indians is a great detriment to the welfare of this Band of some 32 or 33 souls” and recommended their removal from the community to a more remote site.[515]
Fig. 5. Jessie Joe, Mary Jacquot and Mrs. Jimmie of Burwash Landing, 1948. Jessie and Mrs. Jimmie were among the signers of the 1946 petition. [Yukon Archives, Elmer Harp Jr. fonds, 2006/2, #237.]
Fig. 6. Canadian government geologist Hugh Bostock. [Yukon Archives, Bill Hare fonds, #6985.]
In 1946, and again in 1950, Father Morrisset in Burwash Landing and Bishop J.L. Coudert in Whitehorse suggested that, as the Burwash Indians had hunted previously in the sanctuary area, perhaps a special reserve for Indian hunting and trapping might be arranged, referring to the special situation in Wood Buffalo National Park.[516] There were immediate objections from both those advocating the rebuilding of wildlife stocks and the National Parks Branch. In 1942, C.K. Le Capelain, one of the first to promote the idea of a Kluane National Park, and H.F. Lewis, Chief of the Canadian Wildlife Service, both wrote to the deputy minister: “It would be very undesirable to give the Indians a formal claim of this kind to any part of the National Parks reserve.”[517] When Yukon Commissioner A.H. Gibson weighed in on the matter, he noted that Them Kjar, his assistant G.I. Cameron, and Superintendent Jackson supported “rigid enforcement of the preserve regulations.” Gibson also reported the opinion of the local Indian Agent:
(a) he observes the scarcity of game and realizes the desirability of protecting it
(b) he is impatient with this particular band of Indians because they are not energetic or progressive
(c) it would simplify contact with the Indians if they were removed from this settlement and it must be admitted that if the Indians were forced to rely more on themselves, it would likely have good results.
They have obviously, to some extent, been pauperized and are more inclined to rely on maintenance from the church and the Indian Agent, then to bestir themselves to improve their conditions.
To address the immediate situation, Gibson offered a special one-time hunting permit for the sanctuary and requested “a careful survey … of the game populations of the preserve by a competent wildlife observer” to determine both the economic value and best use for this resource.[518] The following summer, A.W.F. Banfield arrived to make the survey. He agreed that there was employment “available for Indians willing to work” and that there was an “unutilized opportunity for a fishery on Kluane Lake.” He also
… found no signs of hardship among the Burwash Indians, all the men who had an inclination for work were employed by outfitters or service stations or on highway maintenance. Work in cutting wood, restaurants, etc., was available for women. Unemployed widows were receiving full rations from the Indian Agent. I received no complaints of destitution or unfairness with respect to trapping and hunting privileges from anyone except Father Morrisset.… There are good opportunities for fishing and gardening at Burwash Landing, but they are not utilized.[519]
According to government reports, then, the Indians would be fine, by either accepting wage labour or relocating to more remote territory; they did not need anything from the national park reserve.
Aboriginal Challenges to Modernism
From the late 1940s into the early 1950s, territorial and federal officials worked with industry to impose their vision of the modern world upon the Yukon. Any Aboriginal challenges to this colonialist regime were met with force, as the Indians of Burwash Landing discovered. While it appears Bostock had a relatively accurate understanding of the movement of the Kluane Lake Indians in the twentieth century, his (and others’) conclusions about the centrality of contact in despoiling Indigenous peoples convinced him against any possibilities of Aboriginal adaption. Government officials preferred to think of Aboriginal peoples as either untouched, invisible, and thus safely out of the way, or defiled by contact with modernity, visible, and therefore unwanted.[520] In refusing to accept the community’s claims, territorial officials, prodded by both the National Parks Branch and Indian Affairs, denied traditional Aboriginal knowledge of place and even the existence of their culture. And to quell any continuing difficulties, they threatened to remove them altogether, thus completing the process of making the Indian invisible. Their approach to “best use” relied upon universalistic principles of scientific knowledge, still scanty on the specifics of the region, to manage the land, its people, and resources. In the enthusiasm for doing the right thing, the territorial and federal governments denied, not only the validity, but even the existence of the long tradition of deep local contextual knowledge shaping Southern Tutchone values, land use practices and their relationships with the Newcomers.
Fig. 7. Rupe Chambers, Park Warden, Kluane Game Sanctuary, 1949. [Yukon Archives, Richard Harrington fonds, 79/27, #333.]
The government, however, was not insensitive to the loss that the sanctuary regulations visited upon the Aboriginal peoples in the southwest Yukon. When the sanctuary boundaries were extended north to the Alaska Highway in October 1949, closing off the last part of country open to Aboriginal subsistence hunting, Indian Agent R.J. Meek proposed a muskrat trapping project as an alternative form of livelihood.[521] After surveys of the proposed area by the Regional Fur Supervisor and a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, the Koidern River area of the sanctuary was chosen as a suitable site.[522] The muskrat project exhibited, on a small scale, the modernist traits active in shaping protected area management relations with Aboriginal peoples. In addition to subsuming the original subsistence hunting activities into a cash-driven trapping program that “best suit our ends in promoting the economy of the Indian people,”[523] the project also worked to “improve” the local environment. An active program designed to improve muskrat habitats, and thus it was hoped trapping success, included managing water levels and introducing alien species as a food supply.[524] But by the early 1960s the project lost any lingering Aboriginal connotation of trapping when it became known as the “muskrat farm.”[525] This also reflected the denial of local contextual knowledge. A Canadian Wildlife Service biologist reviewing the farm operation in 1963 reported that he could not “raise any positive objection to [the Burwash families] trapping the area – under proper control .” Such supervision was necessary because “The Indians in the area have forgotten all their native management sense.”[526] A.E. Fry, the new Indian Agent agreed, adding that
It is possible that ultimately, out of the [Indian people trapping here], some might receive very useful training in this phase of wildlife management. We must recognize, of course, that at this stage we are dealing with a native lacking sufficient formal education to appreciate the completely scientific approach to fur management. Along with a competence in woodcraft, often walks a surprising ignorance of the true characteristics of specific populations in their environment. And our Indian people are no exception. In this way our fur project could be eminently useful as an instrument of education.[527]
The muskrat project did provide a number of Burwash Indian families with a modest livelihood, access to a part of their traditional hunting grounds and some grounds for hope in expanding their interests there.[528] However, attempts to establish a permanent access to this ground for trapping were stonewalled by National Parks officials. The Branch wished to avoid any commitments on possible park lands before a formal boundary was established.[529]
In the spring of 1958, W.A. Fuller of the Canadian Wildlife Service completed a report for the National Parks Branch on wildlife in the Yukon. He detailed its commercial, recreational, aesthetic, and scientific value, noting the small and rapidly diminishing number of Aboriginal people still relying upon subsistence hunting. While Fuller calculated the substantial cash worth of these different values, he suggested their non-monetary values were still greater.
Wildlife is a part of our Canadian heritage which we have a right to expect and a duty to hand down unimpaired.… In the face of an expanding population and shrinking wilderness, the remaining wilderness assumes an every increasing importance. It seems self-evident that the highest use to which much of the Yukon could be put is the preservation of a part of our wilderness and wildlife heritage.[530]
The modern national park ideal of a land free of human beings was manifest – but it would not be long before a series of challenges by Aboriginal people eroded this confidence.
While the boundaries of the proposed national park might have remained undefined, the Parks Branch was actively developing its sense of what the park should be and attempting to negotiate its establishment through the thickets of local opinion. Yukon mining interests raised fierce resistance to the limitations associated with national parks, suggesting a special class of multiple-use national parks be created for the north.[531] The Branch, anxious to avoid any dilution of the National Park Act, answered with a compromise: the designation of a core protected area, considered inviolable, surrounded by a park reserve, whose boundaries might be altered if valuable resources were discovered. The reserve idea was outlined by the minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Walter Dinsdale, in a letter to Yukon MP Erik Nielsen in November 1961:
I would … withdraw the area in question from disposition. We would establish regulations permitting … exploration for and development of minerals. I think the reservation might continue for a stated period – perhaps two years.… If no substantial mineral development is proved up in the reservation period, the park would be established and we would go ahead with the construction and development needed to make it a National Park in all the senses of the word. If some part of the reservation area proves to have substantial mineralization within the reservation period it is possible that there could be some alteration in the boundaries of the proposed national park.… I certainly would not want to commit myself to the exclusion of areas or to the authorization of expenditures to create a National Park in too small or in an inappropriate area.[532]
Even as the future Kluane National Park was becoming more clearly defined, the erasure of the Indian presence in the area of the national park reserve was nearly complete. Mary Jane Johnson, a Kluane First Nation citizen and long-time interpreter for Kluane NP&R, once illustrated this process by holding her left hand palm up, saying “this was our land and our stories” and then, pressing down with her right hand, adding “and then your stories came and covered them all up.”[533]
By the late 1960s, the creation of a Yukon national park appeared to be imminent. The federal government was committed to an expansion of the national park system, there was growing public support in the Yukon and across Canada for new protected areas, and the core and reserve idea had, if not quieted miners, hydro-electric planners, and outfitters, effectively marginalized them. In a 1969 background report on the Yukon park proposal, planners with the National Parks Branch outlined the themes of human history in the area: the Klondike gold rush, the Kluane gold rush and the Mounted Police presence, the construction of the Alaska Highway, and the commemorative naming of a Kluane mountain after the assassinated United States president John Kennedy.[534] The absence of any mention of Aboriginal peoples in this and most other contemporary reports indicated it lay beyond the realm of western thought. This notion was not isolated to the Yukon but reflected a broad international consensus amongst protected area professionals that people did not belong in parks.[535]
Fig. 8. Kluane core and reserve proposal. Canada, National Parks Service – Planning, Yukon National Park Proposal: Background Data Report, Planning Report 72, Ottawa, Oct. 1969, facing p. 15.
J.R.B. Coleman described his vision of how the reserve would work early in 1967:
I recommend that the Federal Government prepare to move unilaterally in the national interest and establish a “core area” or National Park plus a National Park Reserve compromising lands which might logically be added to the Park eventually if no significant mineral resource develops.
The “core area” or National Park should be substantial and be capable of standing by itself as a national park, even if there is never any extension. The Donjek-Dezadeash area is still the choice... our park planners consider that we could define an area of 750 – 1000 sq. Miles which would be reasonably satisfactory. About fifty percent of this would be ice fields and perhaps 500 sq. miles explorable territory. Incidentally, of the 8750 sq. Miles originally suggested much of it is so ice covered or inaccessible as to protect itself.
[From: NAC rg84, a-2-a, vol. 11983, f.u2-20, pt.2 (1962–68) memo feb. 22, 1967.]
The disappearance of the Indian in protected areas was done as part of a liberal belief that rights, and thus identity, should be vested in the individual, rather than the group. Rationalism and democracy, the two highest achievements of western Enlightenment thought, were understood as the product of the individual mind and the individual citizen. In Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau pursued this ideal as a way of creating a “just society” and bringing unity to a country riven by the English-French linguistic divide. And he pursued it with consistency and vigour. He fully supported the 1969 policy document (the “White Paper”) from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which called upon Indian people in Canada to change “the course of history.… To be an Indian must be to be free – free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians.”[536] Aboriginal peoples disagreed with Canada’s desire to slip away from the treaty obligations and responded by organizing in unprecedented ways. The Yukon Native Brotherhood was formed during consultations about the Indian Act and the draft policy in October 1968. It had three objectives: to oppose the White Paper, to draw down Indian Affairs programs to individual bands, and, most importantly, to seek negotiations for a comprehensive claim against Canada. In 1972 the Yukon Native Brotherhood prepared a statement of its position entitled Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow: A Statement of Grievances and an Approach to the Settlement by the Yukon Indian People.[537] This document laid out a plan for a settlement to recognize Indians as equal partners in the development of a shared future for the Yukon. On 14 February 1973, Trudeau met with Yukon Native Brotherhood representatives and accepted their submission as the basis for negotiations of a settlement.[538] The complete reversal by the federal government on its earlier rejection of Aboriginal status as “citizens plus” was no doubt influenced by the Supreme Court’s mixed decision on the validity of the Nishga land claim[539] The first demand by Yukon First Nations was a “freeze on development of all unoccupied crown land”[540]: including the Yukon national park.
Fig. 9. The Yukon First Nation leaders who travelled to Ottawa in February, 1973 to present Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow to Prime Minister Trudeau. [Yukon Archives, Judy Gingell collection, 98/74, #1.]
In December 1973 the Council for Yukon Indians, an umbrella organization established earlier that year to negotiate a settlement for both status and non-status Indians in the Yukon, presented a brief to a visiting Parliamentary Standing Committee. The brief strongly objected to the establishment of Kluane National Park, arguing that the federal government was acting in bad faith even before negotiations were fairly started, and asked the committee to get the minister to “back off from this land-grab policy.” Flora MacDonald, a Conservative committee member, noted that the brief,
has given me … serious cause for concern because it has pointed up a conflict between two legislative actions undertaken by the federal government. As the committee we are studying Bill S-4, An Act to Amend the National Parks Act which … outlines the boundaries of the proposed Kluane National Park.
At the same time, the government has given a firm commitment … to negotiate the land claims of the Indian people in the Yukon. The extent of those land claims has yet to be determined.… If the establishment of the park were to be finalised before the negotiations concerning land claims were completed – that is, if a large area of Crown land were to be excluded from the negotiations – … the government could be accused of not acting in good faith in seeking a settlement concerning aboriginal title.
MacDonald went on to propose an amendment to the bill:
(3) Any land so set aside as a national park shall not in any manner prejudice any right, title or interest of the people of native Indian origin of the Yukon should such a right, title or interest be eventually established.[541]
Kluane National Park Reserve was duly established in 1976. However, it represented a critical departure from the original intention of the core and reserve proposal, which was to allow time to assess the “best and highest use” for the land in the Kluane game sanctuary: that is, allowing time for economic interests to be fully explored and developed before committing the land to national park status. Miners were allowed a few summer seasons for assessment, but the “rational” park issue – western protection versus western exploitation – which had dominated the discussions of the park in Kluane through the three decades was abruptly closed off. There would be no “full National Park … until the Native Claim issue in the Yukon was settled.”[542] The new issue shaping the national park (and subsequent northern national parks, as Brad Martin shows elsewhere in this volume) was the negotiation of a diplomatic and cultural relationship between the Aboriginal peoples of the Yukon and the largely Euro-Canadian society, which had arrived in stages through the twentieth century.
A settlement with the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations in 1995 allowed the establishment of Kluane National Park on that portion of the lands within the Champagne and Aishihik traditional territory. However, the remainder of the reserved lands remains Kluane National Park Reserve, pending the implementation of agreements with both the Kluane First Nations (signed in 2003) and the White River First Nation (negotiations continue). Questions relating to the role, character, management, and direction of the national park remain subjects of continuing negotiation and debate between Parks Canada and all three First Nations.[543]
Conclusion
The story of Kluane between 1923 and 1974 – from the Yukon bison preserve to the Kluane Game Sanctuary, the national park reserve, and today’s Kluane National Park and Kluane National Park Reserve – highlights a transition in the role of national parks in modern Canada. As powerful icons of the nation-state, national parks took on a triad of responsibilities, encapsulating a western aesthetic sensibility of nature’s beauty, the importance of recreation for an urbanizing society, and the protection and management of wildlife. For the park proposed in the southwest Yukon, these values faced off against a related agenda of material well-being through economic development as the colonial state approached the supposedly empty land of northern Canada, bringing with it both benefits and threats. Then quite suddenly in the early 1970s, this closed discourse of “protection or production” was smashed open by the previously disenfranchised Aboriginal people of northern Canada, giving them a chance to participate in … what? In Canada, or in making a different kind of Canada? Perhaps Canadians have begun to escape the “abyssal thinking” that has long divided imperial powers from their colonized Aboriginal peoples. The opening of a cross-cultural dialogue through negotiated agreements such as those in Kluane offers a chance to think in new ways about our country. Perhaps we should be grateful for the robust quality of our liberal democratic institutions that eventually forced, at least in some small ways, mainstream society to acknowledge and respect the cultural plurality that makes up our country. We must also acknowledge the tenacity, resilience, and wit of northern First Nations in both forwarding their principles and forcing us to recognize and act upon our own.[544]