Kluane First Nation
The Kluane First Nation is one of the Canadian First Nations in the Yukon , whose members mostly live in Burwash Landing on the more than 70 km long Kluane Lake . They are descendants of the Southern Tutchone and thus linguistically and geographically belong to the Northern Athapasques .
Their traditional territory called Lù'an Män Keyi stretches from the St. Elias Mountains to the southern end of Kluane Lake and the A'ay Chu (Slims River), to the Ruby Range in the north, almost to the Nisling River, westward to the Donjek River . The Tachal region of the Kluane National Park and Reserve is one of them. They call themselves Lù'àn Män Ku Dän or Lù'àn Mun Ku Dän ("Kluane Lake Volk").
In the 1950s, for administrative reasons, two bands, which were already related by traditional marriages among the local groups, but culturally very different bands were forced by the Canadian government to form the White River Indian Band ; the Scottie Creek Band of the Upper Tanana ( Äzhäntuchʼǟn ), who once inhabited the so-called Scottie Creek area in what is now northern Alaska and in the Canadian Yukon Territory around Whitehorse and Beaver Creek, and a band of the Northern Tutchone living to the east .
Between 1961 and 1991, the current White River Indian Band was again forced to move to Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake, a traditional summer camp of the Łùʼàn Kwächʼǟn ("Burwash People") (the so-called Burwash Band ), a local group of the Lù'àn Män Ku Dän ("Kluane Lake People") of the Southern Tutchone. The three bands have now officially merged to form the Kluane Band (later: Kluane Tribal Brotherhood and finally Kluane Tribal Council ). In 1990/1991 the Kluane Tribal Council split into two separate, independent First Nations: the Kluane First Nation in Burwash Landing and the White River First Nation , whose members returned to Beaver Creek and Whitehorse .
Most of the members of the Kluane First Nation identify as descendants of the Southern Tutchone and speak the Kluane dialect of Southern Tutchone (Dän kʼè). They are organized in a matriarchal moiety system with two totemic clans : the Khanjet (crow clan) or Aegunda (wolf clan). Other tribe members trace their ancestry back to Upper Tanana and Northern Tutchone due to the forced coexistence with today's White River First Nation ; some have Tlingit (Lingit) ancestry, as the Southern Tutchone often entered into alliances with this militarily and politically powerful trading people through marriage in order to secure access to trade routes.
Like most other tribes in the Yukon, the Kluane came to a treaty with the federal government and with that of the territory in 2003.
The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development counted exactly 142 recognized Indians in the Kluane First Nation in December 2009; in September 2018 there were 175.
history
Early history
The earliest livelihoods were the caribou herds , but also moose , sheep and marmots , hares and Alaska piping hares . There were also birds and fish, especially salmon . Grizzly bears , wolves , coyotes and lynx also live here . While the salmon in the north of the territory travel almost 4,000 km across the Yukon , the Pacific salmon take the shorter route to the Alsek River in the south of the traditional area.
The harsh climate required a semi-nomadic life, with families gathering in spring and summer camps to fish, but also in the short fall to hunt. From November to June, Lake Kluane is covered by an ice sheet that can be up to 1.5 m thick. In the south and west of today's Burwash is the Kluane Range, a mountain range up to 2500 m high, which rises almost vertically from the plains that are almost 800 m above sea level. This vast plain stretches from Kusawa Lake to Alaska . Behind it rises the Donjek Range, the height of which is exceeded by the Elias chain , which rises about 6000 m. To the north are less high, albeit rough, mountain ranges such as the Yukon Plateau, the Ruby and the Nisling Range. Dense forests and numerous lakes characterize the landscape. The most important river is the Donjek, which comes from the high mountains and its glaciers, and which receives the Kluane, which in turn drains the lake of the same name. The Duke River, also arising from the glaciers, flows into the Kluane near Burwash. These rivers offer cheap transport and hiking routes.
The early groups lived in shelters made of twigs, branches, and hides. The clothing was also adapted to the climate. Permafrost prevails from October to April, the average temperature in the warmest month of July is around 12 ° C. Only 290 mm of precipitation reaches the area, 110 mm of which is in the form of snow. In addition, the region is extremely stormy.
The relationships between the groups who moved as nomads in the southern Yukon and Alaska were quite close, although they spoke different languages such as Southern and Northern Tutchone, Upper Tanana or Tlingit. Their view of the world and their relationship to their surroundings were also similar. Shamans excelled as healers and were responsible for making contact with spiritual powers. They also helped to find hunting prey.
During the less favorable times of the year, small groups of families, following their respective walking cycle with some variations each year, roamed the entire traditional area. This is why hundreds of remains of former camps can be found to this day, especially at points that are favorable for staying and hunting, such as Talbot Creek or in Ptarmigan Heart Valley. With water almost everywhere, firewood was the only essential requirement for a camp. But people also came together in larger groups for joint hunts, as well as for trade and festivals, above all for the potlatch . The trade involved obsidian , copper, elk and caribou skins, goat hair, sinews and coloring plants such as certain lichens. Dried seaweed, the buttery oil of candle fish (Eulachon), mussels (Dentalia), a type of tobacco, and blankets supplied by the Chilkat-Tlingit came from the coast in return .
The society was divided into two moietys , the wolf and the crow clan (Aegunda and Khanjet), which also existed in other groups, and with whom similar close relationships existed as within the group that was later called tribe by the British and Canadian authorities , so called tribe .
The most important prey was the reindeer known as caribou. The Kluane caribou herd is a woodland herd, so it consists of forest caribou . The animals usually move to higher grazing grounds in summer and lower ones in winter. The Kluane herd deviates from this rule because it stays in the Talbot Arm and Brooks Arm uplands all year round . The animals migrate along the Kluane River between the two plateaus. Oral tradition also knows of barrenground caribous (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus), which in 1936 migrated so far south that they were sighted at Kluane Lake.
The fur trade came to the region shortly after 1800 through the Tlingit, which for the first time tied local trade to world trade. Large numbers came here around 1880. This brought European goods, such as guns, metal goods, axes, knives, but also tobacco, tea, sugar and flour to the Kluane and their neighbors. Although this changed many aspects of their way of life, they hardly adapted to the needs of the fur market, in contrast to groups living further south. Food and social reasons for migration continued to be a priority; the Kluane did not move to any of the Hudson's Bay Company trading posts , as many other tribes did. This was also due to the fact that the Tlingit defended their fur trade monopoly.
Jack Dalton established a first trading post south of the Kluane area in 1894. It was near the old trading place of Neskatahin.
Klondike gold rush, Kluane gold rush
During the Klondike gold rush from 1896 over 100,000 whites came to the territory, but only a few moved to the area around Kluane Lake. In 1901 the Indians made up just over 10% of the Yukon population.
Burwash Landing was originally a summer camp in southern Tutchone when the brothers Louis and Eugene Jacquot established a trading post there in 1904 to supply the ore and coal mines. Around this station some of the Kluane became more settled. The Jacquots had been lured from Lorraine, France , by the Klondike gold rush . In 1904 they looked for the precious metal during the Kluane gold rush . They named the place after Lachlin Burwash, who had to register the finds in the region in Silver City (mining recorder). Their trading post soon included a hotel, restaurant, retail store, and a shop for hunting.
Alaska Highway, Assimilation Policy
The Second World War, particularly the war between Japan and the United States, brought further massive changes to the region. With the construction of the Alaska Highway from 1942 on, numerous construction workers came to the Yukon. The Kluane had to leave the Nisling Valley and moved to Burwash Landing, 90 km away. 1944 was a mission of the Oblates , Our Lady of the Holy Rosary with the help of the brothers Jacquot. The head of the mission between Whitehorse and Alaska was Father Eusebe Morisset, OMI, who ran his missions in Champagne , Snag and Aishihik until 1964. Father Henk Huijbers, also an oblate and missionary, also a resistance fighter, came from Holland in 1947. He began collecting and displaying artifacts . In 1966 the first museum was built in a log cabin called Burlbilly Hill cabin (see Kluane Museum of Natural History ). Fred and Margaret O'Brien converted the school room into an exhibition space in the early 1990s, and the Burlbilly Hill cabin fell victim to a forest fire in 1999.
During the construction of the Alaska Highway, many Kluane fell ill with previously unknown diseases. They were made sedentary and hunting banned. This was partly due to the fact that among the 20,000 road workers and soldiers there were many who shot game at random. When the stocks plummeted, the remaining stocks were placed under protection (Kluane Game Sanctuary, today Kluane National Park ).
Until 1951 the children of the Kluane attended the Oblate School. After that, they had to go to Lower Post in British Columbia . There they had to live in the local residential school and were no longer allowed to speak their mother tongue, Southern Tutchone. The local groups were made to elect a tribal council and appoint a chief. This is how the so-called Burwash Band emerged from the various groups . She was forced to unite with the White River Band to form the Burwash and White River Bands .
Ruth Jacquot-Donnelly, widow of Eugene Jacquot, who died in 1950, gave a house to the Indians of the White and Donjek Rivers, and many of them stayed in the area. Copper Joe played an important role, whose father Copper Chief came from a family from Alaska that controlled the copper trade in the region around Burwash Landing as early as 1875. Mary Copper Joe, Copper Joe's daughter, married Louis Jacquot in 1920. Old Copper Joe's House still exists today.
Within a few years, around 1965, the snow sled replaced the dog team. This drastically reduced the time it took to feed the dogs with fish. On the other hand, the snow sledge made it possible to cover greater distances and to continue to reach the traditional hunting and trapping areas despite the sedentary lifestyle. Weeks and months of hiking became short trips of a day or two. However, as fur prices continued to fall, the expensive machinery became difficult to purchase and maintain. It was no longer possible to get supplies from the country. Very few managed to return to the dog teams, so that soon most of the Kluane were living in the village. Canadian social policy increased this dependency on goods through dependence on the welfare state . There were also alcohol problems, as in most uprooted societies.
However, mobility within the community remained comparatively low, although the Alaska Highway was open to the public. Many Kluane lived on the other side of the lake. The only one who owned a car was Father Morisset, who often drove them to certain points so they could hunt, only to pick them up days or weeks later. With the increase in the number of cars, the Kluane organized their lives more and more around the highway, so trips to Whitehorse became a matter of course. Many of the younger people spend the majority of their lives there today, because there they find work, shop, spend their free time or go to school there. At the same time, access to the protected areas became increasingly difficult because the highway allowed hunting to be monitored for the first time. Although regulated since 1920, the remoteness of the area made police surveillance impossible. The hunting bans from 1943 were therefore not just paper, they were also enforced. In a letter to the Yukon Commissioner, the Kluans complain that their livelihoods are being destroyed and that they have been driven away like a pack of dogs. Father Morisset supported them and also wrote to the government. He complained that the lack of skins made the widows who had previously made moccasins unemployed , and that they also had to rely on meat deliveries from Whitehorse. “What do you expect these Indians to live on?” He asked at the end. After all, they were allowed to hunt limited amounts of muskrat and elk. But this was not enough to maintain her enormous knowledge of the region. The bond with the country diminished.
The Canadian welfare state also made itself felt with the Kluane, as the government tried to expand health care, house building, teaching and administration. Therefore one organized the Indian groups or tribes now in the form of "bands" called units, which elected a chief and a group of advisors. They had no real power, but rather served as an intermediary between the Kluane and the government represented by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (INAC) (now Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada ). In order to reduce costs and administrative work, several bands were combined. In 1961 the Burwash Band and the White River Band were merged. This new group was initially called the Kluane Band, later the Kluane Tribal Brotherhood and Kluane Tribal Council. The White River group was forced to move to Burwash, creating significant tension. The state only offered its services to those who lived in Burwash, which again tied the Indians more strongly to the place, and forced them to leave their winter trap lines , the zones of permitted trapping.
In addition, the most aggressive phase of assimilation policy began , which was to be implemented primarily through a system of boarding schools . In 1944 a Catholic mission station was established in Burwash Landing. The Indian children were not allowed to attend the state school in Destruction Bay . At the same time, the Catholic and Anglican Churches fought for state funds and for monopoly on teaching in the regions of the Yukon. The Catholic Father Morisset built a school in the church. The Catholic Church resisted that Catholic children should go to the Indian school in Carcross , and so in 1951 a Catholic school opened in Lower Post, which was already in British Columbia. Every autumn a school bus came to Burwash and picked up the children who clung to their parents and who were taken away by force. The youngest were five years old, but they too were required to attend school. In 1950 there were 22 declared Catholics in Burwash. Today, due to the bad experience in Lower Post, where the Kluane were not allowed to use their mother tongue and were constantly reproached for being inferior, the Catholic Church hardly plays a role anymore, even if Father Morisset is personally honored. The children were kept underage and were not up to a life in the country where self-organization and creativity in dealing with new situations are of the utmost importance. In addition, their mother tongue became increasingly poor, while their parents hardly spoke any English. In 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada apologized for the catastrophic conditions in most of these residential schools. The Lower Post school operated until 1975.
Land claims and self-government, Kluane First Nation
The schools, however, also had an unwanted effect, as the students learned forms of resistance, from passive refusal to open rebellion. The first reason was the often poor diet, so the children at Lower Post learned how to steal food from the kitchen. The attempts at forced assimilation, contrary to the original impetus, strengthened the tribal identity and the idea of pan-Indianism. So this generation was open to ideas from the USA and southern Canada, but they also no longer fully accepted the authority of the older generation. Around 1970 the Yukon Native Brotherhood was established , which fought for land rights. Her children had attended school in Destruction Bay since the late 1960s . At the end of the 1970s the Kluane Tribal Brotherhood opened its own school, but the number of children was too few. During these few years the children learned in class as well as in the country what was important for their lives there.
In addition, white settlers came to the region from around 1900, some of whom founded families with Indian women. By 1985, their descendants, however, automatically lost by the Indian Act status as Indians. Until this law was changed, about half of the Kluane were without recognition as Indians. In addition, there is another important distinction between urban and rural Kluane, which they themselves refer to as bush indians and city indians, i.e. those who mainly live outside of larger towns and those who live in the city Life.
In 1990 the Kluane Tribal Council split again into the White River Band in Beaver Creek and the Kluane Band in Burwash Landing. On October 18, 2003, the Kluane Band signed a treaty with Canada and the Territory that gave them self-government.
Current situation
Chief was Willy Sheldon, followed in 2016 by Robert Dickson. In 2006, 15 residents spoke a non-English language, 10 were immigrants. In 2009 only two Elders spoke the Southern Tuchone who teach the language.
The Kluane have limited hunting and fishing licenses in the national park and have been auctioning Dall sheep hunting since 2006 , together with the North American Wild Sheep Foundation . The Kluane received exactly 275,625 dollars from this until 2008, i.e. 90% of the income, but they have to invest this sum in the development of their community. The Kluane First Nation Development Corporation is increasingly focusing on tourism.
In 2008 the tribe received $ 1.5 million to build a house from the Northern Housing Trust . Ten houses were built that belonged to tribesmen, including those who did not live in Burwash Landing. This increased tensions within the community.
The climate change makes the glaciers melt in the region, resulting in the low-rainfall region leads firstly to the drying up of lakes, on the other shrink them, which significantly increases the distance to the traditional fishing spots. In addition, trout and whitefish stocks are shrinking. The level of Lake Kluane alone fell by 1.7 m in the summer of 2018.
literature
- Paul Nadasdy: Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon , University of British Columbia Press 2003.
- Catharine McClellan: "Tutchone", in: June Helm (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians , Vol. 6: Subarctic , Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1981, pp. 493-505.
See also
- First Nations history
- List of Indian tribes recognized in Canada
- List of North American Indian tribes
Web links
- Kluane website
- Council of Yukon First Nations. Kluane First Nation
- Mount Logan. Canadian titanium. Yukon First Nations , archive.org, November 19, 2011
Remarks
- ↑ The 516-page agreement can be found here (PDF, 1.9 MB) and here .
- ^ Kluane First Nation
- ↑ Alaska Highway Km 1726 - Kluane River , archive.org, March 7, 2012.
- ↑ Paul Nadasdy: Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon , University of British Columbia Press, 2003, p. 39.
- ^ Sheep hunt tag goes for $ 315,000 , in: Whitehorse Daily Star, February 27, 2008
- ^ Abuse, black mold and First Nation fractures in Burwash , in: Yukon News, September 11, 2009 .
- ↑ Susan Ormiston: Dry lakes and dust storms: Dramatic changes to Yukon glaciers are warning for planet, researchers say , in: CBC News, October 28, 2018.