![]() ![]() The second shift is the greater attention being paid to environmental history - the study of human interaction with the natural world. Lee Maracle, the celebrated poet who is a member of the Sto:Loh Nation, insists, “Nothing about us, without us.” Indigenous and non-Indigenous, they all need to grow up and be educated in a Canada with a fuller and more proper sense of the history of this country.” That means much more thorough and respectful coverage of Indigenous history. As former Senator Murray Sinclair, who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, put it, “We need to change the way that we educate our children. For too long, we have ignored, disparaged, or challenged the stories of Indigenous people who lived on this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived here. The first is the recognition that textbook Canadian history has always focused on settlers. The way we understand the past evolves continually, but recently there have been two particular (and overdue) shifts in the stories we tell ourselves about past events. If I were to embark on such a tale again, I’d amplify my approach. So, in addition to a miner, I wrote about a saintly priest, a spit-and-polish Mountie, a savvy businesswoman, a female reporter from the London Times, and the young Jack London who built his astonishingly successful career on stories based on his Yukon experiences.īut, in the decade since I published that book, I’ve realized that my account of the Klondike gold rush was unbalanced. I was keen to show that the episode involved far more people than the muscular, grizzled heroes celebrated by previous writers. ![]() I told the story of the gold rush through the lenses of six individuals who were there and whose voices I was able to recover through written records - letters and memoirs plus archival newspaper photos and clippings. In 2010 I published Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike. But the appetite for gold rush tales of derring-do has continued to be fed by writers from Jack London to Robert Service, from Pierre Berton to. The excitement ebbed after three years, and most of the prospectors moved elsewhere. The hair-raising climb up the Chilkoot Pass! (Flash the famous Eric Hegg photo onscreen.) The brutal conditions in which tens of thousands of prospectors lived! (Show grainy archival photos of a crowded Front Street in Dawson City.) The bars, casinos, dancehalls! (Cue the cancan music.) The visuals and soundtrack of this epic adventure are embedded in the national imagination. They travelled thousands of kilometres to reach the district, then rafted down the Yukon River and established a mining camp on a mud flat. ![]() One hundred and twenty-five years ago, a handful of prospectors discovered gold nuggets in a tributary of the Klondike River and triggered a stampede of more than one hundred thousand people into Yukon. The Klondike gold rush is one of the most mythologized events in Canadian history. Canada's History Youth Committee Members.The John Bragg Award for Atlantic Canada.Historical Thinking Community of Practice. ![]()
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