Action Canada Fellows and advisors enjoy a walking tour of Yellowknife, led by Scott Robertson ’10, on Sunday, September 1, 2013.
Canadians can be reluctant students of our own history. We are products of neither civil war nor violent revolution, and the parlour politics of our formative years are often a tough sell for students with short attention spans.
If only those students could have joined us on Sunday in Yellowknife. Action Canada Fellows, advisors, and staff spent the day studying episodes of our common past—and present—that too few Canadians ever discuss, in a spectacular place that too few ever get to see.
Our hosts were local Action Canada alumni David Brock ’05, Chief Electoral Officer of the Northwest Territories, and Scott Robertson ’10, the Territorial Chief Nursing Officer, who patiently answered the Fellows’ questions about the Northwest Territories, from the history of Yellowknife and Aboriginal self-government to the NWT’s distinctive consensus model of legislative decision-making and local attitudes towards resource development. Between sessions, Scott led the group on a hike across the city, from its city centre — where shopping centres, supermarkets, and multi-story office buildings are built on higher ground, far enough from the lake to allow for underground plumbing — to Old Town, with its warren of homes, businesses, and roads that twist between rocky hills and clusters of evergreens. As we looked out across Yellowknife Bay and Great Slave Lake, and as float plane engines whirred and clouds scurried across the sky, it was obvious: this country’s North is not something that you merely see—you feel it, too.
But the emotional power of this land is yet surpassed by the tenacity of its peoples—whose traumatic recent history is, in many cases, only now being recounted for the first time. On Sunday morning, we heard from Marie Wilson, one of the three members of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is charged with hearing testimony from survivors of residential schools, documenting their stories for posterity, and helping to bring closure and healing that is long overdue. Nowhere in Canada is home to more survivors per capita than the NWT. For decades, the burden of their experience has rested almost exclusively on the shoulders of shattered families and in the darker corners of broken homes. Commissioner Wilson’s message was simple: our history is ours to accept in full, as we become the authors of our own reconciliation—whether that entails clean water systems, equity in education, criminal justice reform, or otherwise.
The Arctic archipelago, through which we will sail aboard the C.C.G.S. Louis S. St-Laurent this week, has been home to indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and the North’s remote and rugged beauty is Canadian, above all, because of the indigenous Canadians who live there. As we mark the centenary of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918—you can read more about the Expedition here (“The Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-1918“) —we also recognize that, though Canadian adventurers risked life and limb to claim the North for Canada, they were hardly the first to discover it.
On Sunday night, we flew from Yellowknife to Kugluktuk, and arrived safely after our First Air pilot expertly brought us to the ground amid 30-knot gusts. On Monday, we join the crew of “the Louis,” to learn how the men and women of the Coast Guard keep our country’s most remote reaches safe, and safely Canadian. (You can read more about the Coast Guard here: “The Canadian Coast Guard in Perspective“.) Thanks to our hosts in Yellowknife, we will do so with a heightened sense of history—and responsibility.
