Black people helped carve out the Yukon, but their contributions have seldom been noted. Has the territory’s past been whitewashed? By Katharine Sandiford

In 1897, when Lucille Hunter was a pregnant 19-year-old, she and her husband, Charles, set off on the arduous Stikine Trail to the Klondike. They travelled by boat, foot and dogsled, in temperatures down to 50 below. They had their baby girl on the trail, at a camp called Teslin, which became the child’s name. When they finally reached Dawson City, they found it thronging with people like them – stampeders. But the Hunters were seeking more than gold. As black Americans, the children of slaves, they hoped to trade the cruelties of their homeland in the Deep South for a frontier that promised equality and hope.

While the Hunters surely met racism in the Yukon, for the most part they found what they’d sought. They opened a restaurant, staked and mined claims, and hit paydirt. When Charles died in 1939 the front page of the Dawson News published a heartfelt eulogy calling him “an old timer, a liked, well-respected man.” Nowhere did it mention the colour of his skin. To many, that fact is surprising. As is this: Black people are woven throughout the North’s modern history. Roughly 100 black stampeders came to the Yukon during the gold rush. A generation later, thousands more arrived to construct the Alaska Highway and Canol Pipeline. The fact is, the Yukon was built, in no small part, by blacks.

Yet, in the modern Yukon, those contributions have largely been forgotten. The history of black Yukoners has not been told. And meanwhile, many Yukoners remain ignorant about, and sometimes even prejudiced toward, the modern-day Afro-Canadians who make the territory their home. In Whitehorse, a cadre of devoted activists are working to change that.

In the security-card-protected inner sanctum of the Yukon Archives, three white women and a black man pore over photos and documents. They are, respectively, an archives librarian, a mother of three adopted African children, a feisty human-rights educator and an outdoorsy graphic designer. Sitting together at a table lit by emerald-shaded lamps, they pick over old news clippings, peruse ancient census records, peer at grainy pictures. Come February they’ll have distilled these artefacts into their Black History Month presentations, which they’ll take to the schools, the media and the public. But they feel more is needed. “There’s only so much this group can do,” says Charlotte Hrenchuk, the mother and one of the founding members of the group. “We’re always knocking on doors and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this information, this history, these materials. Do something with it.’” But often, she says, their efforts are ignored.

Hrenchuk’s children are from Sierra Leone. Her first foray into black-history research started a decade ago, when her son and two daughters entered kindergarten in Whitehorse. Feeling it was her duty to educate her kids – and their sometimes insensitive peers – about their heritage, each February for Black History Month she would come to their classrooms to make African crafts or talk about African culture. As they got older, and her presentations became more detailed, she wondered if she could dig up evidence of black history in the Yukon. That’s when she met Peggy D’Orsay, an introverted librarian at the Yukon archives. It was a fortuitous encounter. D’Orsay had made it her pet project to compile, scrap-by-scrap, material proof of Yukon’s black past. What D’Orsay showed Hrenchuk astounded her. “I had no idea,” says Hrenchuk, “how rich that history was.”

At the archives, D’Orsay and Hrenchuk show off the evidence. There are photos and records of the large and well-respected Agee family of Dawson City – a shot of their son Sam, smiling beside his otherwise-white hockey team. Photos of “Snake Hips” Lulu, a coy Klondike dance-hall girl. The diary of camp cook Lillian Mabel Taylor, discovered in an abandoned Livingstone Creek cabin, with passages like, “Ironed and made pies, picked some on the banjo ... very sick with cramps all day.” An old Fort Yukon Hudson’s Bay Company ledger
recording Perro LeNoire, a black hunter and labourer, picking up supplies for the winter of 1848. Pictures of “The Black Prince,” the mascot of Dawson’s Monte Carlo Dance Hall, standing proud in his tuxedo jacket and pinstripe pants. Countless photos of unidentified black people, working sluice boxes, waiting tables, or simply posing enigmatically. There’s one of a woman in a silk, hand-embroidered gown, wearing pearls and an expression of power. “Who is this woman?” asks D’Orsay, studying the photo. “We may never find out.”

The Yukon’s black history didn’t end in the Klondike. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the construction of an inland route to protect Alaskan shores became a priority for the American military. It was a massive, urgent undertaking: 2,400 kilometres of road were bashed through uncharted wilderness, over five mountain ranges, in just eight months. Of the 11,000 American troops who carved out the highway, more than a third were African-American. Most were fresh recruits from the Deep South – men with no knowledge of how to survive in the frigid wilderness, ill-equipped and inadequately clothed and shod, and armed only with saws, picks and shovels. Many all-black regiments slept in unheated tents – photos depict men curled together under flimsy sleeping bags. Commanded by white superiors who, records suggest, were often nakedly racist, the black soldiers worked cruelly long days, toiling through frost and mosquitoes and muskeg.

To fuel the construction of the highway and the military bases springing up along its spine, the U.S. also ordered the construction of a 1,000-kilometre pipeline and road from Norman Wells, NWT, to Whitehorse. On this task, most of the troops were black, and conditions were even more grim and discriminatory. One account describes the black soldiers as “cotton pickers”; another, from a 1942 U.S. military newsletter, revels in other broad stereotypes, but also sheds light on their hardships: “Nothing could quite overcome the natural gaiety and love of song inherent in the Negro soldiers. They had several favourite songs which they sang as they wrestled with the heavy steel pipe. One was ‘Biscuits in the morning, biscuits at night, here comes the Athabaska with another load of pipe ... the night is light, mosquitoes sho’ do bite, look up de river and see mo’ damn pipe.”

One military report recounts how a group of black soldiers were sent into a remote area to work during a cold snap. Their truck broke down and they all froze to death. Another, written by a white general, describes why the black troops should always be posted on the more isolated sections of the project. Blacks, he said, had to be kept away from First Nation communities in order to avoid the creation of a “mongrel race.”

Most Yukon history books bear few hints of the Yukon’s black past. A few lines here, a paragraph there, a black face in a white crowd in a grainy photograph. In some books, nothing. One rare find, The Six War Years, a firsthand account by an old-time Yukoner named Barry Broadfoot, records disturbing evidence of attitudes toward blacks, describing “white soldiers kicking black soldiers off the sidewalks, almost pounded into the mud. The Negro fellows were the work battalions and I thought they were like slaves. Everybody kicked them around.”

It’s been a half-century since the war, but today, say Hrenchuk and D’Orsay, a subtler but equally disturbing attitude holds sway. “There is very little reflected in our society about black history at all, let alone black history in the Yukon,” Hrenchuk says. “Our history has been bleached.” She cites examples: Not one of the many interpretative panels lining the length of the Alaska Highway pays homage to the African-American troops who largely built it. As well, the Yukon’s most well-regarded museums – the MacBride Museum and the Yukon Transportation Museum, both in Whitehorse – are almost devoid of black stories. At the Transportation Museum, which has elaborate exhibits about the Alaska Highway but not a single mention of black involvement, the director acknowledges the gross oversight.

The past curator and board just didn’t consider it or have the time or money to get it done,” says Casey McLaughlin. “We will, when we have the time to write the grants to do the exhibits and the research. We know this is an important story that needs to be told.” Down near Whitehorse’s riverfront, the MacBride Museum could be found equally guilty. In their new exhibition space that opened last May, there’s a profile of Lucille Hunter, the black goldseeker, but curators confess it’s out of context and makes her appear as though she were the only black person to ever cross the 60th parallel. Leighann Chalykoff, the museum’s communications director, concedes, “There’s nothing concrete in the plans, but it’s definitely something that we’re working towards, covering all aspects of the Yukon’s history better. So, not just black history, but all the groups that worked together to build the Yukon.”

It’s an important story to tell, says Hrenchuk, not just so Yukoners know the truth about their past, but so that black people currently living in the North are respected and honoured by their peers. “It’s a part of Canadian history and it’s a part that’s been ignored,” she says. “There are so many stereotypes. Somehow people think my kids are going to freeze to death because of the colour of their skin.”

Three years ago, Lillian Nakamura-Maguire, a public-education specialist with the Yukon Human Rights Commission, joined D’Orsay and Hrenchuk in their black-history quest. The group decided to go public. With funding from the Yukon Archives they designed flashy display panels, a website, multimedia presentations and materials for the press. They called the project Hidden Histories: Black History of the Yukon. It launched at the start of 2007’s Black History Month, debuting with a speech by Elaine Taylor, the territory’s culture minister, at Whitehorse’s federal building. Then came radio ads, public presentations, installation of the displays at schools and government buildings, and exhibits in local bookstores.

Paul Gowdie saw one of those exhibits. A black man, he was shocked to learn, for the first time in his 11 years in the Yukon, that the territory had actual black history. He quickly teamed up with Hrenchuk, D’Orsay and Nakamura-Maguire, becoming their fourth member and self-described “token black,” and lending his skills as a graphic designer and photographer. “I was kind of surprised when Charlotte said it was three white women,” Gowdie says. “You would think there would be more black people involved in this kind of project, but there aren’t very many here to begin with.” True: The 2006 Census reports a mere 125 black people living in the Yukon, a fraction of Canada’s three quarters of a million blacks. “That’s why I wanted to get involved,” Gowdie says. “There’s a small percentage of African-Canadians here and we tend to get overshadowed by the political culture.”

Gowdie moved to Montreal from Jamaica as an 11-year-old and quickly learned to speak French, dress for cold weather and play hockey. But it wasn’t easy being the only black child on the ice. “You know, kids are nasty. I got a lot of verbal abuse. They’d throw me off my game, shoot me derogatory comments, hit me harder in the corner.” Eleven years ago he moved North to Dawson City, and, soon after, to Whitehorse. Tall, strong, bearded, artsy and eloquent, the 36-year-old loves the Yukon – despite, he says, suffering continued racial stereotyping from Yukoners.

That’s part of the reason why, last year, Gowdie and Hrenchuk introduced a new element to the February black history activities: Instead of just talking to school kids about the Yukon’s past, they launched a discussion of modern-day racism, exploring common misconceptions around black culture. “I like winter – it’s my favourite time of the year – but some people think that just because you’re black, winter doesn’t agree with you,” Gowdie says. “Kids here are just uninformed. They have so little exposure to African-American culture. Any exposure they do have is through hip-hop, TV or sports. Foul-mouthed language seems the norm.”

Hrenchuk says her children have had a rough go of growing up black in the Yukon. “Oh yeah, my kids encounter racism at school all the time,” she says. “Most of it now is really subtle, but sometimes it’s not and sometimes it’s really hurtful. They’re pretty good at handling it, but when they were younger, and first encountered these things, no.” Hrenchuk says part of the solution would be raising awareness. She would like the territorial department of education to integrate black history into its curriculum. She would like to see the museums develop new exhibits. She would like to see Yukoners become more aware and respectful of their diverse histories, and of the century of black contributions to the territory.

In lieu of such radical change, though, Hrenchuk and her group will keep plodding forward. This February, with minimal resources, they’ll continue to put up their own presentations in the MacBride and Transportation Museums, as well as conducting film screenings through the Yukon Film Society and giving talks at area schools. But there’s a limit to how much they can do. “I don’t have enough time,” says Hrenchuk. “Maybe when I retire I’ll write a book about Lucille Hunter. I think she was just the most incredibly intrepid woman.”

After Charles Hunter died in 1939, Lucille, by then well into her 50s, carried on, business as usual. Every year she would walk more than 200 kilometres from Dawson to Mayo to work on her gold and silver claims. During the Second World War she moved to Whitehorse. She had a great new business idea: She would open a laundry to wash the dirty sheets and clothes of the Alaska Highway workers – many of them African-Americans. For decades she ran a little laundry on downtown’s Wood Street, making a good living, even after she went blind. She died in 1972, at the age of 93 – one of the most senior of all Yukon sourdoughs. She was buried in Whitehorse’s Grey Mountain Cemetery.

“I’m just fascinated that she stayed in the Yukon her whole life,” says Hrenchuk. “It was her home, she had been here since she was 19 years old. She had claims, she had businesses, a certain amount of acceptance. There must have been no better place for her to live.”

Hear about the black soldiers' work on the Alaska Highway during the Second World War.