On the morning Jane Goodall’s death is announced, I am in the Yukon interviewing Dorothy Smith, a member of the Ross River Dena Council, about her childhood experiences at Mission Baptist residential school in Whitehorse. It’s the day after the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
During a 2023 visit to the Museum of Science in Boston, Goodall said, “One of the most important things we can learn from chimpanzees is that they are really good at reconciliation after conflict. We don’t seem to be very good at that.”
Like Goodall, Smith, at 85 years old, does not rest. She has given countless workshops on residential schools, her culture, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to students, government bodies, and even to members of the regional RCMP.
More to the point, she has spent decades working to convince the Yukon Government that the people of Pelly Banks First Nation are deserving of their inherent rights and dignity as a sovereign nation after her community (formerly Band 11) was scattered and then amalgamated, along with two other small nations, into the Ross River Dena Council in 1956 – without their consent.
Smith’s territory, Gas tua (Salmon River), was abundant in caribou, ptarmigan, moose, foxes, wolverines, and wild salmon. The animals were as much a part of her world as she and her family were theirs as they moved, according to theseasons, to wherever wildlife resources were most available. That all changed when Smith, aged ten, was loaded into an airplane along with other children from Pelly Lakes and flown to Jackfish Lake. From there, the children were put into the back of an army truck with a canvas cover over it and driven to Whitehorse and the Mission Baptist School. Other children were taken by the same means to Lower Post, one of the most infamous Indian Residential Schools on Canadian record.
Threatened by Indian agents with arrest or a heavy fine for non-compliance, Smith’s father was worried that if he were to go to prison, he wouldn’t be able to hunt and trap for the remainder of his family and his then-pregnant wife, so he agreed to let her go.
Smith’s parents also travelled to support their children. She explains how many parents travelled by boat or dogsled down to Watson Lake be closer to the ones that had been taken to Lower Post. Once they were there though, they were seldom allowed to see them. For years, many parents, including hers, built canvas boats to navigate the Liard River to Watson Lake where they would wait for their kids to return for the summer before returning with them the 100-plus km back up to Pelly Banks on foot.
Smith’s fight to get the Yukon government to recognize her nation’s sovereignty is more urgent than ever.
After several years of this hardship, some decided it was better to just stay down in Watson Lake to avoid the trek or to be closer to their children. Many families never returned to Pelly Banks, which made it easier for the government to pretend they’d never been there in any permanent way. Smith herself never returned to live there. She says her greatest sadness is that, for the eight years she was at the Mission Baptist school, she hardly got to see her parents. “I never sit down and really tell my kids what I went through, how lonely it was, what things that I missed in teachings from my parents.”
Beyond the rudiments of Christianity, she said, the priests and nuns at the Baptist Mission school and Lower Post provided Indigenous children little education or practical training. Complaints about their circumstances either went unheard or were punished. In Watson Lake the impacts of residential schools manifest in lateral and domestic violence and intergenerational trauma.
“There are a lot of hurts from other people, especially the ones that gone to Lower Post, where they got all that sexual assault from both the nuns and the priests. They’re still carrying a lot of hurt inside and they just take it out on other people.”
Smith says she tries to teach younger people why this is happening, “why there’s so much arguments among the people and why they got to do better.”
Smith tells me she’ll be doing a moose hide tanning workshop with some students at Iron Lake the next day, but she’s worried about the cold. It’s work they have to do outside. She’d like to bring her granddaughter with her. She sends me a picture of herself wearing rabbit mittens she made along with an old photo of her and her younger brother Alfred Charlie in rabbit fur outfits her older sister, Tootsie, made. The photograph was taken shortly before Smith was taken to residential school.
Smith’s nation, dependent on caribou for sustenance since time immemorial, is now faced with the double threat of Fireweed Metals’ Mactung Project, partially funded by the US Department of War ($22.1M), and Australia-based BMC’s proposed Kudz Ze Kayah Zinc and silver mine. (Kudz Ze Kayah means caribou country in the Kaska Dena language).
Her decades-long fight to get the Yukon government to recognize her nation’s sovereignty is more urgent than ever, if the Band is to launch any kind of successful legal opposition to the projects that now threaten the calving grounds of the Finlayson woodland caribou herd on Pelly Banks territory. When I ask Dorothy how she carries everything and does all that she does, she tells me she prays and teaches others.
Like Smith, Goodall’s overarching message, especially of late, was one of persistence. She encouraged people to focus locally on what each of them could change at the micro level in their communities, rather than fall into apathy. “It’s a way of giving other people hope.”
Sidney Coles, PhD, is a journalist and human rights advocate, and lives in Victoria on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən people.
