17 thoughts on “Yellowknife”

  1. Yellowknife is a name to stir the imagination, and I was curious as to how it came to be called Yellowknife. Turns out that it was named after the Yellowknife Indians and isn’t very old, having been settled in the 1930s after (surprise, surprise) gold was discovered in the area. It became the capital of the NWT in 1967 and has lived happily(?) ever after ever since.

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    1. I’ve worked in NWT for the past five years so I’ve begun to get an education on its complex and tragic history. Yes, Yellowknife is quite new and came about as the result of gold, but there are much older communities in NWT, especially First Nations communities (we don’t use the word “Indians” although I have seen it crop up still). The “Yellowknives” are actually part of the Akaitcho Dene First Nation (ADFN) as early researchers really got much of the history and ancestry horribly wrong. Yellowknife and NWT are now embarked on development as individual nations within Canada according to their history. Happy Labour Day. Cheers.

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      1. Thanks. I should have been more sensitive about using the word “Indian,” but whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on Yellowknife used that word, and so I just went with it.

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        1. I understand and you shouldn’t worry. Many people don’t know (that’s why I mentioned it) but here in Canada it’s becoming akin to the “n” word. I looked up the Wikipedia article on Yellowknife too and found it littered with insensitivities. I plan to bring it up with an elder so that it gets corrected. Cheers.

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