2004/07 Yukon trip - Trek to the Arctic - Teslin |
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Thursday 22nd July
Next morning the Alaska Highway swung back into the Yukon , and we crossed Teslin Lake into the Tlingit Indian 
town of Teslin. As you can see from the picture of the plywood Mountie, they have a cheap way of enforcing the speed limits there! We found the Tlingit cultural centre (Tlingit is actually pronounced as Klinkit, easier than it looks) and visited their small museum of art: clothing, masks, tools, paddles. These people had originally been part of the Tlingit coastal community in Alaska but migrated inland to hunt and run traplines for trading with the Russians.
The centre recommended visiting the George Johnston museum, also in Teslin. George was a very unusual Tlingit, a fur trapper, a photographer, a taxi driver, and a musician. He made enough money in the 1920s from fur trapping that he was able to buy luxuries like cameras and developing equipment. He even brought a new Chevrolet car to Teslin on a barge, and then set about building roads so he could drive it somewhere. He charged for taxi rides, but also paid his neighbours to help him with road building. He fitted the car tyres with chains in the winters so that he could drive it on the frozen lake, and painted the car white for camouflage so that he could use it for hunting moose. He’d paint it green in the spring. The museum was filled with his photos and his possessions, including the car. He was a remarkable man, but there is an undercurrent of sadness about the museum as the Tlingit’s way of life was destroyed, firstly by the 
building of the Alaskan Highway which brought tens of thousands of American soldiers into their community, and secondly by the Canadian government taking their children away and sending them to boarding schools. It’s only in the last three decades that they’ve begun to recover from this and rediscover their culture. George’s photographs are helping them do that.