Parks Employees Seeking a Little Respect

by Dan Davidson

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T!” Aretha Franklin sang out from a CD player while Parks Canada employees marched back and forth in front of the Visitors reception Centre in Dawson City this morning. The workers are making their presence known in a sort of floating strike action which has to cover the many Parks and attraction sites in the Dawson area.

Early this morning they were lined up at the VRC, in front of the headquarters of their interpretive section and at the Palace Grand Theatre.

At the VCR Byrun Shandler was disgusted that employees with the Klondike Visitors Association, many of them members of a branch of PSAC, did not honour the picket line, but was pleased that YTG staff in the VCR downstairs did.

Johnny Nunan holds up a copy of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men as his commentary on Parks Canada's senior management. Photo by Dan Davidson

Some members of the public had already been along with cookies and snacks by 10 am, and Carrie Docken reported that one visitor had donned a strike placard outside the Palace Grand.

Docken and strike mate Johnny Nunan were also annoyed at the KVA reaction , feeling that rotating strikes make it possible for other employees to take a day here and there to support their fellow union members.

Nunan waved a copy of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men as his own commentary on Parks senior negotiators. He said this whole situation could have been avoided if management had been prepared to actually negotiate during this round of talks.

Entertainment won’t be entirely absent from the streets. Strikers have rented the Cassiar Building on Princess Street as their HQ (ironically it used to be a Parks office before it was sold to the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in) and were planning a moral boosting breakfast as well as some unpaid street theatre on the subject of unions in Dawson’s history.

Harmony Hunter, one of the three unionized KVA employees who work in the building (the others are management and non-union) indicated that she and her fellow workers were inexperienced in the protocol governing strikes and had no intention of showing any disrespect to those workers. No one in Parks works on the second floor, so Hunter didn’t see the KVA’s entrance to the building as being an issue in this job action.

Hunter, a summer employee and college student, says the experience has motivated her to learn a lot more about how unions work.

The KVA’s Harmony Hunter presents awards to Helen Winton and Jack Fraser. Photo by Dan Davidson

Celebrating Dawson’s Authors on Eighth Avenue

by Dan Davidson

It’s odd that so many of Dawson’s famous writers should now be clustered within a few streets of each other. One could almost call the area Writers’ Block, except that none of these three ever seemed to be at a loss for words.

On August 12 Parks Canada teamed up with the Klondike Visitors Association to celebrate this prolific trio with its fourth annual Authors on Eighth Writing Contest and Reception.

One might call the event a “progressive reading” as it moved to each house in turn along the block and up the hill.

It began with Jack London, who was the first of them, who found, in the words of his great fan, Dick North, that not all the gold was in the hills. Indeed, he did not realize that he had found his motherlode while he was stuck in Dawson City filing papers for a claim that produced little or nothing. But here, as North tells the story, London met a St. Bernard cross named Jack, who would later become Buck, the hero of his first novel, The Call of the Wild. Once he left the Yukon and settled to writing, London turned out 2,000 words a day until not long before he died, returning to northern themes and settings even after he had made his mark with others.

Robert Service came later but, as Johnny Nunan tells the tale outside his well preserved cabin, he was following in a long line of writers obsessed with idea of the North. Service worked at his craft, though he would make light of it and call himself a maker of verses rather than a poet. He had greater financial success and acclaim than many who would have turned up their noses at his stuff. How many people can recite the opening verse of “The Wasteland” in chorus as Nunan got his crowd to do with “The Cremation of Sam Magee” on that day.

Across the street a young Pierre Berton arrived on the scene long after Service had moved on, but he heard the man discussed by his parents, and he grew up in the shadow of that cabin, even then a site that would draw visitors from far places. His continuing fascination took him to France, to do one of the last interviews the old man ever gave, and has caused him to write about him twice now, once in My Canada, and now, in much more detail, in his soon to be published 50th book, Prisoners of the North.

Our Literary Progress moved at last to the front lawn of Berton House, bought by the man himself, restored as a writers’ retreat and in use as such since 1996 through the agencies of the Yukon Arts Council, the KVA and the Canada Council.

There the latest residents, children’s mystery writer Eric Wilson and his wife, Flo, welcomed the crowd of two dozen or so and spoke briefly about the project he will be researching during his time in Dawson City. The mystery will be about an abducted child and her mother, bound for a hiding place in Alaska, and waylaid for a time in the Klondike.

Local writers Helen Winton and Jack Fraser were the winners of this year’s homegrown literary contest, the theme of which had to fit in with the summer’s fires.

Winton read her poem “Seduction of the Spruce” in front of the Service Cabin, while Fraser read his memoir, “Vulcan, God of Fire” at Berton House. There were entries from Outside that won in other categories, but their authors were not on hand to read them.