“I wanted the gold and I sought it:

I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine, scurvy — I fought it:

I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold and I got it —

Came out with a fortune last fall, —

Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it

And somehow the gold isn’t all.”

In Dawson City, painted onto the side of a building on the corner of King Street and Third Avenue is the above passage from Robert Service’s poem “The Spell of the Yukon.” Service’s poem is painted in bold black paint against the building’s bright white wood panelling. As a Parks Canada national historical site, the town’s buildings must adhere and be kept to the historically accurate Edwardian style of the Gold Rush, its streets unpaved and its lines of wooden boardwalks maintained. Along Front Street, facing the bank of the Yukon River, is a long row of styled wooden storefront facades.

Despite being born in Dawson City, and despite growing up in Whitehorse and returning to live there intermittently through my life, I find Service’s words about the Yukon and their proud display mostly irritating and empty. Like the storefront facades of Front Street, the territory hinges many aspects of its identity as a place on a few lavishly kept up, but ultimately thin and flimsy, images. The narrative that there is some inherent, alluring magic to the place, along with fixations on the Gold Rush and the remote romantic wilderness in the territory’s self-image, deserves critical reflection.

“[Social] space is a [social] product.” What cultural critic and philosopher Henri Lefebvre means by this is that spaces are always manifested through and by the activity that has happened and is happening within them. Places do not come to us defined immediately, unalterably, as whole places; we experience them through a process of fluid construction through the social – through and with others. But when we form our identity around certain limited narratives of a place (even if that narrative is one of exceptionalism and uniqueness), we also limit what we recognize and value in and about that place. What of all of the mundane, the not-easily-marketable images and narratives happening, which carry equal importance in making the place, but which do not carry equal recognition in how that place is understood? What of the parking lots?

Growing up in the Yukon, without outside reference, there was no way for life to be anything other than ordinary. Going to A&W or McDonald’s felt more memorable and special than the exhilaration of being able to say that I was from the Yukon. What was a spell for Service (himself hailing from England) is, for many, just the necessity of home, with all of its small-town mundanities and frustrations. I don’t mean to downplay the effect that the physical qualities of a place can have on peoples’ lives – the remoteness, in particular, plays an important role in how people interact and come together. Still, in many ways the North is similar to so many rural places in Canada, with the exception of its unique marketing allure.

But when we put effort into framing something as remarkable, then it suddenly gains the possibility, and expectation, of being so. This is the principle behind tourism, one of the territory’s most significant industries (though not as significant as mining or government). Tourism relies on destinations – on the expectation that an experience that is authentic to the place can be extracted and obtained by a visitor, and taken home with them when they inevitably leave. Tourists come, they see, and they leave, taking with them an experience– some photographs, maybe a few souvenirs, and an assertive narrative in their memory of having been there. The whole townsite of Dawson City becomes a discoverable destination, buildings posed and bending in to this expectation of what the place is supposed to look like. Streets names and statues memorialize the three famous white men who had connections to the Yukon (Robert Service, Jack London, and historian Pierre Berton), while countless business names are derivative riffs on Gold Rush imagery and phrases –  the Miner’s Daughter, the Gold Rush Inn, Maximilian’s Gold Rush Emporium, Bonanza Market, the Eldorado Hotel, to name a few.

Tourism’s extractive nature – coming, taking, leaving – mirrors the methods of resource extraction that are so foundational to the history of the territory. Mining is literally the reason for the Yukon’s existence as a separate political entity in Canada. The Canadian state established the Yukon territory, previously a part of the Northwest Territories, in 1898, during the original gold strike, to capitalize on and administer royalties from the large amounts of gold being pulled from the ground by the thousands of American prospectors. Just a few years later, like seasonal tourists, these prospectors had mostly all returned home. Still, today, mining (although mostly via more complex operations than the romantic image of gold panning in creeks) is an active and important part of the territory’s economy. But if it had not been for the construction of the Alaska Highway in 1943 (built as a supply route to Alaska during World War Two by a huge dispatch of US soldiers, themselves itinerants posted for a short, singular purpose in the territory), the Yukon’s population would remain lower without this important transportation route, and its economic and cultural impact would be much smaller.

Unsurprisingly, however, this recurring extractive dynamic has historically always been at the expense of the First Nations, whose traditional territories the Yukon sits atop. At the time of the gold rush, little thought was given to Indigenous title to and occupation of the land, either by the Canadian government or the prospectors. In 1990, after decades of displacement, struggle and negotiations, eleven out of the fourteen First Nations in the territory signed an Umbrella Final Agreement with the Canadian Government, officially recognizing First Nations history and rights to the land and to the governments of their own people. Since then, First Nations have mounted successful legal challenges to expansions of mining projects, and a cultural and political resurgence has empowered many First Nations communities.

Yet, co-existing with this resurgence, many communities struggle with homelessness, violence, incarceration, and substance abuse. My own personal experiences don’t equip me well enough to discuss these issues at length, but housing remains a contentious issue for many in the territory, settlers and First Nations peoples alike. When my father moved to Dawson City in the 1980s, across the river from the town along the cliffs was a sprawling squatters’ tent city of young seasonal workers. Times have changed. When I returned to Dawson first in the summer of 2011, local hotel owners wanting to rent their accommodations to seasonal workers had long since lobbied to close down the tent city, and instead, to allow a private hostel and a government campground to rent out camping sites. Surprisingly, average rental prices in Dawson City and Whitehorse (even with just renting one of these single camping sites) are often par with Toronto, making it unaffordable for many low-income residents.

When I returned to Whitehorse in 2011, I was struck most visually and obviously by the transformative campaign to develop and beautify the waterfront. The low brush and few wooden shacks that had once defined the long length of riverfront had been cleared for the arrival of a public park, a series of parking lots and several new hulking condominiums. These condos are distinct – rising up from the adjacent cleared empty lots, tall, stylish, with an abundance of glass windows. They were designed primarily for those who could pay for them: newly arrived government workers. But also, they heralded the further displacement and marginalization of the folks who would often use the waterfront as a space to drink alcohol or simply hang out: all of the reinvigorated activity at the waterfront pushed them further into the downtown core, more vulnerable to the wave of increasing gentrification and over-criminalization of Indigenous and homeless people.

As I worked for two years in an office building looking into the small downtown LePage Park in Whitehorse, this transformation within the city’s space seemed all the more obvious to me. The park, used during summer lunch hours as a space for free live music and at night as a gathering place for public drinking, became a microcosm of this tension. It was jarring to see the readiness of white, “respectable” people to call police or emergency services in situations where their claim to what the space represented was threatened, as this tendency simply furthered the marginalization of the people already pushed out from other spaces. Witnessing this over the course of two years, I realized that the dominant ideas about a place can work to only just mask many of the realities of the place, but can also directly perpetuate cycles of marginalization for those not included in those dominant ideas. Poverty and displacement are not highlighted in popular narratives and images of the Yukon. Instead, so many aspects of the Yukon’s identity rely on narratives of colonial discovery and extraction, and on a romantic conception of the place ungrounded in the realities of its history and present. To defer the value of the place to a “spell” in Service’s sense forecloses that, ultimately, we are responsible for what the place is, whether good or bad, whether our relationship to the place is fleeting or long term, regardless of how uncomfortable or unpleasing it all may be.

Ironically, for my part, I find myself drawn back to the Yukon over and over again. This is, foremost, because of the relationships I have established there through my family or friends. Anchored by Henri Lefebvre’s quote “[Social] space is a [social] product,” I find great value in and feel a responsibility towards the people who live in the Yukon, in all of their frustrations, mundanities and idiosyncrasies – in all of their ever-evolving complexities attuned with the dynamics around them. People, in this way, will always defy the dominant storefront facade narratives, gesturing at a fuller, more grounded idea of the place, resisting being “got” like Robert Service’s gold.