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Selkirk First Nation
Amber Baker
Amber Baker is one busy woman in a long line of busy women. Her mother and grandmother taught her and her sister, Kaylyn, to bead. It’s a practice the sisters expanded into jewellery and clothing designs that have appeared on the runway at Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week. Becoming an artist is something that was probably unavoidable for her in Pelly Crossing.
“There’s lots of really beautiful artistic influence in my community, with carvers, weavers, beadworkers and more,” says Baker, who is Northern Tutchone and Tlingit from the Selkirk First Nations (SFN) of Pelly Crossing. “It’s pretty amazing.”
When she’s not busy beading, Baker works as a cultural coordinator for SFN. The job means she spends a lot of time at on-the-land camps. Most recently, she held a shawl and vest-making workshop during a wellness camp at Minto Landing.
“Elders were asking me for help. They have so much knowledge and they want my opinion on things?” Baker sounds incredulous as she says it. “I just felt like it was amazing to help someone who’s been doing similar things their whole life.”
She’s grateful for opportunities like this because they allow her to take a step back and re-set when she’s feeling burned out. She also appreciates that they give her a chance to connect with community, which is important to Baker. That’s why, when she and her sister go to events like fashion week, they take local models with them, and why she’s an encyclopedia of all the events that take place in Pelly each year.
There’s hunting and ice fishing in the fall and winter; hide-tanning workshops on and off throughout the year; incredible cultural events and information at Big Jonathan House and Fort Selkirk; beautiful sites at the free campground; and, of course, hand games.
“One thing you have to know about Pelly,” says Baker. “It’s a huge hand games community.”
If visitors are interested in learning about the traditional activity, she suggests coming in the summer when there are tournaments. If you don’t know how the games work, just ask a local. Someone will take it upon themselves to teach you—and then try to beat you in competition.
Don Trudeau
People visiting Fort Selkirk in search of “The Storyteller” will find Don Trudeau. The 80-year-old Ojibwe Elder and medicine man has been sharing tales of the land and his life with visitors since the 1990s. That’s when he followed a path from Ontario to the Yukon.
“I didn’t know I was coming until I arrived here,” he says. “I didn’t know where I was going.”
At the time, Trudeau was in his 40s and, by his own description, “unruly.” He spent some time in Watson Lake and Whitehorse before making his way to Pelly Crossing where he met his now-wife. While they live in Pelly most of the year, they spend most of their summers in a two-storey cabin at Fort Selkirk. His wife grew up at the former trading post, which is now co-managed as a cultural heritage site by the Selkirk First Nation and the Yukon government.
“This is a place of safety,” Trudeau says of the area, where he gathers plants to help with his medicine work and where he practices healing (free of charge to those who receive it). “The energies which give us life are abounding here, the natural world.”
That’s the main reason he enjoys the community of 350. Pelly Crossing is quiet. There are no crowds or malls. He has a landline and easy access to the outdoors, which is where he prefers to find food, hunting, gathering and fishing. He has an email address but doesn’t use it. There’s no great need for him to rely on the internet here (“AI’s not gonna shoot a moose for me,” he says). It’s easier in Pelly to enjoy a more traditional way of life—to live the way he feels everyone was meant to live.
Trudeau has written about this in a series of books known as The Shaman Speaks series, which are about Indigenous teachings and the way we look at the natural world. But those who want to hear it first-hand (along with stories of the time he was close enough to touch a grizzly) can find him on the banks of Fort Selkirk in the summers.
