Life in the Wild West: A young African-Caribbean family in the Yukon (Part 2)
Introduction
In this part, I help fellow Black African people anticipating a move to the Yukon understand, based on my family’s experience/observations, how Black people appear to navigate the Yukon and what their different motives are for being up there. Remember, this is solely based on my family and I’s experiences and is, in no way, an exhaustive or comprehensive article detailing every motive of every single Black person. I end off this article with life lessons that my family and I learned from the Yukon that I believe may inspire and inform Black African people about how to make the best of their time living in the Yukon.
Black people in the Yukon?
First off, we were shocked to see any other Black person, outside of my family in the Yukon, the most northwest part of Canada. It was even more surprising when we realized the great diversity amongst the Black people whom we met in the Yukon. Yes, I would be so bold to say that the population of African people is probably more diverse than Ontario. We met and befriended African people from Malawi, Jamaica, Central African Republic, the Democratic of Congo, Barbados, Somalia and Nigeria just to name a few.
What I can say overall is that any Black person willing to leave either their home country or the big cities in Canada (Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto etc.) to relocate to a small, rural, cold and not-well-known place like the Yukon already has a different mentality than the average Black person of African descent. This different mentality significantly influenced the types of conversations we would have with our fellow African people in the Yukon. Many of them were world travelers and the Yukon was merely another place to add to their destination bucket list.
Regarding services for Black people like barbershops, hair salons/beauty supply stores or food…not much, actually, nothing from which to choose. Brothas if you have always wondered what it would be like to actually try that self-cut system (those who have been on Worldstarhiphop.com know what I am talking about) and cut your own hair, then Yukon will be perfect for you. I had to learn how to cut my own hair because it was not even worth my time to attempt to ask these White European-based barbershops if they knew how to cut African hair because I already knew the answer.
Sistahs, you will not find any beauty supply stores (with the exception of some Cantu products and S curl products for the brothas sold in Walmart) that cater to you, nor will you find any hair salons that know how to do African-type hair. There is ONE sistah who can braid hair and she lives in Whitehorse (she would braid my wife and pretty much every sistah in town’s hair). Considering the small number of Black people in Whitehorse, my wife would tell me that whenever you would see a sistah with her hair done, all you had to do was ask who did her hair and it was that one sistah who did it for practically every sistah in town. If you end up living outside of Whitehorse, you may have to dust up on those braiding or twisting skills (if you have locs)- YouTube will become your best friend!
Food wise, as alluded to in part 1, there is ONE Jamaican restaurant (big up Picka Peppa) and to my knowledge, is now the only Black-owned authentic restaurant in the Yukon. Antoinette’s, which was a Caribbean and Western fused restaurant used to be owned by a Black woman but, to my knowledge, has since come under new non-Black ownership and management. There are no continental African-based restaurants (at least none of which I know nor attended). Therefore, if you looking for your traditional food, you will have no other choice but to become an all star chef!
If you need to send money back home, I think there is ONE Western union in the Money Mart in Whitehorse.
By this point, you are probably seeing a theme that EVERYTHING is in Whitehorse; once you leave Whitehorse you are on your own for everything.
In the next section, I go into some more details about the different motives of Black people as per our conversations.
Different motives of Black people in the Yukon
Regarding the motives of African people to relocate to the Yukon, based on my wife and I’s conversations, I divided them up into three main groups: The Transient group, The Long-term group, and the African people-avoidant group.
The Transient group- This would be the group into which my family and probably a large number of Black people in the Yukon would fall. I recognize this group as not necessarily claiming roots to the Yukon but seeing it as a place suited for an adventure or a place to clear their head, gather/pursue their futuristic ideas and make enough money to support their goals. People belonging to this group stay on average 1–5 or so years, are typically single while some are in a relationship long distance or locally, with a few being African families, typically with young children.
Some Black people in this group have long-term goals of leaving Canada all together and returning back to the Caribbean or the motherland to live, and find Yukon to be the perfect place to build enough financial capital to fulfill this goal. The salaries in the Yukon and other territories appear to be much higher than other places in Canada for a variety of reasons in which I will not divulge in this article in order to save on writing space. I remember speaking to one continental African brotha who is trying to build up enough capital to return back home to Nigeria as he sees Canada as nothing more than a place to improve one’s financial position rather than a place to establish any roots. Similarly, another African-Caribbean brotha who used to work with my wife as a nurse ended up meeting his financial goal and left to live in Kenya in the property he and his wife had purchased with his hard-earned money from working in the Yukon. All of them hours of overtime (OT) certainly paid off!
We knew a couple of sistahs who worked as nurses and the money that they were making were helping them secure down-payments for homes for themselves and their families, investment properties, start businesses, pay off school debts, and even improving their families’ financial situations back-home.
It was common to see people from this group a couple of times in your endeavours throughout Whitehorse and then not see them again or for a long time (the more I spoke with people cross-culturally, including those who are Yukon born and raised, I came to realize that Yukon generally has a transient population). This was due to many being focused on working and making enough money to reach their goal rather than creating a social network. However, some really gravitated towards one another even after a couple times meeting, which was the experience with my family and some African people we met, and we were intentional about staying connected. That is, sometimes people from this group would feel compelled to take down each other’s contact number to remain connected while others did not find it necessary and trusted that if Yahweh/God saw it suitable for them to be connected, they would meet again.
Long-term group- This group was typically comprised of older African people who were single/married and childless, married/in a relationship or single with older children outside of the Yukon, with a small few who were married and had children born and raised in the Yukon. This group had typically resided in the Yukon for over 5 years and had intentions of making it their home, and we met some who fell into this group. Some African people went as far as creating a Pan-African cultural group (in which I was briefly involved) where they had BBQ’s, organized an African music festival, and even had Black History events.
The long-term group of African people in the Yukon who felt inclined to make it their home resonated with the slow-paced, country, outdoorsy living which, for many of them, reminded them of “back-home” (with the exception of the cold weather of course). I met a Zimbabwean brother who had been in the Yukon for close to 10 years who met his wife and whose children were born and raised in the Yukon.
There was an older African-Caribbean couple my wife and I met at a laundromat who had lived in the Yukon for more than 5 years (specifically in a real country area outside of Whitehorse) and did not see themselves leaving. I heard similar sentiments from another older African-Caribbean woman who we met on a walk and saw taking her daily walks on our drives into town. We lived around these two Black families, one of them being the owner of Picka Peppa, who were apparently the first Black families to move to Whitehorse. Although they had called Yukon home for more than two decades, the owner of Picka peppa was comforted seeing more Black people pop up around her in Whitehorse.
African people-avoidant group- This group of Black people were Black people who made it very clear that they had no intention of congregating with, greeting, nor being associated with Black people. These were the Black people who would avoid eye contact with us or look right through us when they would look in our direction. This observation was also confirmed by many of our African friends who also noticed that some Black people were not as “friendly” nor as interested in being near or conversing with their own people.
I want to be optimistic and suggest that some of their reasons for feeling disinclined may have been rooted in introverted personalities or even just having a bad day and not feeling inclined to speak with anyone. However, I think it is safe to say that some of our biological (not psychological) African people may have been escaping to the Yukon to escape from themselves i.e. people who resemble them.
When we were in Dawson city, we remember one brotha with locs who was with some White male friends, and in our excitement, we hailed him up. My son even became excited seeing this fellow Black man considering the plethora of White people surrounding us and gave him a smile. The brotha looked right through us and continued speaking with his White male friends.
We saw another sistah into whom we ran while in Dawson City and my wife and I smiled at her and gave her the nod (you know the nod I’m talking about) and she made eye contact with us and walked right by us. She was walking slowly by us so I do not believe the possible excuse of her being in a “rush” to get somewhere would suffice for her disinclination to greet us.
In Whitehorse, there would be Black people I would see regularly at the grocery store or in my every-day walks with my family who, every time we would walk by or greet them, including my son, their response was either a “forced” “hello” and quick walk away OR it was blatant avoidance and no response.
By no means did this group represent the majority of Black people whom we met in the Yukon. I would say that they represented a small minority of people. However, I bring this reality up to you all to help you understand that it is true when they say “not all skinfolk are kinfolk.”
Conclusion and Life Lessons learned from the Yukon
My family and I quickly came to realize that Black people are everywhere. Black people do have the courage to venture into new domains, even with the anticipated risk of being subject to racially motivated mistreatment. There are Black people like us and those whom we met in the Yukon who dare to be different and not only relocate to a whole different “world” practically, but also make efforts to look for and congregate with other Black people.
There were times where my wife and I wished that we as Black people created an economic base where we would be able to create jobs and opportunities for our kin and kith folk abroad similar to how other groups of colour have done. However, as illustrated above, due to the different groups of Black people in and out of the territory and also the different mentalities present, such unity would be difficult, but not impossible.
One major lesson that I took away from living in the Yukon is that African people have to realize that for every problem in our African Diaspora communities, the solutions must be created by us and for us. What I mean is that self-determination is literally the only solution to our problems while everything else should be an add-on. For instance, the Filipino community in Whitehorse have created a self-sustaining community by establishing themselves culturally and economically. The Philippines’ government developed an economic partnership with the Yukon government in 2019 in order for Filipinos to fulfill labour shortage in the Yukon. However, this was made possible because Filipino peoples have the opportunity to come to the Yukon to be employed by their people who have established an economic base for them. Without self-determination, the economic partnership would have been one-sided i.e. only benefiting the European-Canadians in the Yukon and not the greater Filipino community.
The First Nation communities are another example as they have relentlessly advocated for self-governance for multiple decades. They never sought out integration; despite inter-ethnic conflicts between the First Nations rooted in the residual effects of colonialism, they have at least been able to find common ground in somewhat uniting in face of a common enemy. Considering the longstanding abuse Indigenous people have suffered the hands of the RCMP, the Kwanlin Dun and Selkirk First Nation created and implemented the Community safety officer program, a program that trains community safety officers to be the first line of response for community conflicts instead of the RCMP officers. Other First Nations are beginning to follow suit and establish their own community safety officer programs. In addition to the self-governance amongst the 11 First Nations, First Nations communities successfully reached an agreement with the Yukon Government to have their own separate school board June 2021.
Demanding the government and other racist institutions to treat us humanely is viable and necessary. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are also important. But overreliance on these institutions to solve our problems, which were designed to keep us inferiorized, is completely illogical. We know that the oppression that African people globally have experienced is the greatest atrocity to ever touch the face of humanity. But either we sit and wallow in our inferiorized condition and depend on these European-Canadian institutions to decide whether or not they want to continue profiting off of our oppression, or we take action by way of Pan-African unity and self-determination. As brother Malcolm X so eloquently expresses, “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity. We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.”
To conclude, no matter what motive is driving you to relocate to the north and no matter how long you intend to stay there, ensure that whatever initiative you have planned, no matter how big or small, is to benefit the greater African Diaspora in some way. Unity, the advancement and improvement of our peoples’ condition begins with intentionality. It is counter-productive to complain about our collective oppression but seek out individualistic solutions. It is equally important to be respectful of the Indigenous people of the land (and of course the respect should be mutual). Do not fall into the pitting-against-each-other trap into which we can so insidiously fall.
Some may be fearful of relocating to such an enigmatic place with a scarce number of African people. However, do not let fear consume you; we cannot be so paralyzed in fear at the thought of being a victim of racism that we forget to live our lives. We need to overcome this fear and take advantage of the opportunities at hand for the benefit of our community.
While your motives for relocation may be first and foremost financially rooted, do not neglect the spiritual component. My family and I are friends with this married couple, both of African descent (one being continental African and the other African-Caribbean) who, like us, were thought to be “crazy” for considering the idea of relocating to Nunavut and implicitly discouraged to do so by other scared Black people. Currently, they have been residing and have found peace in Nunavut for over a decade. Notwithstanding the financial freedom they have attained from the well-paying jobs they have, I would argue that they have developed a spiritual fortitude that exceeds those who attend their respective religious institutions regularly.
Despite not being in a “church” let alone their original church back in Ontario, their spiritual fortitude is rooted in intentionality to be closer to God simply by way of being physically around God through their proximity to nature. Their prayers, time in their bible, temperament and even spiritual discussions with other fellow African people in Nunavut, as they shared with us, have been rooted in stronger intentionality and has created this spiritual aura that my family and I and even my mother who visited them in Nunavut, felt when they visited us while we were still in Ontario. It was them (and my mother)who truly motivated us to consider relocating to the territories because we wanted to receive and attain this level of consciousness and internal peace that they have.
If we truly believe that God/The Creator created and is immersed throughout the universe, then escaping to the rural and remote, beautiful and breath-taking physical environments on which this European-based nation they call “Canada” sits, may be necessary to help provide you clarity, spiritual nourishment and direction as to where you need to go in life. As I alluded to in part 1, these motives grounded my family and I’s relocation to the Yukon. We as African people are innately spiritual people and it is important to become in tune with our divinity and restore our relationship with Allah/The most High or which ever name you call them. Relocation can provide an opportunity for closeness with God and an opportunity to meet like-minded African people.
There are opportunities all over Canada for us to pursue our dreams and it is important to take advantage of them rather than sustain a fear-based and provincial mentality. As the honorable Marcus Garvey states, “take advantage of every opportunity; where there is none, make it for yourself.”
