Yukon who is who

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Bessie Allen //Äshênia// (1901 – 2005)

Bessie Allen was born to Robert Isaac and Sadie Roberts Isaac at Aishihik Lake and became a well-respected Elder in the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. During her childhood, the family lived totally on the land. She met her husband-to-be in Burwash where he worked at the trading post. She lived a modern life although they still worked a trap line using dogs. An early Southern Tutchone tradition was travel by foot, called a "shakat" trip. Bessie kept the tradition alive in the early 1970s by organizing and participating in shakats in the Kloo Lake-Ruby Lake area and another in the Silver Creek area. Up to five families participated in these traditional shakats. Although the hunting and gathering tradition of travel on foot was difficult, shakats remained important to her. She recalled one trip from long ago when, with her husband Jack and other families, they started from Aishihik Village and walked about 200 kilometres to Klukshu for salmon. In July they walked to Kloo Lake and then into Jarvis Creek to hunt sheep and moose before going up the Kaskawulsh River to camp below Sheep Mountain where they met families from Burwash. The group cooperatively snared sheep and hunted moose while moving north until they reached the Donjek River. The summer-long shakat continued on to Burwash before returning to Aishihik Village.((Gary McRobb , "Tribute in remembrance of Bessie Allen" in //From First We Met to Internet: Stories from Haines Junction's first Sixty-Five Years as a Settlement.// Yukon College. 2007: 102-3.)) 

Jack and Bessie lived at Aishihik Village until the 1940s. Bessie served as a mid-wife and treated flu victims with traditional medicine. When Stanley, their first child, contracted tuberculosis, the family went to the hospital in Dawson. They walked and boated from Aishihik to Carmacks and onto the Pelly where they rode a motorboat to Dawson. Stanley died of the disease and is buried in Dawson. After Aishihik, the family moved to Haines Junction where Jack worked at the experimental farm. Bessie continued raising her family, tanning hides and sewing traditional garments. She was a great seamstress and continued to tan hides well into her 80s. Jack died in 1997. Bessie is survived by daughters Lorraine, Rosalie and Virginia, and sons Percy and James. James Allen became chief of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.((Gary McRobb , "Tribute in remembrance of Bessie Allen" in //From First We Met to Internet: Stories from Haines Junction's first Sixty-Five Years as a Settlement.// Yukon College. 2007: 102-3.)) \\

In 1997, Lorraine was a native language instructor in Whitehorse when she started recording her mother’s stories in Southern Tutchone. She translated them to English and recorded people's names as her mother pronounced them.  Bessie was one of the last to remember when the Nisling River was a busy route. Travellers from Aishihik, Fort Selkirk and Carmacks regularly met there to carry out subsistence activities and to trade as recently as the 1930s and 1940s.The book was published in 2007 by the Yukon Native Language Centre.(("Elder's stories maintain Southern Tutchone traditions." //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 7 February 2007.))