Yukon who is who

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
Kluane Martin, Shakwànche (b. 1935)
	
Kluane Martin was born at Champagne. Her mother was Grace Chambers, nee Dickson and her father was Carl Chambers, son of Shorty Chambers. They lived in Champagne until 1945 when Grace took Kluane and her sister Louise back to Grace’s home at Burwash.((Grace Chambers in Kathy Van Bibber, "A Glimpse of the beginning: Champagne Business and Social Buildings." Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and YTG Heritage Branch, 1993.)) Kluane remembers travelling along an old road from Champagne to Burwash to visit her aunt, Ruth Jacquot, before World War II. When Kluane was five or six, she was sent to help at her grandmother Louise Dickson’s mink farm near Champagne. In 1942, Kluane started attending St. Paul’s Hostel in Dawson during the winters. She calls it nine years of hell. There were eighty children in the residence, some of them Kluane’s cousins, and four adults.((Shakwanche Kluane Martin, “It was Challenging Sometimes” in //Kluane Lake Country People Speak Strong.// Kluane First Nation, 2023: 151-59.))
	
Kluane took grade 10 in Haines, Alaska, grade 11 in Chilliwack, British Columbia, and grade 12 at Whitehorse Elementary and High School. She returned to Burwash to work at the Lodge at Destruction Bay until she was 18 and then she finished school in Vancouver. She started cleaning the halls in the Coqualeetza TB Hospital in Sardin, British Columbia and when a job came up in the lab, she started her career as a lab technician. Kluane thinks she was one of the first First Nations people to become a registered lab technician in Canada.((Shakwanche Kluane Martin, “It was Challenging Sometimes” in //Kluane Lake Country People Speak Strong//. Kluane First Nation, 2023: 154.))
	
Kluane moved to Whitehorse in 1959 and soon began working with the army lab tech at the Whitehorse hospital. She and the tech in charge of the lab, Bill Siemens, worked together until the American Army left the Yukon in 1966. Kluane took lab training at Vancouver General Hospital with the federal government Northern Careers Program and received certification in the American association of lab technicians. In Whitehorse, she was the only lab tech for some time in the hundred-bed hospital. More than once a patient would say they didn’t want an Indian to take their blood – but in the end they had to allow it because the nurses were not so good at doing it. She worked at the Whitehorse hospital from 1956 to 1998, and in the latter years there were three people working in the lab. In the 1960s, Kluane was raising her two children on her own and had to pay for daycare. Twenty dollars a month was a lot of money in those days.((Shakwanche Kluane Martin, “It was Challenging Sometimes” in //Kluane Lake Country People Speak Strong.// Kluane First Nation, 2023: 151-59.))
	
Kluane was one of fifteen indigenous people from across Canada that sat on the Non-insured Health Committee setting up a health benefit plan. She did the first water quality study for the Kluane Lake area, culturing the water in different places and writing up a report on where the bacteria and contamination was coming from in the lake. She was interested in land claims but could not get deeply involved because she was a government employee and needed the hospital job to raise her family. Kluane faced discrimination and was successful in life because she was strong enough to demand equal treatment.((Shakwanche Kluane Martin, “It was Challenging Sometimes” in //Kluane Lake Country People Speak Strong.// Kluane First Nation, 2023: 151-59.))