Ken S. Coates (b. 1956)
Ken Coates was born in Banff, Alberta and moved with his family first to Revelstoke, British Columbia and then, when he was six, to Whitehorse. Ken and his father built a cabin on Tagish Lake.1)
Ken attended F.H. Collins high school and decided to go to university when a teacher told him Yukon kids should not expect to do well at higher levels of education. Ken received his BA in history from the University of British Columbia, his MA from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D in history from the University of British Columbia.2)
Since the early 1980s, Dr. Coates has focused on his studies of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yukon, residential schools, and the Yukon land claims negotiations. He worked with Northern Native Broadcasting (NNBY) to create a documentary, The Mission School Syndrome, based on his paper “Betwixt and Between” about the history of the Carcross Residential School. He participated in a United Nations workshop in Whitehorse about international negotiated land claims and was invited to give talks all over the world about the stories and experiences of the Yukon.3)
In the 1980s, Dr. Coates was a guest lecturer at Yukon College (now Yukon University) and contributed to the design and curriculum of the Northern Studies program. In 1988, he co-founded The Northern Review With Dean Aron Senkpiel and instructor Norm Easton. It is the only peer-reviewed Canadian publication devoted to northern issues and published north of the 60th parallel. 4)
Between 1991 and 1995, Dr. Coates was first vice-president academic at the University of Northern British Columbia. He taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand (1995 – 1997), was Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick (1997 – 2000), taught at the University of Saskatchewan (2001 – 2004), and the University of Waterloo (2006 – 2012).5) In February 2023, Dr. Coates became the chair of Yukon University’s Batchelor of Arts in Indigenous Governance program. The program was developed in partnership with fourteen Yukon First Nations.6)
Dr. Coates has written many, many articles and books including Best Left as Indians: Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840 – 1973 (1991).