Norman Shorty Sr., Ugut (d. 1990)
Norman Shorty was Tagish Kwan, the son of Jim Shorty from Big Salmon. Norman and Emma Shorty lived in Teslin and at places along the Alaska Highway where he worked on the highway crews. Norman’s work brought them to Whitehorse in the 1950s and they lived at Whiskey Flats. After the city expropriated the land around 1964, the family with five children, moved to a house on Black Street. The houses along the clay cliffs, including the Shortys’, were expropriated in the 1970s and Norman bought land and built a house near the Marsh Lake dam.1)
Norman worked as truck driver for many years and was a pioneer broadcaster for CBC Yukon. With his sister, Gertie Tom, he brought music and news of Yukon First Nations to Yukon airways in the 1960s. He used a reel-to-reel recorder to record people speaking and singing in their own languages. Norman and Emma’s children continue the family traditions of harvesting from the land and preserving and teaching First Nation languages and culture.2)