Irene Adamson, nee Slim, Ukat’sanatay (1923 – 2011)
Irene Adamson was born in a tent near what is now the Robert Service Campground. Her name means “look around for it” because her grandfather was looking for his pipe when she was born. She is Agunda, Wolf Clan, born to parents Frank Slim and Aggie [Agnes] Broeren. Her aunt and uncle, Celie and Frankie Jim, did not have children so they adopted her.1) Her siblings include Sophie (Miller), George, Owen, and Virginia (Lindsay).2)
Irene was raised around Lake Laberge and Fox Lake when her father worked on the boats as a deckhand. The family hunted up the Teslin River at Hundred Mile Landing with about ten other families and sometimes walked from Winter Crossing or Mason Landing to Livingston Creek. The family did some placer mining in June and then go down the Teslin to set nets and dry fish in August. The T&D boat, Yukon Rose, would come to the camps with groceries and clothes and old Bill Drury would set up a table with gold scales and a cash box. He would also trade for furs. At age 13, Irene mushed a dog team from Carmacks to Whitehorse and camp overnight by herself.3)
She lived around the Fox Lake area before the Klondike Highway was constructed. She heard about the horse teams that took freight up to Dawson and about a big meadow at Lake Laberge where up to 200 horses were kept over the winter. In the 1920s a herd of caribou came through and walked right over the barbed wire fence and took it down. In the spring of 1933, the family was living at Braeburn. Her father wanted to get groceries from Carmacks and so Irene went with him by dog team from Twin Lakes. She had never been to Carmacks before. They took the old Overland Trail by Montague House. There was one big meadow that they all knew about, and thousands of caribou had dug up the snow there. The last time she saw a caribou herd come to Fox Lake was in 1937 when she was ten years old. They were barren ground caribou - from the Fortymile Herd.4)
Irene married John Adamson, of coastal Tlingit and non-native descent.5) John was from Alaska and they raised their nine children in the Whitehorse area.6)
Irene began her professional life as a resource person for the Kwanlin Dün.7) In the 1930s, the federal government grouped the Ta’an people with the Kwanlin Dün and others in an administrative unity they called the Whitehorse Indian Band. Land granted to the Ta’an Kwäch’än as a reserve was largely abandoned, including the former village site at Lake Laberge. The Ta’an Kwäch’än were without a voice when the Kwanlin Dün agreed to some mineral exploration in an area that would encroach on Ta’an cultural sites. Irene Adamson went to an assembly at Teslin and explained the Ta’an Kwäch’än’s concerns. She asked to join and became a member of the Council of Yukon Indians (now Council of Yukon First Nations). Irene and others worked hard to gain official recognition of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council as a separate First Nation and this came to be in the 1980s.8)
Irene Adamson served as an Elder with the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. She was the Elder Enrolment Commissioner on the Yukon Enrolment Commission (YEC), a body engaged in final land claims implementation activities with the power to determine eligibility for enrolment as it relates to the Umbrella Final Agreement. Adamson retired from the Commission in December 2003.9)