Yukon who is who

Johnny Fraser Tiìnah Tsʼatìi (1883 - 1976)

Johnny Fraser traced his ancestry to the Tlingit trading settlement of nuqwa ik' which flourished on the upper Alsek River in the mid-19th century.¹⁾

Johnny was born in Neskatahin, also called Old Dalton Post, a Southern Tutchone fishing camp. Some of the nuqwa ik' people moved there after a devastating epidemic and decreased Tlingit-Athapascan trade forced them to abandon their own settlement. Other nuqwa ik' people returned to their birth place, the coastal town of Klukwan. Johnny spent part of his youth in Klukwan and he spoke both Tlingit and Tutchone. As a boy, Johnny had spent a year working for a white man named Dr. Fraser, from whom he took his surname.²⁾ Dr. S. M. Fraser was the surgeon assigned for a number of years to the Mounted Police detachment at Pleasant Camp. Special constables served as scouts and guides for the police and were valued for their knowledge of the area and their skills in handling the dog teams.³⁾ Special Constable Johnny Fraser worked with the police before Chisana stampede to the Upper White River in 1913.⁴⁾

Johnny Fraser was a trapper in the Dezadeash River area.⁵⁾ He spent his summers fishing at Klukshu and his winters at Champagne.( (“Johnny Fraser Dies.” Yukon Indian News (Whitehorse), February 1976.)) He was one of the few in the Yukon who knew both coast and inland traditions, coast songs and Yukon songs, and was known to be a great speaker in both Tlingit and Southern Tutchone.⁶⁾ He became the ranking man of the gana~adsi ib in the Southern Tutchone village of Champagne and was considered an authority in Tlingit culture. In 1948, Johnny was the elected chief of the Champagne band. He took his duties seriously and looked out for the welfare of anthropologists Dorothy Ranier Libby and Catherine McClelland when they stayed at Klukshu in the summers of 1948 and 1949. He instructed them in what he thought they should know.⁷⁾

Fraser prospected in southwestern Yukon and was an inductee in the Yukon Prospectors Association’s Hall of Fame.⁸⁾