Yukon who is who

Jean Séguin (1833 – 1902)

Jean Séguin was born in Ennezat, diocese of Clermont-Ferrand, France. He studied the classics and then medicine. He studied for the clergy, was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1860, and was then sent to Canada as a missionary. In Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan (1860-1861), he began to study the Montagnais language.¹⁾

Father Séguin was moved to Portage-la-Loche in 1861 and then travelled with Brother Patrick Kearney to Fort Good Hope, NWT where they stayed until 1891.²⁾ They arrived at the Fort Good Hope mission on the lower Mackenzie River in August 1861. They were considered among the best of the Oblates stationed in the Athabasca-Mackenzie region in the 1860s.³⁾

In 1862, Father Séguin travelled to Fort Yukon, the same year that the Anglican missionary Robert McDonald arrived. [They travelled together on the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) supply boat.] Seguin did not get any cooperation from the HBC officer in charge, Strachan Jones. Seguin spent a hungry winter in the caribou lodge of one of the company men, a Roman Catholic married to a Gwich’in woman. He returned to Fort Simpson in the spring without making any converts.⁴⁾

Father Séguin had better luck at LaPierre House where he established the first Catholic parish in the Yukon, St. Barnabas Mission.⁵⁾ After this, he started yearly summer visits to fish camps at Teetshik goghaa and Tsiigehtchik. He created plans for a church on the banks of the Arctic Red River (Tsiigehtchik) and the frame was completed in the fall of 1867. Father Jean Séguin worked among the Gwichya Gwich’in for almost forty years.⁶⁾